Eat, Drink and Be Wary: Ex-CIA Officer Reveals How Eateries Are Key to Spycraft | Hacker News Reader

Eat, Drink and Be Wary: Ex-CIA Officer Reveals How Eateries Are Key to Spycraft

npr.org

219 pointslnguyen148 comments

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.

Works in SF too

https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/07/incoming-democrat-chair...

Overheard on Amtrak in some cases (strange since Amtrak does offer roomettes).

No roomettes on the Acela. The NYC -> DC route only takes like ~4 hours

Hey don't undersell the one fast train in the USA: it's only ~3 hours! Plus there are now a handful of nonstop trips that take 2 hr, 35 mins [1].

[1] https://wamu.org/story/19/07/25/amtrak-launches-nonstop-acel...

This is very much in the security training government and military have to take annually as well.

It’s even in corporate training to prevent revealing trade secrets accidentally.

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

How would you know if the information you heard was classified or not ?

I’d imagine that if you happen to work in the industry, then you would know if what you were hearing was a problem.

From what I’ve read, those with clearances that hear something outside of a secure area are obligated to report it immediately.

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.

Years ago--as you would judge by the names--we were walking along 14th or 15th NW and my wife overheard the following snippet:

woman a: .... Anyway, that's what Bill said. woman b: But what did Hillary say?

A co-worker to whom I mentioned this suggested that perhaps the business improvement district hired actors to walk about and hold such conversations.

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

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.

This is—no joke—one of the main reasons why tech companies feed their employees on campus.

I don't get that. I don't bring my laptop to lunch even in the office. Prior to this job, I had neither a laptop nor (paid) on-site lunch.

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).

Probably helps with the IRS audits: oh, it’s not an employee benefit, it’s an employer benefit!

Awesome, did you work at Nike or Intel?

I worked for New Relic, although, no joke, probably 90% of the people on my block worked at Intel or Nike!

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.

That was a drop waiting to be picked up

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.

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.

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 how about that fruit company’s new phone?

Yup, and I guarantee you foreign states send nosey-nellies to all these venues to do nothing but snoop on this stuff.

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.

Usually it means you can't actually drink that much, so, watch what you wish for.

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.

[1] Not a lawyer, not legal advice.

generally speaking it seems like it is insider trading in Europe and is not in the US.

It is insider trading if you get it by soliciting the information.

It is not insider trading if you get it by simply overhearing a public conversation.

It's insider trading if it's material and non-public. Solicitation has nothing to do with it.

In France, at least some authorities think it is insider trading:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-29/deals-...

This is a pretty grey area. Would not recommend trading on the info.

How in the world would anyone prove that you traded on insider information that you overheard at a restaurant?

Just keep it to yourself. You might be investigated, but not a chance they will find enough to even think about prosecution.

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".

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/09/200401407/epis...

Only wacky if you think insider trading is a bad thing. There's a pretty vocal minority of economist who thinks it does more harm than good.

One of the most objective summaries I've seen is from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (1).

Subjectively: intentional or not, insider trading laws drastically protect and enhances wallstreet's information asymmetry advantage.

(1) https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/research/public...

"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!.

Except Founding Farmers.

Reminds me of the nytimes journalist who overheard Ty Cobb (Trump's former lawyer) talking about the Russia investigation at a restaurant in DC: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/us/politics/isnt-that-the...

Airport lounges for sure

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.

[1] https://kafkadesk.org/2019/06/13/polands-most-wanted-man-thr...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-10/polish-bu...

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.

por que no los dos?

Moore's Law says you now bug every restaurant table in DC.

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!

> I’m sure someone has already thought of this!

...probably the CIA.

> Pay people

This seems like an unnecessary step for the intelligence apparatus

You could make your own intelligence service, like those repo men who scan license plates.

"Hey Alexa|Google|Siri, search for 'crowdsourced eavesdropping'."

La Liga:

> 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.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/06/12/spanish-fo...

wow, that's crazy. I know big soccer clubs are huge about keeping secrets too. Down to what their players are eating/fed/ .

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.

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.

Also known as "ninja-proof seats"

This sort of seat is seldom ideal for those who need to leave the premises quickly.

As the article points out, back exits are critical. I imagine it’s not difficult to find a good seat like that near the kitchen.

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 love learning a phrase for the obscure preferences that my wife always makes fun of.

Of course she also makes fun of my obscure phrases.

Zen Buddhism’s command position?

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.

>AFAIK

You better know well, all given :)

I may have been exaggerating about my wife's responsibilities.

I'd imagine the priority might be:

1) Microphone all possible tables and have them record/signal when key words are overheard

2) Befriend/seduce/bribe wait staff and train them to roam around in optimal patterns to catch conversation

3) Some kind of subtle hearing amplification/focusing device

4) Record all conversations using a device on your person and process them later

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.

