Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

The speed a witch folks will imply there is a conspiracy at every turn on HN seems to be increasing with time.

We are always surprised by unbelievably convenient coincidences favoring whoever has the ability to cause them.

It's astonishing that, during the vetting process and over the course of his employment, his alleged sexual preferences were never a cause for concern. These people can't keep secrets from their employers because any secret they keep is a possible liability.

>convenient coincidences favoring whoever has the ability to cause them.

I feel like that by default would just mean everything involving anyone with any power (or even little) would be thought to be a conspiracy.

The thing that makes me believe that the evidence was planted is because is such an easy thing to do and it does a lot more damage, if there were some financial transcation then there would be some more evidence to corroborate it, if it was some objects or property again there would be a lot more things to corroborate, with porn you just plant a file or a stick and then the you show the jury some disturbing image and you are done, you destroyed the person, lazy and efficient.

The article does not mention it and I would like to know if it is know if this was some files on his laptop, or was in his browser cache or browser history or an USB stick

>I would like to know if it is know if this was some files on his laptop, or was in his browser cache or browser history or an USB stick

That kind of stuff will never be released though.

Given the national security aspect of this case you might be right, but in general a lot of dirty details about the hows and wheres of CP cases comes out eventually in court filings.

Exhibit A: "Mad Thad" McMichael / https://imgur.com/a/xr2IH - of "\things\dont click\cp\cp" fame.

Ironically, it's the sort of tampering that more "privacy violation" by third-parties could help protect people against. Storing your behavior in the clutches of multiple competing firms with multiple conflicting interests can make it easier to protect one against an attack on reputation that involves modifying one data store.

"Your honor, the prosecution claims my client had CP on his hard drive, yet it does not appear in either his Apple backups nor his Google Drive synchronization images..."

It does not have to be like that, you should be able to find traces in recent played videos opened files, what is ironic is that you have a high visibility person like Epstein that FBI is incompetent to catch for years but for some reasons the people they have reasons to find something the evidence just appears... it just feels this laws are not used to protect children/teens but to punish the ones the government doesn't like.

Possible alternate explanation: Epstein had the resources to pay people to obfuscate the trail of any investigators trying to dig up dirt on him, and $J_RANDOM_CIA_STAFFER does not.

You don't think it defies logic that a SOFTWARE ENGINEER who works for the CIA, would leave such an obvious trail to a horrific crime on his home computer?

This person has intelligence, technical acumen, and is immersed in secrecy and privacy at an extreme level on a daily basis.

Maybe people are just dumber than we want to credit them for. But I don't think its "conspiracy theory" to find this indecent strange.

> You don't think it defies logic that a SOFTWARE ENGINEER who works for the CIA, would leave such an obvious trail to a horrific crime on his home computer?

The history of people being arrested for crime suggests no. People who are incredibly savvy in one field have been incredibly stupid in what should have been a very-closely-related field.

Entirely too many politicians who know how much people talk have had their careers tarnished by unpopular sexual trysts, for example.

That's all true. Maybe it is just people are that stupid.

Here is ANOTHER article from Today about a famous Hacker being arrested for child porn.

https://kotaku.com/nintendo-switch-hacker-busted-also-pleads...

It just feels like from reading the news, that to be an illegal hacker it's almost a requirement to have tons of child porn on your personal computers.

This person went through one of the most demanding interviewing process on the planet and has passed probably more than one interrogation without anyone suspecting he was a paedophile.

I'm really not sure which possible assertions is more disturbing: that the FBI would frame him or that the CIA may be full of paedophiles.

You're assuming CIA software engineers are good at their jobs, and that engineers have opsec skills

Those are two big assumptions.

HN is usually pretty logical, so I find it odd that people are jumping to conclusions here.

Jumping from "the CIA is all elite software engineers" to "CIA engineers must have extraordinary opsec" to "if unencrypted evidence was found, the most likely explanation is it was planted" requires several wild leaps.

Maybe the same sort of person who blows up their life by leaking classified information and does it in a manner sloppy enough to at least be accused of the crime is also careless to not properly cover up other crimes?

Also, clandestine service and analyst roles are two very different roles housed under the same agency. Not everyone in the CIA is in clandestine service. (In fact it's my understanding the vast majority are not)

I have no idea if this person is guilty, that's what a trial is for. But I'm not going to say the presence of evidence is evidence of innocence - that seems like extremely flimsy, circular logic.

Then again, I've never held a clearance or worked a government job - this is all just my own analysis based on open source information, so take what I say with a grain of salt :)

Folks may want to read this article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9...

(There's also a HN discussion thread for that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14500633)

> I feel like that by default would just mean everything involving anyone with any power

Precisely. We give them the power to search our houses and take away our freedom because we trust them to do The Right Thing. When this trust is broken, we are in a very bad place.

