Scott Kenny
ACCESS: Above Top Secret
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
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One of the tricks here is that apparently the lithium battery pack was replaceable in the design. So a hostile actor could get ahold of the battery design specs and make a reduced-capacity version with a little kaboom inside, then at some point install the rigged battery into the units. (this basically requires getting a demo sample and having a bit of fabrication workshop available, plus later access to the units to be rigged at say a store level. If you're picking a fight with Israel, don't buy your consumer electronics in Tel Aviv, maybe?)This is like the electronic equivalent of the tylenol poisoning case or some other mass product tampering,and just as with that event its very likely we will see this repeated somewhere else at some point in the near future.
One could easily imagine the initial chaos resulting even from relatively small numbers of some well known brand of smart phone or laptop being booby trapped in this same sort of way,plus the longer term economic fallout for whichever unfortunate company [or companies] had its products targeted.
The potential is quite terrifying,for instance how big a bang would you get if you pulled this same sort of trick with an EV battery?
This IS NOT a case of a deliberately triggered battery thermal runaway. You have lots and lots of warning before one of those causes a lithium battery to "rapidly disassemble" itself all over the parking lot.
Story time: my shooting buddy is a Vietnam vet, at the time of this story he worked as a QA/repair tech at a boutique electronics manufacturer. Maker was doing a run of hand-held gambling devices for a casino in Nevada, about the time the Samsung batteries were first making the news. Company had a whole pallet worth of these things and one started smoking. Everyone else is panicking, my friend dives into the pallet and starts tossing hand-helds out until he finds the smoking one. He drops that into a metal trash can and carries it out to the loading dock before running back inside to make sure there weren't any more units overheating. By the time he'd satisfied himself that there was only the one unit, the unit in the trash can had popped with enough force that they found fragments of it 100 yards away at the far end of the parking lot. Couple weeks later in the investigation debrief teleconference, "So what can you tell me about the time one of these ex..." "RAPIDLY DISASSEMBLED ITSELF..." "There must be a lawyer in your conference room." Much laughter from both conference rooms, followed by a somewhat insulted-sounding "yes".