Hacker News Reader

Comment by philovivero | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think this sounds conspiratorial, and surely isn't happening. Who has the time or money to pay 5 people to just go around harassing and stalking people for political gain only?

Then I remember the story of the lady in East Germany who, after it fell, managed to get the Stasi records that finally proved that yes, they had been stalking her, harassing her, and spying on her.

They would do things like wait until she went into a store to buy something, then let the air out of her bicycle tires. Just stupid little harassing things like that, so that if she complained about it to her family they'd think she was crazy.

Next time you hear some nutcase on the street talking about things like this to whoever will listen... ponder things like this.

View on HN

Even corporations do this kind of thing, not just state agents. There was an interesting case where Ebay harassed two old couple for running a blog that was critical of Ebay practices. Ebay went so far as to cause long-term psychological damage to the couple by mailing them bloody pig masks, signing them up to naughty magazines and sending them to their neighbors, van stalking them, and all other kinds of crazy stuff you wouldn't believe. Everything was directed by senior leadership at Ebay, and 'encouraged' by the CEO.

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/technology/ebay-cockroach...

Really interesting read, if you guys wanna learn more. But basically anyone with money and power can initiate this kind of harassment activity.

> Wenig texted Wymer weeks later: "Take her down."

> The CEO Wenig's messages were deemed "inappropriate" by eBay, but eBay's internal investigation concluded that the CEO did not know about the stalking and harassment activities.[5] Wenig left eBay in September 2019, with a US$57 million severance package.[5] After the harassment scandal became news, Wenig was re-elected to the board of General Motors.[5]

So essentially he got off Scott free due to plausible deniability then threw the people he told to do the deed under the bus. Then got a 50+ million dollar payday and a board position at General motors.

That reminds me of COINTELPRO, and how the FBI tried to get MLK to commit suicide by sending him a harassing black mailing letter. It's amazing how states particularly when they have apparatuses that can go rouge or are even actually encouraged by the government like the Stasi were go to ridiculous lengths to harass people they find politically inconvenient.

that is true, but that was more than fifty years ago..

I had this same thought but then I caught myself. Human nature doesn’t change that much. This basically happened at the corporate level at eBay in the last 12 months right? So factually if you are just saying it was a long time ago, then yes, that’s correct. However, I think it can and does still happen and humans from 50 years ago aren’t much different. In fact, some are even literally the same humans but just older…

It is such a weird story:

BOSTON – Six former employees of eBay, Inc. have been charged with leading a cyberstalking campaign targeting the editor and publisher of a newsletter that eBay executives viewed as critical of the company. The alleged harassment included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries – including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask – and conducting covert surveillance of the victims.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/six-former-ebay-employees...

That means the people in charge now were trained by the people doing that stuff 50 years ago

Some of the people in charge today were also in power 50 years ago:

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

I have no idea if Chuck Grassley had anything to do with that, but my point is that if the same people in Congress then are still in Congress today, you can't claim a clean break from the past due to the passage of time.

If they were able to do it without any repercussions or consequences, why would they ever stop doing it?

I'm sure they've cleaned up their act by now!

Surely they aren't during stuff like that, and "thwarting" "terrorist plots" where the "conspirators" are FBI assets themselves

what are you referring to? the Boston bombing?

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/03/the-fbi-pressured-a-lone...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/magazine/fbi-internationa...

impossible to know how many such stories there are

The problem with learning about things with a ~multi-decade delay (via FOIA etc) is that everything sounds so long ago, in a different time.

But there's not a ton of reason to believe that things have changed so fundamentally.

I can think of one powerfully compelling reason: wishful thinking.

They definitely still do this.

This was posted yesterday in one of the comments on HN if you want a better idea of what the FBI does these days: https://casetext.com/analysis/how-to-spot-the-informant-at-y...

> Anonymous discovered that HBGary was conspiring with a law/lobbying firm known as Hunton and Williams to launch a highly sophisticated campaign to subvert and sabotage the enemies of their clients. In some cases these plans involved illegal actions. The targets were journalists, labor unions, and political opponents.

