Your phone is not a bomb

Yesterday, pagers belonging to Hezbollah members exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands. Today, another mass detonation occurred in Lebanon, this time involving walkie-talkies. The attacks are gruesome and shocking. An expert told the Associated Press that the pagers received a message that made them vibrate so that someone had to press buttons to stop them. This action appears to have triggered the explosion. At a funeral in Beirut, a loudspeaker reportedly called on people to turn off their phones, highlighting the fear that any Device could actually be a bomb, even in your pocket.

Electronics is a global business, and the events of the past two days in Lebanon have unleashed an unexpected information fog of war. Nearly everyone uses personal electronic devices – phones, headphones, chargers, and in some cases even pagers. These devices can pose a risk under certain circumstances. Devices catch fire, get hacked so intruders can spy on you, or get infected with malware that turns them into botnets. Could your smartphone just explode one morning when you reach for it on your nightstand? Almost certainly not.

According to the Associated Press, the attack was likely carried out by hiding very small amounts of highly explosive materials in the pagers. In principle, intelligence operatives in Israel, who are believed to have carried out both attacks, could have tampered with the devices at the factory. However, since the exploding devices appear to have been targeted specifically at Hezbollah rather than anyone who owned a particular model of pager, it is more likely that the perpetrators intercepted the devices after they left the factory. The resulting pager bombs were apparently obtained by Hezbollah months ago. The pager bombs and radio bombs have been waiting to be remotely detonated ever since.

You’re unlikely to find your iPhone, Kindle, or Beats headphones modified with pentaerythritol tetranitrate or hexogen, the two compounds currently suspected of being used in the Lebanon blasts. That’s not because such a thing isn’t possible—as little as three grams of these materials can be highly explosive, and it would be possible, in principle, to cram that much of it into even the small cavities of an iPhone packed with circuitry. In theory, someone could tamper with such a device either during manufacture or afterward. But it would take a lot of effort to do so, especially on a large scale. Of course, this risk applies not just to gadgets, but to any manufactured product.

Other electronic devices have exploded without being rigged as bombs. When news of the exploding pagers first broke yesterday, some speculated that the batteries had caused the explosion. This conclusion is partly due to increased awareness that lithium-ion batteries face some risk of explosion or fire. The pager model attacked in Lebanon does indeed use lithium-ion cells for power. But the intensity and precision of the explosions in Beirut, which were powerful enough to blow victims’ hands off, could not have been caused by a lithium-ion explosion – which could not have been set off at random anyway. A lithium-ion battery could cause a minor explosion if it overheats or overcharges, but these batteries pose a greater risk of fire than an explosion. This can happen if they are punctured, causing the flammable liquid inside to leak out and then ignite. That doesn’t mean your iPhone could explode if you tap an Instagram notification. In the US, low-quality batteries from dubious manufacturers that are installed in cheap devices like e-cigarettes or e-bikes pose a far greater risk than anything else.

Accidental battery fires, even with poorly manufactured parts, could not be used to launch a simultaneous explosive attack. But that doesn’t mean you don’t own devices that could put you at risk. Think about spyware and malware, a concern common with devices made in China. If a device is connected to the internet, it can transmit messages, send your personal data overseas, or theoretically explode on command if it was built (or retrofitted) to do so. It seems plausible enough to put the pieces together in a way that creates fear – exploding pagers in Beirut, widespread ownership of personal electronic devices, fire hazards from lithium-ion batteries, devices connected to unknown, far-flung servers. Words like Spyware And Malware is reminiscent of the James Bond idea that a hacker on a computer halfway around the world can quickly press buttons and make any phone explode. But even after the astonishing attack in Lebanon, such a scenario remains fiction, not reality.

And yet it is also true that this attack has given rise to a new kind of terror. In Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East in particular, there is now a legitimate fear that even ordinary explosive devices could be bombs. Depending on how the explosive devices got to their new owners, it is also possible that the explosive devices got into wider orbit. Two children have already died.

In other words, the fear is based on enough facts to take root. Abroad, even here in the United States, the same fear can be aroused, albeit with much less justification. Worrying that your phone is actually a bomb feels new, but in reality it is not. The fear is caused by Bombsthe things that explode. A pager or a telephone can be made into a bomb, but so can anything else.