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Dick Cheney Had Implanted Defibrillator Altered To Prevent Terrorist Attack

Posted by Soulskill on from the didn't-want-to-wake-up-his-heart-by-accident dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to the Washington Post, 'Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he once feared that terrorists could use the electrical device that had been implanted near his heart to kill him and had his doctor disable its wireless function. Cheney has a history of heart trouble, suffering the first of five heart attacks at age 37. ... In an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes, Cheney says doctors replaced an implanted defibrillator near his heart in 2007. The device can detect irregular heartbeats and control them with electrical jolts. Cheney says that he and his doctor, cardiologist Jonathan Reiner, turned off the device's wireless function in case a terrorist tried to send his heart a fatal shock.' More at CBS News."

8 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by mellon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yeah, I think we have a pretty clear case of projection here. If a terrorist got close enough to him to hack his pacemaker, why not just stab him?

  2. It's a weird experience by BenEnglishAtHome · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My sis has an implanted defibrillator. It's a weird experience to be sitting in a doctors office when a technician comes in with a machine to test the installation.

    "I just need to turn up your blood pressure and heart rate for a minute" says the tech, as casually as ordering a cup of coffee.

    A couple of button presses later, the look of shock on my sister's face as she realized that she was not, in a very literal sense, in control of her own heart is something I'll never forget.

    She needs her implanted defibrillator but, holy shit, the power she must cede to Miss Random Device Technician by having it in her body is scary as all hell.

    1. Re:It's a weird experience by BenEnglishAtHome · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was being specific, not general. Here's what I mean -

      Do you crinkle in fear each time a car comes at you from the opposite direction?

      I'm sure I was quite afraid the first time I drove. However, I quickly learned that the danger was minimal, there were postive steps I could take to minimize it, and if something did go horribly wrong there was only a vanishingly small chance that someone was deliberately causing a problem. I got used to it, obviously, since they don't bother me now. I don't remember exactly, but I feel sure I actually got used to it before I finished my first drive.

      I understand that all of life is potentially dangerous. That was not my point.

      Prior to the implanted defibrillator, my sis had a pacemaker. It was just under the skin and checking it required placing an electronic puck of some sort directly on the skin over the pacemaker. That was how it was connected to a testing console. Making changes to the way it worked was a bit complicated, took some time, and required the cooperation of the patient (at minimum, to just sit there and let the work happen).

      The defibrillator was very different. There was no puck and it could be accessed from a vastly greater distance. Also, the technician could instantly, with a few keystrokes, turn my sister's heart up or down whether my sister was cooperating or not. In my first post, I was relating that this was the first time we realized that the implanted defibrillator required her to trust her life to a technology that could be so easily abused. Now that she's gone through it, she accepts the risk.

      However, it's a case of believing "I'm not a target/security through obscurity" that allows her to accept this situation. She really is completely defenseless against anyone close by who can send the right wireless signals. She accepts the risk in exchange for the rewards but the initial shock at realizing the risk existed (and having it so clearly, offhandedly demonstrated) was NOT unjustified. I feel sure that if she were a public person like Cheney, she, too, would have wanted wireless access disabled.

  3. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    IIRC the pacemakers have to be put in wireless configuration mode with a magnet placed in a specific spot on the pacemaker, so to hack one wirelessly would require physical access to him. It's not WIFI it's just wireless to prevent having to open him up to access the pacemaker, it still requires physical access.

  4. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by johanw · · Score: 1, Interesting

    A terrorist? Someone who (tried to) kill Cheney would be a hero like Claus von Stauffenberg who tried to kill Hitler.

  5. Re: Terrorist? by Zemran · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Mandella really was a terrorist. He was arrested while in the possession of 48,000 Soviet-made anti-personnel mines, 210,000 hand-grenades and loads of other explosives. He was blowing shit up and was about to blow up the railway station. He was sent to prison and frequently offered release if he would renounce terrorism. He consistently refused. His wife of the time used to like to tie children to street lamps and put car tyres around their necks which she then filled with petrol and set the poor child alight.

    He had a change of heart and became a man of peace. Would Bin Laden have been so readily forgiven?

    --
    I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
  6. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by clarkkent09 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    First of all, Israel is conducting large scale state terrorism basically since it exists.
     
    Israel was granted its existence by the UN in 1947. The problem with Middle East is that Arabs have never been able to accept that because they don't like Jews. If Israeli Jews were Muslim, the problem wouldn't exist, simple as that. The expansion of Israel's territory since then came in my view in a fair way, as they won one after another defensive war against attacks by vastly superior Arab forces.
     
      Second, some of the worst dictators in the Middle East have been explicitly supported by the US government
     
    So what. It was right to support them when it suited our interest and there was a greater danger to us and to the word to worry about (USSR - the most evil empire in the 20th century). As far as I'm concerned, dictators are a fair game to support or to depose according to our interests and once we defeated the Soviet Union, we are now knocking them out one by one. Saudi royal family has a special deal with the US that temporarily keeps them in power because of oil but as soon as that reason is behind us they will be next in line.
     
      Also, it would perhaps also be a good idea to get a clue at the size the "islamic world" you're talking about, because you talk an awful lot as if it was confined to the Middle East.
     
    And it would be a good idea for you to get some perspective of what a total failure Islamic civilization has been. There is no progress at all of any kind, technological, political or otherwise that happened in any Muslim country in hundreds of years. 2 Nobel Prizes in science by Muslims compared to over 100 by Jews! The best university in any Islamic country (in Turkey, among the least Islamic of the Muslim countries) is not even in the top 200 in the world. Democracy has either failed or been under attack by Islamists in just about every Muslim country. Every border where Islamic civilization meets a non-Islamic one there is trouble, just look at the world map. Israel has shown how to turn a backward desert wasteland into an advanced 1st world country in less than 50 years. Why can't any Muslim country do the same? I think it is obvious to anyone but Western cultural relativists that the reason is Islam.

    --
    Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
  7. I don't blame him for turning off wireless... by IDtheTarget · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I don't really like the Republican party any more. They're running the country into the ground. But listening to how hateful the liberals are, and how they wish death to their political opponents (see list below), I can't really support them either. I don't want to be a member of the party of hate. So for now I'll be an independent.

    That being said, if even a few of the below links are accurate, wouldn't you protect yourself from the left, who profess to want their political opponents to die?

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyharnden/9757837/

    http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2011/07/16/dan-savage-hbos-real-time-i-wish-republicans-were-all-f-king-dead

    http://www.examiner.com/article/liberal-talker-mike-malloy-says-he-wants-gop-literally-dead

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItcqrHLZGDg&feature=player_embedded#!

    http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/media-research-center-documents-liberal-death-wishes-against-conservatives

    http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/the-dark-side-of-liberalism-death-threats-to-conservatives-and-racist-threats/question-3628447/