> One client was Bank of America, who hired Hunton and Williams to launch a campaign against Wikileaks. At some point the list of targets was expanded to various other supporters of Wikileaks such as journalist Glenn Greenwald. The other client so far revealed was the Chamber of Commerce, which wished to target labor unions and a shockingly long list of their supporters.

> The main tool of attack would be the use of the Palantir technology to analyze the network of support for the targets.

Source: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/02/13/943139/-HBGary:-...

The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities never properly followed up on that incident. In 2011 it asked the DoD and NSA to provide any contracts with HBGary, Palantir and Berico, but as far as I can tell that never ended up happening, the whole thing was just buried over time and forgotten.

This implies Palantir has "technology", which I'm sure they would like you to think, but what they actually do is sell SQL queries as a service.

Don't they have proprietary databases to query? Or can I download their data and do my own analysis?

Sure FBI/CIA/NSA did nasty things in tbhe 40's/50s/60s/70s/80s/80s, but now it's totally different!

and the 90s (Contras)

and 00s/10s (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/14/cia-black-site-d...)

But they SURELY have changed in 2020s!

I got the same speech when suggesting some of the "dangerous white supremacist (who were never arrested nor identified)" at the Canadian truck rallies might have been feds in disguised.

How weird.

The stasi story was also ~30 years ago too. The point isn't a story of who's bad more than it is a story of unchecked political power. That was my point, not a "we do it too so TFA isn't bad." No, it's bad when any state does it.

I think one difference is we did have the Church commission so at least there is some amount of accountability although it could have been better whilst in PRC there will be no such inquiry into these sorts of things.

My favorite is the time the FBI sent a bunch of fake correspondence making it seem like a bunch of prominent civil rights leaders were cheating on their spouses and was very confused when nothing came of it because said spouses already assumed they were and didn't care.

My fav story along those lines is the KGB trying to blackmail Sukarno with videotape of dalliances with prostitutes. He asked for copies to show his friends.

My favourite thing about that story is that it was on film reels, not videotape.

FBI COINTELPRO [0] and CIA Operation CHAOS [1] did way more than just sending some harassing mail to MLK [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS

[2] https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/7...

It's important to remember that this was in the past. The FBI, as well as every other three-letter-agency, are the good guys now, and they are totally ashamed of doing those things. They're definitely not doing anything like that anymore!

Like the old saying goes, a leopard can change its spots.

it always is a comfort to know that the alphabet boys did bad things in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, 2000's but are actually totally chill now

Although leftists already seem to think the CIA started the Iraq War, when they were against it and Cheney/Rumsfeld had to invent ways to get all the intelligence agencies out of the picture so they could make something up in peace.

Similarly, they didn't overthrow Bolivia recently, but people think Elon did it personally to get cheaper lithium because he joked about it on Twitter once.

If they were they wouldn't be able to cover it up.

I mean, we know when they do it - nearly every domestic terrorist bombing/kidnapping attempt ends up being a group of one guy and 4 FBI informers as soon as the one guy asks how to make a bomb on Facebook.

My satire detector soothed my anger at this comment. It is getting a lot of strain lately...

Indeed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29399776

Seems very odd that people are downvoting the comment I'm replying to:

downvoters - why are you downvoting this? Do you think it's false? Or just don't like hearing about it?

I didn't downvote you, but often people get downvoted because they take the discussion off-topic.

It's interesting to you that what the PRC is doing today reminds you of something the FBI did last century. But the discussion is still about the PRC, not the FBI.

As you can see, your comment that is benign on the surface started a whole thread of off-topic comments, which bogs down the overall discussion and generates more heat than light.

Or maybe people read what you wrote as yet another "what about..." comment, the likes of which always pop up like mushrooms after a rain in discussions about China's current-day misdeeds.

At this point we can't even talk conspiracy theories without someone bringing up the meta conspiracy theories, like the Chinese saboteurs sowing division in this comment section...

The commenter was responding to someone talking about spy work in East Germany, a post that, despite being about something that also happened 50 years ago and a continent away, is the top comment under an article about China. Is you think one is relevant and not the other you're deeply blind to some ideology underlying your assumptions.

I think this is still very relevant to the discussion. Because spying is a profession in which behavior tends to degrade to the lowest common denominator, it makes criticism of such actions very hard if your own domestic agencies engage in similar behavior. The domestic populance can only influence domestic policies, so it would be even more prudent to set criticism in that direction.

