I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.
Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this
This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.
Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on
Unmarked vans drive around all the time. They don't typically park out front of a whistleblower's house. There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be required.
An unmarked van could park in front of any arbitrary public neighborhood house with street parking for a few hours and nobody would care. As long as people aren’t visible in it.
Multiple days would be suspicious but that would be true of even the “sewer inspection” cover van
An unmarked white van (without windows) parked a house or two down the street hacking your wifi might not be that noticeable. One across the street with a radio dish spinning around and a parabolic mic sticking out the window and a few people entering and exiting it with donuts and coffee multiple times probably would be.
I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.
My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.
With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling of hyperbole for effect.
Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.
But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.
A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van.
You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.
> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley
So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?
I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.
That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.
It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.
From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...
Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing
I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.
You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer inspection van and hope you trick every single person who notices it into second-guessing themselves along the lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than that..."
Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced enough to facilitate this option.
I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully pull off low key 100% of the time while actively monitoring someone from the street in front of their house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.
Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.
haha well dont assume
spies are some godmode infallable people. spies also are humans and can have varying degrees of freedom to express their stupidity in their work..
in our country some spies got caught drivin around with wifi pineapple in plain sight circling govt and ngo sites.
in my mind thats next level dumb stuff, but maybe they arent really hackers and think its not conspicuous, or even the opposite, they know exactly what it is but think 'oh normal people wont stop to think about this, they dont recognise such equipment'.
if you werent there, didnt know the guys in the van etc. etc. - its all just guesswork.
even public record of a sewer inspection right then and there at that time (which i kinda doubt exists) wouldnt confirm or deny what that van was really doing there.
that being said, i would _assume_ its a sewer inspection van. but thats an assumption, not a known fact.
Reminds me of the joke where students prove by induction that the teacher is not actually planning a surprise test, and are surprised when there's a test the next day
I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!
Now I'm starting to wonder if that guy habitually leaves the door open because he got sick of people winking at him with a wry smile every time he had to go to a job.
Sometime there’s vehicle from at least three businesses and two government agencies gathered round an inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that’s costing.
You're thinking like a normal person. You need to think like an institution that has the entire weight of government behind them and who nobody wants to be on the wrong side of.
They either find someone who has suitable vans they can threaten with prosecution. That person then agrees to be an "informant" because that's better than losing your life to the feds and then their handler asks to borrow a van. They like this because no money needs to get spent specifically on it so it doesn't tend to get scrutinized. If they're going full above the table they register a business with the state complete with valid HVAC license or whatever and then rent a van from some company the FBI owns/runs that rents white vans and have some decals printed up. (For those inclined to do further reading, the OSINT hobbyists have done a lot to expose this workflow as it relates to aircraft so probably start there.)
He's asking if the first world will allow non-rich non-european countries that don't already have nukes to develop nukes while insinuating that there's a racial element (there definitely was historically) to such decisions.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Equivocating the occurrence of a non-us nation-state backed organization of hacking a western organization with data found at an alien crash site is bananas.
DeepSeek is basically a startup, not a "foreign nation-state backed organization". They were forced to pivot to AI when their original business model (quant hedge fund) was stomped on by the Chinese government.
Of course this is China so the government can and does intervene at will, but alleging that this required CIA level state espionage to pull off is alien crash levels of implausible. They open sourced the entire thing and published incredibly detailed papers on how they did it!
You don’t need a CIA level agent to get someone with a fraudulent job at OpenAI for a few months, load some files on a thumb drive, and catch a plane to Shanghai.
Naivety of some folks here is astounding… CCP has golden shares in anything that could possibly be important at some point in the next hundred years, and yes golden shares are either really that or they’re an euphemism, the point is it doesn’t even matter.
It doesn’t have to micromanage. It doesn’t care about most. It is only interested in the politically important ones, but it needs the optionality if something becomes worthwhile.
You're suggesting that DeepSeek was a Chinese government operation that gained access to OpenAI's proprietary data, and then you're justifying that by saying that the government effectively controls every important company. You're even chiding people who don't believe this as naive.
