Slashdot Mirror


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."

15 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Terrorist? by Joining+Yet+Again · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Breaking News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Breaking News : Dick Cheney has a heart !

  4. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by Joining+Yet+Again · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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

    ...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 ....

  6. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  7. 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.

  8. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by Joining+Yet+Again · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ah, but I'm a non-practising psychopathic cunt.

  9. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by nbauman · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  10. Re:Terrorist? by couchslug · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."
  11. 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.

  12. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by Dunbal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  13. Re:Evil, powerful men have enemies. by milkmage · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  14. New Heart Device Allows Cheney To Experience Love by JThaddeus · · Score: 4, Funny

    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')
  15. Cheney's clueless, it's not that easy by Chewbacon · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.