Spying was excused as a necessity, so how would I condemn these actions in the first place? "Whataboutism" is an ethical argument but we are not talking about ethics in the context of spying at all.

> which bogs down the overall discussion and generates more heat than light.

An argument can also be made how it adds context, to properly frame these actions in the reality we live in.

Insisting on looking at this in total isolation, like it's this thing that only happens in that one particular place, completely belittles how and why these practices become established and normalized in the first place.

Because state organized suppression of perceived political dissidence is not unique to China, it has a long history all over the globe and takes many different forms to this day [0].

Recognizing and acknowledging that is a much more fitting approach to Hacker News than going; "This is a submission about China, only talking badly about China allowed in here!", which only results in the same kind of "circle jerk" discussions that already dominate too much of Reddit.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/05/25/oracle-social-media-surv...

traditional CCP USA what-about-isms

What-about-ism: What you are saying is wrong because your side does it too

Not what-about-ism: You are right! And here is another example in support of your point!

no. closer to the traditional improv "yes and". both examples bolster OP's point

what-about-isms often bother me too. That said any commenter that excuses the CCP because of US dalliances is way off base. I'd say that there is some value to pointing out that unelected agencies both domestic and foreign do this stuff to US citizens.

There are a lot of cases of Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Saudi, etc. dissidents or critics being targeted overseas. I'm not sure why it's a surprise to anyone or why people think it doesn't happen.

To make sure the qualify of the brain-wash process for the whole country, which is the foundation for those countries' stability, dissidents must be eliminated or harassed enough so they shut-up, wherever they might be.

Agreed. It seems naive to think "of course that wouldn't actually happen" without any real evidence except your own incredulity. Why shouldn't they harass people in small ways? It's cheap, annoying, and minor enough that most people will just brush it all off as coincidences. You obtain your goal of punishing those who got on your wrong side, without having to worry about attracting too much attention.

Hell it doesn't even have to be state actors, if anyone here pisses off someone with too much money, it wouldn't be hard to hire someone anonymously on craigslist to harass you. People have done a lot worse for a lot less money

puts on tinfoil hat

Because the belief that this kind of gang stalking never happens and people who think that they are getting harassed like this are always crazy is a psyop designed to make sure the public is more susceptible to the rare, but highly effective practice.

My parents were US diplomats stationed in Moscow in the 50's. The KGB would do things like disable the elevator in their apartment block just as they got home, only to turn it back on the moment they finished walking up to the top floor. Leave music playing in a next door apartment juuust loud enough to be disruptive. Block traffic on a certain street to cause my father to be late to an important meeting with his Soviet counterpart. The list of petty harassment would be pages long if I enumerated everything.

Same with Ernest Hemingway, remembered for his paranoia later in life, specifically about the US government watching him. Going to doctors for this, to no avail.

Turns out the FBI was following him, as detailed in recently classified documents (2010s).

My synopsis is that they enabled his predisposition for depression and paranoia. But the initial observation of being watched by the government was not inaccurate.

It's much more difficult these days due to Baumol's cost disease. You have to pay the benefits for all those stalkers.

> Sometimes I think this sounds conspiratorial, and surely isn't happening.

People often read these types of articles and think "this can't be right." Without researching the topic they cannot fathom a government would do such a thing. The CCP's "United Front" organization sponsors many of these actions.

However, the fact these things occur is very open source, well published (including in the CCP's 5-year plans), and verified in many academic settings. You just have to read some researched documents or books (if interested, I can recommend plenty), and not rely on your own intuition based on living in a Western society of what the PRC would do. They are taking advantage of democratic principles and using them against us.

The media does not heavily report on it due to the clear externality of spurring, or appearing to support, xenophobia against Chinese citizens. However, everything I read intentionally takes the time to point out that their issue is with the CCP and not the Chinese people, as most authors lived in China and love the Chinese culture. We can point out wrongdoing by the CCP without extending those views towards the Chinese people who live under the one party system.

