Float like a lead zeppelin, sting like the police:
This is amazing. The host keeps wondering when it will end, and the answer is never.
And this was his answer with Schultz too by the way. To him “parenting” just means telling his kids not to do drugs. Dad of the Year. https://t.co/04wmh4Mvn4
Once again, Donald Trump confuses hydrogen fuel cell cars with hydrogen-filled dirigibles from the 1930s. He then picks a random "beautiful woman" out of the crowd as an example of someone who will get blown up by a hydrogen fuel cell car. Which don't explode. https://t.co/DQ3pnxKHk2
— Mike Rothschild (no relation) (@rothschildmd) October 10, 2024
I wouldn’t do Aaron Rupar’s job for a million dollars. OK I would, but I wouldn’t do it for a half million. Unless the fringes were really good.
Steve the hurricane guy:
Magical realism novel, set in a world where TVs lose power when the wind stops blowing. Where people drive hydrogen cell cars which explode like the Hindenburg in every accident, incinerating beautiful women within. Where electric boats too heavy to float are designed, manufactured, and purchased with no one noticing. When they sink, the sharks attack, forcing a decision crisis. Hurricanes are nuked, million acre forests are raked, and C-130s drop 17 tons of water on ancient burning cathedrals. Governments fund everything from tariffs so high that nobody buys any imports.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. (Every person who lived through this 30 years from now).
I think turning everyday gadgets into bombs is a bad idea. However, recent news coverage has been framing the weaponization of pagers and radios in the Middle East as something we do not need to concern ourselves with because “we” are safe.
I respectfully disagree. Our militaries wear uniforms, and our weapons of war are clearly marked as such because our societies operate on trust. As long as we don’t see uniformed soldiers marching through our streets, we can assume that the front lines of armed conflict are far from home. When enemies violate that trust, we call it terrorism, because we no longer feel safe around everyday people and objects.
The reason we don’t see exploding battery attacks more often is not because it’s technically hard, it’s because the erosion of public trust in everyday things isn’t worth it. The current discourse around the potential reach of such explosive devices is clouded by the assumption that it’s technically difficult to implement and thus unlikely to find its way to our front door.
That assumption is wrong. It is both surprisingly easy to do, and could be nearly impossible to detect. After I read about the attack, it took half an hour to combine fairly common supply chain knowledge with Wikipedia queries to propose the mechanism detailed below.
Why It’s Not Hard
Lithium pouch batteries are ubiquitous. They are produced in enormous volumes by countless factories around the world. Small laboratories in universities regularly build them in efforts to improve their capacity and longevity. One can purchase all the tools to produce batteries in R&D quantities for a surprisingly small amount of capital, on the order of $50,000. This is a good thing: more people researching batteries means more ideas to make our gadgets last longer, while getting us closer to our green energy objectives even faster.
Above is a screenshot I took today of search results on Alibaba for “pouch cell production line”.
The process to build such batteries is well understood and documented. Here is an excerpt from one vendor’s site promising to sell the equipment to build batteries in limited quantities (tens-to-hundreds per batch) for as little as $15,000:
Pouch cells are made by laying cathode and anode foils between a polymer separator that is folded many times:
Above from “High-resolution Interferometric Measurement of Thickness Change on a Lithium-Ion Pouch Battery” by Gunther Bohn, DOI:10.1088/1755-1315/281/1/012030, CC BY 3.0
The stacking process automated, where a machine takes alternating layers of cathode and anode material (shown as bare copper in the demo below) and wraps them in separator material:
There’s numerous videos on Youtube showing how this is done, here’s a couple of videos to get you started if you are curious.
After stacking, the assembly is laminated into an aluminum foil pouch, which is then trimmed and marked into the final lithium pouch format:
Above is a cell I had custom-fabricated for a product I make, the Precursor. It probably has about 10-15 layers inside, and it costs a few thousand dollars and a few weeks to get a thousand of these made. Point is, making custom pouch batteries isn’t rocket science – there’s a whole bunch of people who know how to do it, and a whole industry behind it.