I think you have a cartoonish view of China. A huge amount goes on that the government has no idea about. Now that DeepSeek has made a huge media splash, the Chinese government will certainly pay attention to them, but then again, so will the US government.
I’m suggesting it will be happening now and any past efforts will be retroactively analyzed by the appropriate CCP apparatus since everyone is aware of the scale of success as of Monday. It has become a political success, thus it is imperative the CCP partakes in it.
> DeepSeek, illegally, got their hands on an OpenAI model via a breach of OpenAI's systems. [...] given the lengths other Chinese entities have gone to when it comes to replicating Western technology; we should not discount this.
Above, teractiveodular said that "DeepSeek is basically a startup, not a 'foreign nation-state backed organization'". You called teractiveodular naive for saying that. So forgive me if I take the obvious implication that you think DeepSeek is actually a state-backed actor enabled by government hacking of OpenAI.
Until recently treating the US and China on the same geopolitical level for allied countries would have been insanely uncharitable and impossible to do honestly and in good faith.
But now we have a bully in the whitehouse who seems to want to literally steal neighboring land, or is throwing shit everywhere to distract from the looting and oligarchy being formed. So I suddenly have more empathy for that position.
I notice that your geographical perspective doesn’t stretch to any actual evidence that such a thing took place. So it really has exactly the same amount of supporting evidence as my alien crash reverse engineering scenario at present.
The surrounding facts matter a lot here. For example, there are plenty of instances of governments hacking companies of their competing nations. Motives are incredibly easy to come by as well, be they political or economical. We also have no proof that aliens exist at all, so you've not only conjured them into existence, but also their motive and their skills.
Ok so to be clear: your surrounding facts are they may have a motive and nation states hack people. I don’t disagree with those, but there really are no facts that support the idea that there was a hack in this case and the null hypothesis is that researchers all around the world (not just in the US) are working on this so not all breakthroughs are going to be made in the US. That could change if facts come to light but att the moment it’s not really useful to speculate on something that is in essence entirely made up.
Are you a Chinese military troll? The fact that China engages in industrial espionage is well known. So I’m surprised at your resistance to that possibility.
Industrial espionage isn't magic. Airbus once stole basically everything Boeing had, but that doesn't mean Airbus could magically build a better 737 tomorrow.
China steals a lot of documentation from the US but in a tech forum you of all people should be very familiar with how little actual progress a bunch of documentation is towards a finished unit.
The Comac C19 still uses American engines despite all the industrial espionage in the world because most actual engineering is still a brute force affair into finding how things fail and fixing that. That's one of the main advantages SpaceX has proven out with their "eh fuck it, just launch and we will see what breaks" methodology.
Even fraud filled Chinese research makes genuine advancements.
Believing that China, a wealthy nation of over a billion people, with immense unity, nationality, and a regime able to explicitly write blank checks could only possibly beat the US at something by cheating is like, infinite hubris. It's hilarious actually.
I don't know if DeepSeek is actually just a clone of something or a shenanigan, that's possible and China certainly has done those kinds of things before, but to think it's the MOST LIKELY outcome, or to over rely on it in any way is a death sentence. OpenAI claims to have evidence, why do they not show it?
>>>Believing that China, a wealthy nation of over a billion people, with immense unity, nationality, and a regime able to explicitly write blank checks could only possibly beat the US at something by cheating is like, infinite hubris. It's hilarious actually
So this is the first time I’ve heard the Chinese regime being described in such flowery terms on HN - lol. But ok - haha
The evidence supporting offensive hacking is abundant in recent history; the number of things which have been learned from alien crash data is surely smaller by comparison to the number of things which have been learned from offensive hacking.
> Models from American companies at least aren’t surprising us with government driven misinformation, and even though safety can also be censorship
Being a citizen of a western nation, I'm inclined to agree with the general sentiment here, but how can you definitively say this? You, or I, don't know with any certainty what interference the US government has played with domestic LLMs, or what lies they have fabricated and cultivated, that are now part of those LLMs' collective knowledge. We can see the perceived censorship with deepseek more clearly, but that isn't evidence that we're in any safer territory.
