This is well known but often ignored for convenience. Go to any restaurant in the DC area around lunchtime and you'd be amazed at what you can learn from the table next to you.
Also true for the Caltrain, coffee shops, and nicer restaurants between SF and SJ. And SFO, SJC, and SEA airports; I think I hear some salesman loudly talking about a deal almost every time I fly out of those places on weekdays.
Fun fact: Using knowledge gained in this way isn't insider trading[1]. Conceivably a person could even sell tips based on information heard in public places to traders. During the golden age of Wall Street, this was extremely common. Traders or their lackeys would visit businesses (or the bars near them) and pump employees for info.
What's even wackier is that in commodities trading, insider information was allowed.
The loophole was a key plot point in the movie "Trading Places" and when the 2010 financial overhaul rules were passed, this section was nicknamed "The Eddie Murphy Rule".
"insider trading" is one of funniest many exceptions to the rules of capitalism. Like someone said "The financial system works! you support companies you think will do good for profit! it's great, it will regulate itself! Only, you can only bet with bad information and we'll make great expense into regulating you are not using good info!.
Yep. One of the first things I learned early in my careers is, when you're having lunch at a venue with your coworkers, if the subject turns to client work, do not ever mention the client's name out loud. You never know who might be sitting nearby.
So, the guy at the end of the bar that everyone just passes off as the town drunk might actually just be a very cleverly disguised spy? I want that as my cover when I join a spy agency.
My fiance worked for a movie theater in the DC area for a while. Once she found, left on the floor, a packet for an Afghanistan diplomat program put on by the US State department. Big itinerary with lots of names, dates, contact information, not just for the various stops and talks but for the people selected for the program. Nothing classified or obviously sensitive, but I'm sure someone with the interest could run through those contacts and come to a lot of conclusions about the US's foreign policy goals in the region. Or to follow these up-and-coming Afghanistan diplomats around on their trip to the US and maybe grab some blackmail.
Back in my Portland days I got the DL on some of Nike’s soon to be announced Jordan’s when an obviously high ranking Nike designer popped open his MacBook and proceeded to have a design review at a local coffee shop! Maybe not the most actionable information but kind of fun to see.
The GP is pointing out that companies may improve security by providing employees food on-site which reduces the exposure of business information to people who do not work for the company (insofar as people with access to the on-site food are a proxy for people employed by the company).
I watched a documentary once that described how corporations will hire people to eat Subway in public places or to talk loudly about things as a form of marketing. It’s profoundly dishonest
This has been done in Poland by Marek Falenta - private businessman. He did bribed waiters and wired popular restaurants in Warsaw to get material on businessman and politicians. It made a lot of noise - nothing top secret but enough of what politicians really say in private stuff to impact elections.
A friend works in the city of London, he told me taxi drivers always have details about business deals that aren't yet public for the very same reason.
It is, but people are terrible about it anyway. At a minimum, it is a field day for social engineering attacks because you can learn to speak in the languages / abstractions of that specific organization which automatically leads to trust-building.
can confirm that defense people are terrible about spilling a lot of details in public, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard an actual classified piece of info spoken in public
I once sat at a bar next to a drunk guy who told me he was a Boeing engineer. He proceeded to describe to me how jet engines work, one limitation of common designs, and a way to work around it. I didn’t understand any of it. I got the impression he was very interested in his work and didn’t have people he could discuss this stuff with.
He then told me about a limitation with the SR-71 Blackbird (Apparently the panels of the body expand at high speed, so they have to be designed in a way where they have gaps and are leaky on the ground, until they reach sufficient speed.)
He said solving this problem would be a big deal. Then he wrote the word, “Aurora” on a napkin and immediately crumpled it.
I wonder what criteria is used to determine "the most operationally optimal seat in the restaurant".
If it's a standard formula that most agents use because it's tried and true, then it could be viable to bug one or two tables in select restaurants in the DC area.
Basically, cast a wide net and see what information you get.
Same could apply at restaurants where business deals are discussed in order to perform insider trading, but unless they have a "movers and shakers" booth or room, it would be harder to pick the right table. Probably easier to pay waiters for intel.
My wife likes to sit in what she calls 'the Mafia seat', the seat in a restaurant that is best-protected by walls, etc, from behind, and that gives the best view of the rest of the room, so you can see what or who is coming.