Reports indicate the explosive payload in the cells is made of PETN. I can’t comment on how credible this is, but let’s assume for now that it’s accurate. I’m not an expert in organic chemistry or explosives, but a read-through the Wikipedia page indicates that it’s a fairly stable molecule, and it can be incorporated with plasticizers to create plastic explosives. Presumably, it can be mixed with binders to create a screen-printed sheet, and passivated if needed to make it electrically insulating. The pattern of the screen printing may be constructed to additionally create a shaped-charge effect, increasing the “bang for the buck” by concentrating the shock wave in an area, effectively turning the case around the device into a small fragmentation grenade.
Such a sheet could be inserted into the battery fold-and-stack process, after the first fold is made (or, with some effort, perhaps PETN could be incorporated into the spacer polymer itself – but let’s assume for now it’s just a drop-in sheet, which is easy to execute and likely effective). This would have the effect of making one of the cathode/anode pairs inactive, reducing the battery capacity, but only by a small amount: only one layer out of at least 10 layers is affected, thus reducing capacity by 10% or less. This may be well within the manufacturing tolerance of an inexpensive battery pack; alternatively, the cell could have an extra layer added to it to compensate for the capacity loss, with a very minor increase in the pack height (0.2mm or so, about the thickness of a sheet of paper – within the “swelling tolerance” of a battery pack).
Why It Could Be Hard to Detect
Once folded into the core of the battery, it is sealed in an aluminum pouch. If the manufacturing process carefully isolates the folding line from the laminating line, and/or rinses the outside of the pouch with acetone to dissolve away any PETN residue prior to marking, no explosive residue can escape the pouch, thus defeating swabs that look for chemical residue. It may also well evade methods such as X-Ray fluorescence (because the elements that compose the battery, separator and PETN are too similar and too light to be detected), and through-case methods like SORS (Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy) would likely be defeated by the multi-layer copper laminate structure of the battery itself blocking light from probing the inner layers.
Thus, I would posit that a lithium battery constructed with a PETN layer inside is largely undetectable: no visual inspection can see it, and no surface analytical method can detect it. I don’t know off-hand of a low-cost, high-throughput X-ray method that could detect it. A high-end CT machine could pick out the PETN layer, but it’d cost around a million dollars for one machine and scan times are around a half hour – not practical for i.e. airport security or high throughput customs screening. Electrical tests of capacity and impedance through electromechanical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) may struggle to differentiate a tampered battery from good batteries, especially if the battery was specifically engineered to fool such tests. An ultrasound test might be able to detect an extra layer, but it would require the battery to placed in intimate contact with an ultrasound scanner for screening. I also think that that PETN could be incorporated into the spacer polymer film itself, which would defeat even CT scanners (but may leave a detectable EIS fingerprint). Then again, this is just what I’m coming up with stream-of-consciousness: presumably an adversary with a staff of engineers and months of time could figure out numerous methods more clever than what I came up with shooting from the hip.
Detonating the PETN is a bit more tricky; without a detonator, PETN may conflagrate (burn fast), instead of detonating (and creating the much more damaging shock wave). However, the Wikipedia page notes that an electric spark with an energy in the range of 10-60 mJ is sufficient to initiate detonation.
Based on an available descriptions of the devices “getting hot” prior to detonation, one might suppose that detonation is initiated by a trigger-circuit shorting out the battery pack, causing the internal polymer spacers to melt, and eventually the cathode/anode pairs coming into contact, creating a spark. Such a spark may furthermore be guaranteed across the PETN sheet by introducing a small defect – such as a slight dimple – in the surrounding cathode/anode layers. Once the pack gets to the melting point of the spacers, the dimpled region is likely to connect, leading to a spark that then detonates the PETN layer sandwiched in between the cathode and anode layers.
