Goddamn, that is a hideously well-reasoned article. Don't even worry about your phone. What about all the little things that have batteries in it. What's to stop a state actor from embedding minor explosives in our TV remotes, kitchen appliances, our goddamn inexpensive bluetooth headphones (ugh). Hell, any rechargeable cell on Amazon could be tampered with.
I suspect there are technical issues with some of those applications, but I feel like I woke up in a different world after reading this article.
Several generations ago I saw a teardown of a then-current smartphone and marvelled that very little of the available space was electronics: most was battery. There's been a similar trend in laptops.
More recent phones have switched this around somewhat, largely on account of the multi-component cameras which actually occupy much of the available space. But other than that, you could characterise the guts of a smartphone as largely being a battery with some electronics attached.
And they're hardly the limit for miniturisation. An HN submission last week featured the world's smallest computer ... as of 2015, which is roughly the size of a grain of rice:
The principle challenges with electronics this small is finding ways to power and interconnect them.
The power problem largely solves itself if what you're distributing calls itself a battery. Heck, plenty of batteries already have management systems on them to deal with charging and thermal management, so an additional chip (perhaps concealed as a capacitor or resistor) isn't going to draw much attention. TFA mentions this:
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.
So now you have to distinguish benign vs. malignant circuits.
Any explosive / weapons payload is probably a larger concern. That might be explosive as used recently, or potentially a chemical, biological, or radiation mechanism. Again, TFA details how that could be incorporated into the battery layers themselves, alternatively they might be an additional package within a battery. Cylindrical cells in particular could conceal shaped charges.
And those batteries could go into anything. Phones, walkie-talkies, baby monitors, electric toothbrushes (shaped charge, consider the possibilities), flashlights (handheld or strapped to a head, either would cause considerable or lethal harm).
Or all manner of technical, professional, and/or military hardware, some of which might have far larger batteries as part of various components, which of co-opted could have significant effects.
I'm pretty sure that RU and UA are taking copious notes presently, if not other parties.
> small circuit board embedded in it called the PCM or “protection circuit module”.
Which is, perhaps ironically, to prevent the battery from igniting from discharging rapidly (shorting) the battery. It also protects the battery from 100% discharge (which won't ignite it, but will kill the battery).
Makes you wonder if that's how it worked. If you wanted to use a lithium ion battery by just mixing PETN directly in the battery electrolyte ... (maybe it even dissolves, but you'd need an additive for that. Complicated. You could definitely put it directly in the battery in the same space as the electrolyte though) and then using the battery discharge as a "blasting cap", by sabotaging the protection circuit on command, that might work. That would maximize the effect of the PETN, might even use the, at that point superheated, battery electrolyte as shrapnel.
This setup would even auto-disarm itself. If it's not triggered for months to years it will, by itself, destroy the explosive slowly and safely. And yes, that will destroy the battery, but I imagine that's not a huge concern. Might be a problem if the battery then ends up in repair shops and people put it in battery testers.
This would also be completely impossible to detect at airports or the like. For directly checking chemical compounds they need to be able to touch them, so if you wash it and keep it clean it'll be invisible. And the battery is packaged in a metal! That's how all batteries work, so that's not suspicious at all. The metal will prevent other methods of scanning, and it'll be really hard to detect the nitrogen and oxygen of the explosive. I'm not sure if that would even be suspicious in a battery. It probably would.
I still think the fact that "plastic explosive" exists, the more modern variants is the bigger threat. Because you that way they can make an explosive that is a plastic. The very cover of a cell phone, or sunglasses, ... and the item itself can be the explosive. And of course, you could use something bigger. The danger of this is that people carry heavy pieces of plastic and it might be possible to take maybe even a few kilograms of explosive anywhere past almost any security check, because the explosive IS a suitcase, which would make a very scary amount of explosive not suspicious.
I suspect there are technical issues with some of those applications, but I feel like I woke up in a different world after reading this article.