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Comment by deftnerd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

por que no los dos?

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