But where do you hide this trigger-circuit?
It turns out that almost every lithium polymer pack has a small circuit board embedded in it called the PCM or “protection circuit module”. It contains a microcontroller, often in a “TSSOP-8” package, and at least one or more large transistors capable of handling the current capacity of the battery.
I’ve noted where the protection circuit is on my custom battery pack with a blue arrow. No electronics are visible because the circuit is folded over to protect the electronics from damage.
And above is a selection of three pouch cells that happen to have readily visible protection circuitry. The PCM is the thin green circuit board on the right hand side, covered in protective yellow tape. One take-away from this image is the diversity inherent in PCM modules: in fact, vendors may switch out PCM modules for functionally equivalent ones depending on component availability constraints.
Normally, the protection circuit has a simple job: sample the current flow and voltage of the pack, and if these go outside of a pre-defined range, turn off the flow of current.
Above: Example of a protection circuit inside a pouch battery. U1 is the controller IC, while U2 and U3 are two separate transistors employed to block current flow in both directions. One of these transistors can be repurposed to short across the battery while still leaving one transistor for protection use (able to block current flow in one direction). Thus the cell is still partially protected despite having a trigger circuit, defeating attempts to detect a modified circuit by simply counting the number of components on the circuit board, or by doing a simple short-circuit or overvoltage test.
A small re-wiring of traces on the protection circuit board gives you a circuit that instead of protecting the battery from out-of range conditions, turns it into a detonator for the PETN layer. One of the transistors that is normally used to cut the flow of electricity is instead wired across the terminals of the battery, allowing for a selective short circuit that can lead to the melting of the spacer layers, ultimately leading to a spark between the dimpled anode/cathode layers and thus detonation of the PETN.
The trigger itself may come via a “third wire” that is typically present on battery packs: the NTC temperature sensor. Many packs contain a safety feature where a nominally 10k resistor is provided to ground that has a so-called “negative temperature coefficient”, i.e., a resistance that changes in a well-characterized fashion with respect to temperature. By measuring the resistance, an external controller can detect if the pack is overheating, and disconnect it to prevent further damage.
However, the NTC can also be used as a one-wire communication bus: the controller IC on the protection circuit can readily sample the voltage on the NTC wire. Normally, the NTC has some constant positive bias applied to it; but if the NTC is connected to ground in a unique pattern, that can serve as a coded trigger to detonate.
The entirety of such a circuit could conceivably be implemented using an off-the-shelf microcontroller, such as the Microchip/Atmel Attiny 85/V, a TSSOP-8 device that would look perfectly at-home on a battery protection PCB, yet contains an on-board oscillator and sufficient code space such that it could decode a trigger pattern.
If the battery charger is integrated into the main MCU – which it often is in highly cost-reduced products such as pagers and walkie-talkies – the trigger sequence can be delivered to the battery with no detectable modification to the target device. Every circuit trace and component would be where it’s supposed to be, and the MCU would be an authentic, stock MCU.
The only difference is in the code: in addition to mapping a GPIO to an analog input to sample the NTC, the firmware would be modified to convert the GPIO into an output at “trigger time” which would pull the NTC to ground in the correct sequence to trigger the battery to explode. Note that this kind of flexibility of pin function is quite typical for modern microcontrollers.
Technical Summary
Thus, one could conceivably create a supply chain attack to put exploding batteries into everyday devices that is undetectable: the main control board is entirely unmodified; only a firmware change is needed to incorporate the trigger. It would pass every visual and electrical inspection.
The only component that has to be swapped out is the lithium pouch battery, which itself can be constructed for an investment as small as $15,000 in equipment (of course you’d need a specialist to operate the equipment, but pouch cells are ubiquitous enough that it would not be surprising to find a line at any university doing green-energy research). The lithium pouch cell itself can be constructed with an explosive layer that I hypothesize would be undetectable to most common analytical methods, and the detonator trigger can be constructed so that it is visually and mostly electrically indistinguishable from the protection circuit module that would be included on a stock lithium pouch battery, using only common, off-the-shelf components. Of course, if the adversary has the budget to make a custom chip, they could make the entire protection circuit perfectly indistinguishable to most forms of non-destructive inspection.
