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Comment by Kaveren | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how good the disguise "technology" is that they won't disclose in a public YouTube video.

I don't know why you'd want to disguise yourself as the opposite gender unless you could pull off the voice, your cover would be blown almost immediately.

I still don't place any stock in intelligence operatives working in embassies, I can only imagine it works because intelligence agencies aren't sophisticated enough yet. You have a (relatively) small group of staff, and you know a portion of them are spies. Many "official covers" are extremely weak.

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The hosting country, like Russia, knows they are spies and puts surveillance teams on them 24/7. The spy's (aka CIA Officer) job is to make sure their agents (the host country people they are gathering intelligence from) will not be discovered because in worst case that may mean death for the agent.

I've read a few memoirs from CIA officers and typically they are doing a very well planned surveillance detection route (SDR) to ferret out who is following them. If they are headed to a clandestine meet, the plan could include disguises and specific parts of the route where they can lose the surveillance team. Then they can meet freely with their agent.

The sophistication isn't about technology of disguise, it is more about using a combination of the techniques described in the video and well honed skills.

I am just saying, if I am an asset, I do not want to be handled by someone under official cover. I'm sure they take all manner of measures to stay safe, but imagine how much safer it could be when you don't know the handler is in a group of a few hundred suspected spies. I'm sure that's more difficult though.

By "technology" I meant quality of the masks if they even bother with them. It seems silicone masks are very good. I wonder if surveillance cameras are able to tell if a person is wearing one.

>It seems silicone masks are very good. I wonder if surveillance cameras are able to tell if a person is wearing one.

One would think IR imaging would bust masks pretty quick due to differences in thermal characteristics from normal skin.

Silicone prosthetics are nearly perfect disguises.

And if you pull off a female illusion well, youd be surprised that most people wouldnt think twice about your voice.

I agree, a lot of it is about the complete package, how you walk, how you stand, which emotions you show overtly, how you dress.

There are plenty of women with very deep voices and you still accept them as women. You just don't notice because you don't hear the voice in isolation.

The speaker in the video claims that they can turn a woman into a man but that it's nearly impossible to turn a man into a woman. In other words, according to her, there is no way to "pull off a female illusion well".

Nearly impossible, sure. But not impossible. There are professional female illusionists you can look up to see the amount of preparation and effort it takes to pull off.

Wouldnt it be trivial to use heat detection laser thermometers to determine that a facial prosthetic is being used. Or simply thermal imaging.

> I don't know why you'd want to disguise yourself as the opposite gender unless you could pull off the voice, your cover would be blown almost immediately.

Only if you speak. The solution then, if this were for some reason necessary, is "don't speak."

You can train your voice to speak convincingly like a female. Transgender women do this all the time. The training does not take that long (a few months) and would be good for disguising your voice in a number of ways, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they did this.

In my limited experience they aren't that convincing.

I'm probably missing something here but how are you confident that you're not failing to identify the ones who are convincing?

I used to work at a place where there were a lot of transgender prostitutes outside in the evenings. They would proposition me as I walked by (as well as flash their parts at me sometimes). Some were pretty convincing regarding looks but when they spoke you could tell.

(I said "limited experience", but I suppose I probably have a fair bit more experience than most people).

Prostitutes likely wouldn’t have access to the tools and care needed to make their voice sound good.

But ultimately, most trans women are not prostitutes. I know a trans woman who is an executive at a major tech company and you would not even suspect her unless you dove into her LinkedIn profile and googled some of the trans charities she’s involved with.

It doesn't matter if a few are good at convincing, as long as most are unconvincing. Unless the people who are good at voice conversion are the same people who have done body shape modification aand wardrobe modification and are opposite the people who openly admit about their transness, it's easy to estimate what fraction of trans people are good at changing their voice.

Well this conversation was about spies and I doubt it is very important what percentage of trainee spies eventually pass.

a semi-related question, can people with training in music recognize the difference between a sopranist and a soprano?

because as a layperson i really can't.

Could be the toupee problem. You only notice the bad ones, and assume that all toupees are unconvincing? Meanwhile, the effective hairpieces slip by you undetected.

Relying on not having to speak is extremely sub-optimal. I'm not sure how many situations you can get in that you have both the time required as well as the need to disguise yourself as someone of the opposite gender.

You could pretend to be mute, of course, but this can attract more attention in certain scenarios.

>* I wonder how good the disguise "technology" is that they won't disclose in a public YouTube video.*

The impression I got of government tech from the Snowden leaks was "script kiddies at scale". I don't think their technology is "better" but they may have unique abilities by virtue of access to large databases such as DMV/passport photo DBs.

Or they can do things like get a court order compelling $COMPANY to pipe any publicly posted profile photo to them with the reasoning it was publicly posted and thus has no expectation of privacy. Other things at scale like that.

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