Hacker News Reader

Comment by keyme | Hacker News Reader

Two meta but interesting things to note:

1) A trained FSB operative completely fell for a convincing enough social engineer, armed with nothing but caller-id spoofing software. Even though he was extremely apprehensive in the beginning of the call, he was slowly "eased into" talking top-secret stuff on the non-secure phoneline. This was so incredible that his last words on the call were "I was shocked by your questions. Was this OK that we talked about this on a non-secure line?". That's crazy. What chance do normal people have against such a good social engineer?

2) The amount of pro-Putin commenters in this thread (mind that some of these comments are dead), claiming that this is a CIA false flag or some such.

View on HN

As for the first one, I think the reason was that Navalny called him after the investigation and clearly showed at the beginning of the conversation that he knew a lot of secret things, including the surnames of the other agents, facts on when and where they were, etc. Probably, the FSB guy just couldn't believe that there was a chance that a person who doesn't work for the government could be so aware of the details of the operation.

One thing I know from conversations with people working in FSB, is that working in a field is considered to be a low, starting position. Also many people start to work there only after some rudimentary training. Yeah, seemed weird to me too. Also this guy was only from a cleanup crew, whose job was only to transfer contaminated clothes to chemical institute. Seems plausible to me that he fell for some social engineering

Do you think geniuses work for those services? They are perma drunk simpletons that are no good for anything higher than beating up a person. Add the fear they harbor from their psycho superiors and if you push them right, they will fall that easy.

They're a bit better than that. You don't trust something like Novichok into the hands of a perma drunk simpleton.

(I mean, sure, I'm sure they have people that fit your description. I just don't buy that this particular operation was entrusted to that level of person.)

> The amount of pro-Putin commenters

Exercising my self judgement doesn't make me pro Putin, nor does it make me a conspiracy theorist when I wonder why the flu killed more people in France in one month (jan 2017) than COVID in 10 months.

I have a brain, I use it. Maybe sometimes I come to the wrong conclusion but at least I don't just regurgitate what the media feeds me.

So in this case I find strange that the super Russian spies never manage to kill anyone even when they use military grade chemical agents that are supposed to kill full cities (remember the Skripal case, this one was fishy as hell too).

> So in this case I find strange that the super Russian spies never manage to kill anyone even when they use military grade chemical agents that are supposed to kill full cities

That's actually not surprising. Chemical weapons turn out to have lousy effectiveness in terms of killing people. In 1995, a terrorist group released sarin into 5 subway cars during Tokyo's rush hour and managed to kill a whopping 12 people in the process. A single grenade would likely have killed more people. Admittedly, sarin isn't the most lethal chemical agent, but it is one that was actually used in chemical weapons programs, and the stronger agents implicated are only like 10× more lethal. The notion that "military-grade chemical agents" are "supposed to kill full cities" is propaganda about the effectiveness of chemical weapons; it's not a realistic assessment of their actual capabilities.

At the same time, there's also a world of difference between a targeted killing of a single individual versus a generalized killing of a large mass of people. The mechanisms you need to use to achieve this are different: in one case, you want to deliver a more spiked concentration of chemical to one individual, preferably in a manner that allows it to take effect when those who delivered it are nowhere near. But killing an entire city requires you to have extremely fast diffusion with extremely high initial concentrations, so that you can kill people before they start to run away (or don protective gear). That someone screws up the dosing when trying to use it as a targeted weapon is easily plausible.

> That someone screws up the dosing when trying to use it as a targeted weapon is easily plausible.

Twice? What kind of first class spy agency would miss a target, let alone 2 (Skripal and Navalny)?

Murdering someone is not a hard feat especially when you are a government agency with all the resources necessary to do so.

In the case of Navalny, it was even easier as they were "playing" at home.

What's the point of re-using a super duper chemical nerve agent that already demonstrated that it was not a sure deal?

Now it's possible the Russians lost all the KGB experience (remember the Bulgarian umbrella?) and are subpar spies. Why do we need to be afraid of them then?

I believe that when a spy story ends up in the press, it's because we are the targets for propaganda. Else it stays in the shadows.

My theory (which is just that, a theory) is that the US is trying hard to block the Russian gas pipeline to Europe, and this kind of stories allow them to impose sanctions.

Your purported statistic about the flu is demonstrably false.

For the entire 2016-2017 flu season, not just January 2017, there were 14,400 deaths from the flu in France. [0]

The latest death count for COVID in France is 60,549, even after all the lockdown measures were put in place.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321906828_Influenza...

INSEE is the official French statistics agency, not some conspiracy quack.

Sorry this is in French:

> En outre, l’épidémie de grippe hivernale amorcée fin 2016 a entraîné un pic de décès exceptionnel en janvier 2017 : 67 000 décès en France métropolitaine ce mois-ci.

Source: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3629105

It basically says there was an exceptional peak of 67k deaths due to the flu for the month of January 2017.

It doesn't say those were all from the flu. Yearly deaths = 606k = average 50k a month. January had 67k, so roughly 17k flu deaths.

I can’t find any source that attributes over 60,000 deaths to the flu in France in January 2017. In fact, that’s close to 4x the most commonly reported figures for the whole 2016/2017 flu season in France. What numbers are you basing that claim on?

Copy paste from the other comment:

INSEE is the official French statistics agency.

Sorry this is in French:

> En outre, l’épidémie de grippe hivernale amorcée fin 2016 a entraîné un pic de décès exceptionnel en janvier 2017 : 67 000 décès en France métropolitaine ce mois-ci.

Source: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3629105

It basically says there was an exceptional peak of 67k deaths due to the flu for the month of January 2017.

I disagree with your reading. Specifically, it doesn't say that 67,000 people died of the flu, it says that 67,000 people died. The entire report is about all-cause mortality, and so is that sentence. The flu was the reason for a spike in deaths, but it was not the cause of all 67,000 deaths in France that month.

What I believe to be a more accurate translation:

"In addition, the winter flu epidemic that began at the end of 2016 led to an exceptional peak in deaths in January 2017: 67,000 deaths in mainland France this month."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com