How To Attack a Supply Chain
Insofar as how one can get such cells and firmware updates into the supply chain – see any of my prior talks about the vulnerability of hardware supply chains to attack. For example: this talk which I gave in Israel in 2019 at the BlueHat event, outlining the numerous attack surfaces and porosity of modern hardware supply chains.
Above is a cartoon sketch of a supply chain. Getting fake components into the supply chain is easier than you might think. As a manufacturer of hardware, I have to deal with fake components all the time. This is especially true for batteries – most popular consumer electronic devices already have a healthy gray market for replacement batteries. These are batteries that look the same as OEM batteries and fetch an OEM price, but are made with sub-par components.
Aside from taking advantage of gray and secondary markets, there are multiple opportunities along the route from the factory to you to tamper with goods – from the customs inspector, to the courier.
But you don’t even have to go so far as offering anyone a bribe or being a state-level agency to get tampered batteries into a supply chain. Anyone can buy a bunch of items from Amazon, swap out the batteries, restore the packaging and seals, and return the goods to the warehouse (and yes, there is already a whole industry devoted to copying packaging and security seals for the purpose of warranty fraud). The perpetrator will be long-gone by the time the device is resold. Depending on the objective of the campaign, no further targeting may be necessary – just reports of dozens of devices simultaneously detonating in your home town may be sufficient to achieve a nefarious objective.
Note that such a “reverse-logistics injection attack” works even if you on-shore all your factories, and tariff the hell out of everyone else. Any “tourist” with a suitcase is all it takes.
Pandora’s Box is Open
Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has no ethics: the difference between a patch and an exploit is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy agencies around the world, but never deployed en masse because while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify its re-deployment in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation.
However, now that I’ve seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it’s relatively easy for any modestly-funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this – a wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation-states to cartels and gangs, to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday (if chemical suppliers can moonlight in illicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions?). Bottom line is: we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday, we could be victims of exploding batteries, too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation grenades should be a crime, as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies.
I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.
"I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home."
That's the last line, and spent the rest of the article explaining exactly how to do this. I'm already dreading when this happens again.
Ryan Routh seems to be yet another unhinged man with a gun over there:
Mr. Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N. C., said he never fought in Ukraine himself — he was too old and had no military experience.
But like many foreign volunteers who showed up at Ukraine’s border in the war’s early months, he was eager to cast aside his former life for something far more exciting and make a name for himself.
“In my opinion everyone should be there supporting the Ukrainians,” he told me, his voice urgent, exasperated and a little suspicious over the phone.
When I talked to Mr. Routh in March of last year, he had compiled a list of hundreds of Afghans spread between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan whom he wanted to fly, somehow, to Ukraine. Mr. Routh told one Afghan he was helping: “I am just a civilian.”
My conversation with Mr. Routh was brief. He was in Washington, D.C., he said, and had planned for a two-hour meeting with some congressmen about Ukraine. (It’s unclear if that meeting ever happened.)
By the time I got off the phone with Mr. Routh some minutes later, it was clear he was in way over his head.
He talked of buying off corrupt officials, forging passports and doing whatever it took to get his Afghan cadre to Ukraine, but he had no real way to accomplish his goals. At one point he mentioned arranging a U.S. military transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees willing to fight.
I shook my head. It sounded ridiculous, but the tone in Mr. Routh’s voice said otherwise. He was going to back Ukraine’s war effort, no matter what.
Like many of the volunteers I interviewed, he fell off the map again. Until Sunday.
