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Dick Cheney Had Implanted Defibrillator Altered To Prevent Terrorist Attack
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."
Terror is a strategy, not a value judgment.
Don't let the propagandists redefine words to suit their purposes.
I'd much rather be terrorised from time to time - indeed, England was for quite a while, and my father almost got killed in one bomb blast - than be aerial bombarded back to the Middle Ages.
Frankly, anyone who understands how insecure wireless is should be terrified of having a built in personal "off switch." I would do the same thing, and so would a lot of slashdot.
Breaking News : Dick Cheney has a heart !
Frankly, anyone who understands how fragile the human body is should be terrified of walking outdoors, etc.
Murders don't happen all the time simply because most people aren't psychopathic cunts. But, in Cheney's case, it takes one to know one.
Extra Extra!
Read all about it!
Dick Cheney revealed to have a heart!
Progressives outraged over use of resources!
Okay, given Cheney's historical level of paranoia (this is nothing compared to some of his hijinks as SECNAV), I can TOTALLY see Cheney not understanding something and therefore assuming it's going to be used by people out to get him. Both "not understanding something" and "worried about trivial crap" are WELL within Cheney's persona. Having said that, whose wise idea was it to make a defibrilator that can be remotely accessed wirelessly in the first place? If nerd history has taught us anything, it's vulnerable shit eventually gets broken into, and wireless protocols are by definition vulnerable.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
...most people aren't psychopathic cunts. But, in Cheney's case, it takes one to know one.
But you claim to recognize Dick Cheney as one. Apparently that means you are a ....
By attacking America on 9/11, Al Qaeda hoped to lure America into a foolish overreaction that would alienate the West from the Islamic world, weaken America's will, and help spread Al Qaeda's message of extremism and violence. Few people helped them achieve these goals more than Dick Cheney did. So why would they want to kill him?
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.
Ah, but I'm a non-practising psychopathic cunt.
By attacking America on 9/11, Al Qaeda hoped to lure America into a foolish overreaction that would alienate the West from the Islamic world, weaken America's will, and help spread Al Qaeda's message of extremism and violence.
Good thing we're too smart to fall for that.
Precisely. There is only "war" of different kinds and at varying levels.
"Terror" is pretty effective though. Nations which lose hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed to socially acceptable causes (smoking, obesity, auto crashes) can easily be terrified into implementing structurally toxic changes by the trivial loss of a few thousand killed in one small location. I wouldn't want to be under a massive bombardment either, but once upon a time nations knew they could take massive casualties yet not only survive but triumph.
Give the Mamayev Kurgan monument some thought. Stalingrad cost more Soviet dead than the US lost in all its wars, but they refused to lose. Commies or not, they had balls.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Disabling wifi doesn't remove the danger. Directed energy weapons, like RF guns, can still target and disrupt the device in various ways since it contains electronics.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Cheyney obviously watches Homeland, in which the Vice President is killed by remotely acessing his pacemaker.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Killing a politician with subtle electronic sabotage is not appealing to terrorists. It is not dramatic. It is quiet. Terrorists would rather blow a city block with TNT to kill a politician. Killing somebody using defibrillator suits spies or other government agents.
And my guess is that that is what he was really worried about.
No. As a previous poster mentioned, the device has to be in very close proximity initially. However, in most ICD models once the heart device has been paired with whatever device is on the outside, communication can happen over a bit longer distances ( a few meters or so). Remember that these devices have batteries - they don't need coils. I have one, and it communicates with a receiver in my home when I'm around, allowing my cardiologist to be alerted if something odd happens with my heart rythm.
I have a pacemaker/defibrillator, and I really couldn't give a shit. Besides, my tech says that my model requires a magnetic field in order to pull a magnet inside the device and make a contact so that the wifi is turned on. Without someone sticking that round thing on my chest, no one can talk to the machine. Honestly if strange people go around putting heavy chunks of metal on my chest without my permission I think wifi is the least of my worries.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Probably someone who thought that sticking a cable through your chest to change the things configuration is an even worse idea.
Stalingrad cost more Soviet dead than the US lost in all its wars, but they refused to lose. Commies or not, they had balls.
Well, in essence, it was Hitler's fault. The original plan was to take the Ural oil fields and the German machine was unstoppable it doing it - until Hitler decided on a detour to take Stalingrad on the way (he thought it would destroy the Russian hearts and resistance) ~ bad move.
If he didn't do the detour, I think the outcome of WWII would have been different.
Mind you, that doesn't take away what the people of Stalingrad did to resist and destroy the German eastern front.
if his pacemaker is anything like the one my fried has, you basically have to touch his chest with another gizmo to see it.
so wireless in the sense that there are no wires sticking out of his nipple... not AQ can kill him from an internet cafe in Pakistan.
what's Cheney's IP? /duh.
One of my favorite headlines fromThe Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-heart-device-allows-cheney-to-experience-love,2294/
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Classic case of the dumbasses we put in charge who go sticking their fingers in things they know absolutely nothing about. Cheney strikes me as a prepper and we need to keep dipshits like that out of office.
These devices have to be "woken up" with a sensor placed on the chest. Then it'll communicate with the interrogation equipment which can induces shocks via a defribillation test. The range is limited to about 15 feet. Despite the wireless option being turned off, anyone with the device used to interrogate can still induce a shock with the chest sensor.
Still, a shock could still be induced without the tech by causing artifact in the leads. Inappropriate shocks have been reported in people operating heavy equipment like jackhammers and chainsaws. So shake the shit out of him and he may get an inappropriate shock. Worst that would happen there is induction of ventricular fibrillation which would only cause an appropriate shock.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Agreed: such a targetted attack would only be "terrorism" when the word is redefined by propagandists.
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.
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.