A recent attack that caused pagers to explode across Lebanon and Syria, injuring thousands of people and killing at least 12, including an 8-year-old girl, marks the latest iteration in a historical pattern of boobytrapping electronics.

Israel reportedly booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah members in what appears to be a supply-chain attack — meaning the gadgets were tampered with or outright replaced with rigged devices containing explosives and a detonator at some point prior to arriving in the hands of the targets. Hezbollah, which also attributes the exploding pagers to an Israeli attack, had reportedly recently switched en masse to using pagers for communications to evade Israeli surveillance.

The scale of the coordinated attack was shocking, but the tactic of turning an electronic gadget into explosive device is not unprecedented. In fact, it dates back at least half a century, according to U.S. military documents.

Field Manual 5-31, titled simply “Boobytraps” and first published by the U.S. Department of the Army in 1965,........

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