60 years ago this fall, Richard Hofstadter published his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” I assume this essay was inspired, if that’s the right word, by the first Kennedy assassination, and it’s striking how its opening paragraph sounds like it could have been written this morning, with the alteration of just one proper noun:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
Or maybe it’s not even necessary to make that alteration: on some level — paging Rick Perlstein — Trumpism is the culmination of what Hofstadter called “the Goldwater movement,” although his characterization of that (this) movement as driven by the animosities and passions of “a small minority” has turned out to be overly optimistic.
The contemporary media environment has as it were normalized the paranoid style, to the point where something like a presidential assassination attempt is unsurprising to the point of banality. Donald Trump in particular is himself reaping what he has done so much to help sow, but he had and continues to have a whole lot of help in creating a paranoid, surreal, unreal nation, spiraling now toward who knows what, but probably nothing good.
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. . .
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
A more succinct description of the Trumpist mentality remains difficult to compose.
Efforts to restore democracy to the United States, a troubled, oil-rich former British colony with a history of political violence, may have suffered a serious setback this week after yet another chaotic presidential debate, some Americanists say.
Held in the relatively stable northeastern state of Pennsylvania on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the country’s worst terrorist attack, the debate was a chance to showcase the democratic progress the country had made since the violent, shambolic elections and attempted coup nearly four years ago.
However, it got off to a less than stellar start. The three moderate candidates in the race – Jill Stein, Cornel West and Chase Oliver – were barred from participating. Instead, the contest pitted the two frontrunners: former President Donald Trump, the candidate of the far-white Republican Party, widely thought to be the political wing of white-Christianist militias, and Kamala Harris, the current vice president, who led a palace coup two months ago that forced the ageing, unpopular incumbent, President Joe Biden, to abandon his quest for re-election.
During the debate, moderators drawn from the US media, once considered one of the most vibrant in the region, struggled to get Trump and Harris to answer questions about their views and policies, and the session at times degenerated into name-calling, fearmongering and outright lying. The two candidates traded insults, incited anti-China sentiment, differed over women’s rights and whether the country is facing an invasion by hordes of violent, pet-eating criminal immigrants, and agreed on backing the genocidal regime in Israel. There was little articulation by either candidate of a coherent vision for the country.
Now with Americans watching the spectacle, unlikely to be impressed by the quality of leadership delivered by democracy, there are fears the country could resume its slide into autocracy. Before the debate, polls showed the two candidates locked in a dead heat. After the debate, the data show they are in fact deadlocked in a race to the bottom. It is indisputable that voters who watched the debate came away disillusioned by the choices they face. In a poll conducted immediately after the event, only 45 percent say they were left with a positive view of Harris, who many believe won the debate. Trump fared worse – only seen positively by 39 percent. In a sign of just how concerned elite Americans are about the declining faith in democracy, Taylor Swift, a local celebrity, took to social media immediately after the debate to endorse Harris and urge her fellow citizens not to give up hope but instead do research and make a choice.
Propping up democracy in the US has long been a vital priority for safeguarding global peace, given its linchpin status in the Caucasian bloc. Analysts say allowing autocracy to once again flourish in North America and in the ethnostates of sub-Scandinavian Europe could lead to yet another all-out Caucasian tribal conflict that would draw in the rest of the international community – a third world war.
Further raising the stakes, the Caucasian bloc is home to four rogue nuclear-armed nations – the US, United Kingdom, France and Russia – which are in violation of their commitment to disarm under Article VI of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. There are concerns over what would happen should these weapons fall into the hands of white-wing Christianist groups.
In the coming weeks, the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will begin in the nearby city of New York, and during the high-level week when heads of state take to the podium for the general debate, how to rebuild faith in democracy in the US is expected to be high on the agenda. Given the failure of the internationally recognised Biden regime to enact crucial electoral reforms to prevent a repeat of the 2020 fiasco, the UNGA may be the last chance for the world to help save the US from itself and put the long-suffering American people on a better path to peace and stability.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Log in