Cocktail party problem is actually hard in ML. And that's not even getting into speech recognition on imperfectly segmented speech streams.

Keywords: multiple talker speech segmentation, computational auditory scene analysis CASA

Text-only version:

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=770368584

> invited her to a pub called the Fuggle & Firkin

Fuggle is a classic English aroma hop, released in 1875 by Mr Richard Fuggle. [1]

Firkin is an English brewery cask unit, specifically one fourth of a barrel or half a kilderkin. [2]

There used to be a chain of Firkin pubs in the UK, all of which featured Firkin in the name, e.g. Fettler and Firkin, Goose and Firkin, etc. [3]

[1] https://www.britishhops.org.uk/varieties/fuggle/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_brewery_cask_units#Fir...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firkin_Brewery

There are also Firkin pubs in Southern Ontario.

fox and Firkin in my hometown closed but the brewery there now rocks sours.

California in a lesser known town? I know of a Firkin & Fox.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...

As someone who does have this merger, which one (of Mary/marry/merry) does "wary" most resemble for you?

Wary.

I think the answer is "Mary".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/%C9%9B%C9%99%C...

Mary and Merry are exactly the same as Wary to me.

Mary

I read it as Eat, Drink, and Be Werry, and it took me a second of mild confusion to realise it was Wary, for much the same reason.

>and how to commit suicide.

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.

Some things are worse than suicide.

Which is exactly why I'd quit.

Clearly not cut out for that line of work...

Or maybe it's a clever ruse.. checkmate adversary

It's the US government, so you're far more likely to have to "suicide" someone else than kill yourself

heh you were downvoted for that. Apparently someone approves of

* An employer training their employees to kill themselves.

* A line of work where employees may have to kill themselves.

* Dying for the US government (more like actually the interests of the elites) and the "greater good".

How is that different from the indoctrination of suicide bombers?

Before someone retorts with "because they kill innocent civilians", do you think the CIA etc never does that?

> How is that different from the indoctrination of suicide bombers?

Presumably the CIA mission is not dependent on the agent's suicide. This is an action taken in a worst-case scenario to avoid torture.

Right. They’re going to be killed anyway after immeasurable misery and betraying their contacts, so best to end it themselves.

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.

that assertion in the article could be dramatic nonsense

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 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.

CIA agents are trained to be perfectly just like "one of us" leading apparently normal lives.

There are most likely CIA agents among us here on Hacker News... functioning as technology executives, sales people, engineers, developers, etc

>technology executives

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?

Valid. Why work for a gov pension when your stock bonus is 7+ figures a year.

The higher you go in the ladder the more likely you are to be talking to a spook

Gilman Louie says hi ;) .

I love this The Onion video that is a news report on the CIA's most successful project ever, Facebook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0

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

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..

They just walk around in Batman getup.

Why do you think the international wholesale market for cosplay is located there?

They've certainly gone to similar lengths in the past: see https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/meet-the-cias-disguise-art..., for instance.

The former Chief of Disguise for the CIA did an AMA relatively recently. Pretty candid and fascinating stuff.

For the curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a32j7e/im_jonna_mende...

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.

How resilient is facial recognition to good old fashioned spectacles with optionally attached plastic {nose, eyebrows, moustache}?

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51WNRdX9cxL...

There’s 2^3 + 1 disguises / operations right there for ya!

2^4 + 1 if you {,don’t} include a beard hung off your ears.

Facial recognition countermeasures can be considered in some ways obsolete in an era of stance and gait recognition.

At last the Ministry of Silly Walks shows its value to the wider bureaucracy.

Elastic band and a small sharp pebble strategically placed in your shoe take care of that.

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

This is over-egging the pudding a bit.

You'd think the "commit suicide" lesson would just be "perform any of the prior taught skills not well enough."

You laugh, but this story from a few months ago is crazy https://nypost.com/2019/07/24/fbi-agent-brother-to-cop-accus...

Some redditors who were at the bar posted on how he was with agents that were bartenders

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.

Dying isn't as easy as you think, and being incapacitated in a an already-bad situation is immeasurably worse.

not your own 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.

Please tell us more about that interaction!

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Peary

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.

Ed Snowden has a bit in his book about his time at the Farm. It sounded insane, and in line with that.

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.

> how to flip or crash a car

Build a ramp and hide it behind a fruit cart, like they do in every movie car chase ever.

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.

Warning: I tried to read it - but after half of it I found no content.

Did you have a technical issue with npr.org or are you stating your opinion that the article wasn't interesting?

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).

Interesting that one passed on SIS (the traditional tap on the shoulder by a don)

I was surprised that the CIA will take dual nationals on as Officers.

> I was surprised that the CIA will take dual nationals on as Officers.

You keep your citizenship but cannot carry two passports.

The most essential skill of spycraft is extortion, not dining.

When did "eatery" become an acceptable term for restaurant?

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.

Wouldn't a cafe be a drinkery?

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