This is silly. They don’t take forensic images of your drives unannounced during the vetting process.

No, but they dig through your life, talk to people who knows you, and ask very pointed questions.

Most people who view child porn probably do not tell their friends and family.

See my child comment for a more in depth response, but to your point I believe it is naive to assume intelligence agencies would not weaponize something as powerful as a CP accusation.

I think it is illogical to assume that it happened in any / every given case with no evidence.

I would think that just given time someone has falsified such a thing before, I don't by into the idea that it makes sense to make that assumption for any or every given case.

Not every case. Nobody assumes a conspiracy when your neighbor down the road gets brought up on possession of such material. Despite easily having the power to, there's no motive for the federal government to go around framing random individuals of sex crimes.

But a whistleblower? A thorn in the intelligence agencies' side who has exposed them and attracted their ire? You'd be a credulous fool to take that story at face value. The IC has a long and documented history of flouting norms like honesty and integrity. These are institutions whose entire purpose is to use deceptive, extra-legal methods to focus the power of government against anybody who poses a threat to it.

The only rational, non-conspiracy nut commenting is getting downvoted.

Why would they need to do such a thing. The defendant broke his agreement with the CIA and the Federal Government by leaking classified information. It honestly seems incredibly stupid to falsify evidence that could torpedo an entire case....

>Why would they need to do such a thing.

In general or this case? In general: Because it's incredibly powerful. In this case? See below.

>The defendant broke his agreement with the CIA and the Federal Government by leaking classified information.

This has yet to be proven, and the defendant claims he is innocent. An alleged leaker claiming his innocence possessing unencrypted CP is incredibly convenient for the CIA. Almost too convenient.

>falsify evidence that could torpedo an entire case

Why when the risk to the gov is basically 0%. You run a kit to plant the files and metadata. The files are then "extracted" by a forensic tool, the "evidence" is now bulletproof. The only person who could conceivably challenge such a move would be a very wealthy person who knew they were innocent and chose to hire expert witnesses to analyze the planted data to prove it was faked. Even then... good luck.

It would obviously be better if the original article had itself examined the glaring motives. But since we can not rely on mass media to actually do critical reporting, it's good for someone else to say it. When convenient narratives are repeated without questioning, it warps people's perspectives.

>it's good for someone else to say it

I'm not sure I agree. You could say that about ... anything. Spam, racism... etc.

So you believe that an agent working for CIA on Vault 7 didn't know how to encrypt his hard drive ?

Why do you think this is conspiracy ?

I don't / don't know that it is a conspiracy .

it’s a symptom of elite and institutional deligitimatization and it’s everywhere

It's pretty well established that people federal law enforcement wants gone are allegedly pedophiles or otherwise abusing children at an exceptionally high rate compared to the general population. In the absence of other information some skepticism is warranted.

Is it? I've never seen a statistic suggesting that. Feels like it'd be pretty easy to observe if it were happening.

HN is passing the Eternal September threshold; this is a standard pattern with any open-subscription message board as T approaches infinity.

I'm old enough to remember transitioning my interaction from /. to HN to get more professional discussion of industry topics. That was a long time ago, and there's no reason to assume most of /. hasn't followed me here by now.

Edit: for those downvoting me, I'd appreciate a clarification on whether I was "off-topic," "troll," "flamebait," or something else; this is not the granularity of feedback to which I am accustom. ;)

I fear you are correct.

I'm a bit bummed as HN was pretty unique / not likely to find a new one.

>I'm a bit bummed as HN was pretty unique / not likely to find a new one.

Slashdot, Digg and Reddit all had the same "unique" feeling for a long time. Something will replace HN eventually.

I never felt like Slashdot, Dig, or Reddit expected the same amount of depth / thoughtfulness.

Like when I ask a question here I'm not inundated by "I just read wikipedia and i'm here to splain it to you!" folks (I did too man .. that's not my question) and the expected depth on HN was / sometimes is fairly comprehensive. Also a lot less meme level type blogsmap nad links to folks who have blogs that actually know something.

For me that was fairly unique to HN, at least as far as programming type stuff goes. Slasdhot, dig, reddit, always kinda spammy / shallow.

Interestingly, now that most of the chaff has abandoned /. it has somewhat returned to its original flavor, albeit a bit tainted. I'll not likely return simply because the conversation is a bit more grown-up here and I prefer the uncluttered presentation. But it's better now than it was at its worst.

Way back in the day I always felt the /. community was a bit shrill... to the point of absurdity when it came to the topic of Open Source and such. Hopefully they've mellowed a bit.

"HN is passing the Eternal September threshold" is something people say perennially. It goes back a decade already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1524164

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613021

See also "HN is turning into Reddit", which even goes back to before HN was HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755721

Reply on news.ycombinator.com