She's not in the mafia or allied professions, AFAIK, but I'd wager that similar metrics are used by the professionals.
Sounds like what many people (perhaps your wife is one of them) subconsciously prefer and tend to, which as I've been informed on HN before (I am one of them, I'm aware I have such a preference but it's not consciously deliberate) is Zen's 'command position'.
I believe it came up before in the context of office desk arrangements. In office or restaurant, wherever, I find it very uncomfortable to have things going on behind me.
I confess I'm not really familiar, I was just trying to repeat what I'd been told after previously describing the feeling (and the position). Having searched briefly for more information, it seems I meant feng shui rather than zen.
Crowdsource. Pay people to run an app when they go around DC, that records constantly from their mic, and uploads it to the cloud along with their location. I’m sure someone has already thought of this!
> The Spanish football league La Liga has admitted that its official smartphone app has been making audio recordings in order to identify pirate broadcasts of football games.
> The league said its app detected the location of users, and if they were found to be in a bar, it then recorded audio clips using phone microphones.
> The app used an algorithm to identify whether the person was watching a football game from the recording and compared that with their location to see if it the bar owner had paid for a licence to show the game or not.
Highly variable by state, and probably a problem even in many one-party-consent states since the person doing the recording would generally not be a participant in recorded conversations. Many states and countries have laws on eavesdropping.
Edit: "In the District of Columbia, an individual may record or disclose the contents of a wire or oral communication if he or she is a party to the communication, or has received prior consent from one of the parties. The District’s voyeurism law prohibits secretly taking images of people in private settings and distributing them without consent. The District also contains several obscure city rules regulating the activities of commercial street photographers." Both significant criminal and civil penalties might apply.
Record all conversations using a device on your person and process them later
Processing and extracting multiple conversations at different levels from a single audio source automatically would be a great project to attack with some quite simple sound engineering tools and speech recognition ML.
I found this title subtly wrong, and it took me a little while to realize why: my accent doesn't have the Mary–marry–merry merger, so "Be Wary" and "Be Merry" don't rhyme for me.
And that's when I'd come to my senses, realize all the sweet talk they lured me in with was rubbish, and hand in my 2 second resignation notice, if an employer is going to train me on how to end my own life I'm out.
I doubt anyone has ever volunteered for CIA field agent training without realizing that it's dangerous, and specifically that there's a nonzero chance of winding up in the permanent custody of extremely inquisitive men with pliers.
I don't particularly approve of anything the CIA does. I downvoted because it's pretty silly to imagine that anyone could get all the way to CIA field agent training without already knowing that the job can be gruesomely dangerous.
I wonder how much of CIA spycraft has been made obsolete because of social media?
In the past finding out who someone's family, friends, interests, political leanings, where they travel, and skills might involve sending a human to secretly follow them around. Now you can just see who their family and friends on Facebook are, look at their daugther's Instagram page to see where the family has traveled, see their comments on reddit to know their political leanings, and looked at LinkedIn to see what skills they have.
I've always wondered what the upper limit for this is. How high up on the social/wealth ladder do you have to go for there to essentially be no chance that the person is an intelligence officer?
I wonder if they give a class in juggalo paint at the farm, and other means of bypassing facial recognition programs. The tenure of a field operative these days must be incredibly short
Her videos for Wired are pretty fun as well. My family watched them together and found them fascinating.
Shortly afterward, I was in DC with my family on vacation, and we went through the international spy museum (which is a lot of fun). When we got to the gift shop, we found out she’d been there not even an hour before signing copies of her book. I was bummed, to say the least.
Interesting point. One could assume that having full access to both the intricacies of the system and the ability to purge/hide people from it would help domestically, but what about international spies? Juggalo paint to fool facial recognition in Texas is one thing, but may backfire in Shenzhen..
to "the Farm," a secret CIA facility in Virginia where their grueling training included all the obligatory skills of what Fox refers to as "the Bond business": how to flip or crash a car; how to use a Glock; how to parachute; how to use a speedboat; how to withstand torture; how to use a grocery bag and duct tape to bandage a punctured chest; and how to commit suicide
I’ve had a bit of interaction with the Farm. As a kid, my dad and I would sail past it (as close as you can get without being blared at). I’ve heard explosions coming from there, and seen people rappelling from helicopters into the woods.
