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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

The 4 cell phones thing and her sketchy story is suspicious. But anyone could have malware on a USB stick. Especially from China.

That said this sounds way too sloppy for state espionage. Maybe it’s private? Or they are recruiting way too many people and let some bad ones in.

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Trojan horse? Distract Secret Service agents with a clueless decoy while the real spies are sneaking around out back. Seems to be a subplot in lots of action movies.

Too sloppy for state espionage? In my experience, the level of competence in government varied widely. This is entirely plausible as state espionage.

Yup. Moreover, most "state espionage" and the like is really just a state-sponsored variation of garden-variety opportunistic/criminal activity that would otherwise be quite ordinary. This is something that most people might not generally realize, because there's so much focus on high-profile espionage. But that's rare and not at all the common case.

Seriously they destroy Iran nuclear enrichment with stuxnet by leaving usb flash drive around. The worker took it, kept it as there own and use it at the nuclear enrichment site.

Her story is completely nonsensical, she's an awful liar. Or, is pretending to be an awful liar. Perhaps she's clever and is pretending to be a hapless rube, in an effort to diminish her perceived culpability. With spy shit like this, either is a possibility.

It does seem like a sloppy attempt at espionage. But perhaps it worked in the past.

Testing the waters maybe..

She could just be nuts.

This was actually my first thought. But I was going to call her a “random.”

It does sound comical. Maybe the chinese are getting desperate after the huawei exec got arrested? Or maybe it's just a "setup" to apply pressure on china before the next round of trade talks. Usually espionage/intel related events are kept secret. When it's publicized, it's usually for political/trade/etc reasons.

Just like how china magically found canadian "spies" in their country right after canada arrested one of their executives and used their propaganda apparatus to put pressure on canada.

If this was real serious espionage, I doubt the secret service, cia, etc would release the info so quickly to the media. Does this mean the trade negotiations are not going well? Does it mean it is going well? It'll be interesting to read about the inner workings of the trade negotiations a few decades from now and what historians make of this time. Things like can only be understood in hindsight and never in the moment because we, no more than the chinese people, get to see what is really happening behind the scenes. Everyone gets the massaged and curated "news".

Russia has openly attacked the US, UK, EU with their online efforts.

These days you don't need to be convert.

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