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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Random visitors don't go into offices. They don't look into cupboards. They don't sit behind desk with computer.

I am a random nobody and I was able to waltz in to my congresswoman's office. Obviously I wasn't digging through the desk drawers, but it's not like I was closely observed while I waited for my congresswoman's secretary to get off her phone call

This is not similar to having 4 ours of unfettered access during a riot. They literally were digging in desk drawers, using the phone, leaving threats, carving hate speech into wooden doors, etc.

I once saw a citizen with a 6-shooter strapped to his hip at a Colorado county clerk's office peacefully fill out some paperwork for 5 minutes. What does this story tell us about what rioters did or didn't do while tearing up the capital building?

> I once saw a citizen with a 6-shooter strapped to his hip at a Colorado county clerk's office peacefully fill out some paperwork for 5 minutes. What does this story tell us about what rioters did or didn't do while tearing up the capital building?

1 minute of Googling tells me that Colorado is an open-carry state, and there is no specific exclusion for county offices, so unless this was in Denver or another municipality that prohibits open carry I don't see the relevance of your story to what happened in the Capitol.

That's his point. There's no comparison between entering the public part of an office during business hours and what happened yesterday.

But perhabs visitors like lobbyists, donors etc. could be often alone long enough with a computer to something bad. And don't forget all the viruses that tweet porn links.

Unlikely, given that it does not happen in commercial companies either and there no one particularly has reason to care.

Private companies are compromised by visitors every single day. Outsiders on-premise are one of the largest attack vectors after insiders.

This is why both the local network and endpoints are no longer trusted in security models.

I'm sure it happens. According to what I've seen on TV, all you need to do is stick a thumb drive in a laptop and utter the magic incantation "OK, I'm in" and you can either download the entire content of the network or implant a virus in the time it takes for someone to come back into the room.

How about staffers working for members from the other party? Yes, you'd expect a "gentlemen's agreement" not to do such things. You might not be wise to trust it, though...

I doubt there is anything like gentlemens agreement last 8 year's. Everyone was aware it is sociopaths run the place.

So I think other party stsffers are not trusted to be left alone.

"You will go to jail forever" and "You will be completely unemployable forever" are still two surprisingly effective deterrents against the vast majority of the population when they have a job.

There's lots of stuff you "could" do everyday, but the probability of getting caught is high, the ultimate impact to anyone else is low, and the severity of punishment immense.

All that changes quite significantly when even basic access control is lost and the building is overrun by unidentified belligerents for a few hours. I'm betting a number of foreign intelligence agencies were scrambling to see if they could take advantage usefully.

There's no "unemployable" for political crimes. It makes you more employable by the side you did the crimes to help.

And yet you still have to assume they might.

Authorized individuals have classified documents on Capitol hill computers, there have been many options available to support breaching a workstation given physical access for years.

In this event you don't even know if such authorized persons had time to lock their computers.

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