Later, I was a physics student at a university very close to Camp Perry. We were able to detect microwave transmissions on odd bands, at odd hours, that seemed to be directed from or to the camp. There was a helicopter that flew over campus towards “the Farm” every Saturday at midnight, for some reason.
Perhaps most memorably, I had a very unpleasant interaction in town with someone who, I found out in the Washington Post a while later, was Aldrich Ames.
Unless you really know what you're doing and have a good spectrum analyzer and set of horn antennas, you're going to detect 6, 11, 18 and 23 GHz band microwave in the general area of Camp Peary from totally ordinary telecom and cellular backhaul purposes.
Stuff like 1' and 2' size dishes on Verizon and TMobile monopoles, rooftop sites and towers forming point to point 18 GHz band, single or dual linear polarity, 40, 60 and 80 MHz wide links to other poles.
A cursory search shows that there's a plethora of ordinary FCC part 101 licensed microwave stuff in that area, to the point that coordinating a new point to point link would require some additional engineering work.
I read the memoir of a CIA case officer ("See No Evil" by Bob Baer) while at that same university. It was surreal to think the place he trained was where I would end up if I turned right instead of left when getting off the highway.
That’s what I was thinking of. He wasn’t parachuting into a speedboat with a Glock between his teeth, he was mostly sitting in classes in his book. And living in a death trap hotel when the stairs collapsed. Eating Froot Loops with sour milk for breakfast was as arduous as it got.
Nice. I've seen enough action films to know I'd want to go out via explosive speedboat death, involving a prominent chrome throttle control and a makeshift ramp if possible.
Should one be surprised that the CIA have lunch meetings when recruiting people?
Honestly, that part of things always seemed quite similar to a sales or marketing job. They also apparently do things like go to conferences, meet people, and collect business cards.
It was an opinion. I am now sorry for being snarky - but my opinion did not change - whole article about the surprising iformation that spies meet at restaurants.
>Moran moved on from the spy world. Moran heads communications at the Environmental Investigation Agency.
"EIA is a 501(c)(3) independent, international, non-profit advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.". 30 year old environmental non profit, totally not the perfect front organization for spy operations, right up there with jet chartering business (Aero Contractors, Pegasus Technologies, Tepper Aviation, etc).
I don't know that I've ever used it, but there are plenty of places to eat that I wouldn't call a 'restaura t', and that's what I'd assume someone using it was referring to (a d possibly including restaurants in a context such as this).
Cafés, 'diners', crêperies/breakfast places, anywhere in a shopping centre/'mall', that sort of thing.
I'm having trouble understanding how one can seriously consider NPR 'internal propaganda.' Their national broadcasts are like radically centrist and unbiased while the local/syndicated programs can be hard hitting and completely opposed to the government.
The criticism looks like most criticism of news media: braindead reporters, selective coverage, etc., pointing to some bias, but not really enough overall to be conclusive. And associated with the same sort of people that would sign a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide.
IDK, my experience is that news reports are OK for getting introduced to a topic but all the detailed/useful information is in blogs and databases these days.
> I'm having trouble understanding how one can seriously consider NPR 'internal propaganda.' Their national broadcasts are like radically centrist and unbiased
“Radically centrist” and “unbiased” are mutually incompatible descriptions, the former of which is compatible with propaganda favoring the elite consensus.
Radically centrist in that they go out of their way not to be liberal or conservative in an attempt to stay unbiased, sometimes to the detriment of the programming.
Ha. I don't mind the downvotes (because I'm right). The "shift to the right" is pretty well documented.
The fact that "liberal" is considered a pejorative today is testament to that.
I welcome proof otherwise.
Edit: example #1 of "neutral bias": The war on drugs is reported on in a matter of fact manner, and I've heard ZERO editorial comments that point out the insanity and wrongfulness of it. Same thing with the wars, etc.
I found it pretty informational, IDK. As CIA propaganda goes I think I'd put more stock in Hollywood. Even the Bourne films featured Panera Land...err I mean Pamela Landy to soften the blow to our image from narcissists and alcoholic bureaucrats.