Reminds me of Gang stalking[0]. It always seems to happen to people who present themselves as generally not very mentally healthy, but sometimes you have to wonder. If you were the very unlucky target of some deniable, organized harassment effort, it would certainly take its toll on your mental health.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_stalking

relevant Onion https://youtu.be/FzoXQKumgCw

tangentially relevant Onion https://www.theonion.com/police-flip-through-unsolved-crimes...

Damn. I was in jail with a lot of very mentally sick people, and this hits too close to home!

Tangentially related indeed, though all the really funny writers must have gone to Clickhole when that launched

Irrelevant onion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_onion

The Stasi term for this was Zersetzung: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

You may want to dig into gangstalking as a cultural phenomenon before you legitimize it with that equivalency.

This is not cherry-picked; I just went to the subreddit and found a relatively recent post: https://old.reddit.com/r/Gangstalking/comments/tf2xd0/they_a....

(Spoilers: the number of people in amphetamine psychosis is several orders of magnitude larger than the number of victims of targeted government harassment.)

Yeah, if you look at the post history of the people posting there you will see a lot of posts about meth. Or maybe their mental health is what led them to meth in the first place, because you'd think the meth induced psychosis would wane off over time. But for most of them the delusions keep getting stronger and it can last for year. It's really heartbreaking and the entire paranoid concept of gangstalking makes helping them very very difficult

Worth noting that if you actually ARE being tailed by an organized and well-resourced group, they will frequently use a team of people to do so, time and circumstances permitting.

This is probably why it's very hard to help someone who is under legitimately delusional feelings of gang stalking, because those who legitimately are and those who are delusional are likely to look the same to outsiders, and will always be considered delusional.

If a person is suffering from strong enough paranoia to classify themselves as a "targeted individual", then they've probably walked through the scenario that they might be crazy but also realized that if their paranoia is accurate, then they would also have appeared to be crazy.

It's a vicious cycle.

I feel similarly about describing political aspirants as narcissistic or sociopathic based on their "delusions of grandeur" – what about when they actually become president? Not so delusional anymore, I guess? It calls into question the validity of such a diagnosis in the first place, as anything more than a measurement of deviance from some arbitrary and counterfactually ambiguous statistical mean. It's almost as if the entire field of psychiatry harbors delusions of grandeur...

"delusions of grandeur" can mean many things. Someone who thinks they’re a genius and wins a popularity contest is not now provably a genius.

Someone who believes themselves to be the fastest athlete is not so when their opponent falls down and they win the race.

Don't whatever you do go here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Gangstalking/

I tried to go there, but I was directed to install the app and there was no option to continue browsing on the web. Reddit dark patterns have come to a point where they are literally disabling the web frontend for mobile users?

Add the old subdomain to avoid the mobile stuff. The link is a subreddit of people complaining about being stalked and then trailing off into other conspiracies.

Edit: old.reddit.com/r/gangstalking

Also reminiscent of the batshit-bonkers story of eBay's corporate jihad against a mom-and-pop business:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/ebay-execs-sent-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/lawsuit-ebay-tri...

>political gain only

Political dissidents flee to US (west in general), west (US in particular) will magnify and weaponize dissident for international discourse power when convenient. Countries being targeted spend resource to deter this behaviour. Interesting case of different systems abusing each other's asymmetries - large diasporas in west = lots of asylum for dissidents but also many recruitable foreign assets.

And sometimes diaspora drama is innate, deep cultural beef between nationalist and dissident Chinese that IMO will only get more acrimonious with time. Older gen of dissidents who fled PRC when times were bad are dying but their kids and younger generation of dissidents from HK/XJ/TW will clash hard with younger gen of PRC nationalist economic migrants and 1st gen kids of mainlanders who inherited beef against dissidents. It will be shitshow, with lots being exploited by domestic propaganda and foreign espionage.

> Who has the time or money to pay 5 people to just go around harassing and stalking people for political gain only?

Things are automated now. Nowadays while living in Germany, torrent some movies and stop paying TV license. Then observe what will happen. In society there are hordes of bored lawyers and sadists who eagerly harass for a fee. Given legal immunity and pervert sense of purpose, people simply like to be invasive and predatory.

> Who has the time or money to pay 5 people to just go around harassing and stalking people for political gain only?

Political gain often means more wealth and power for those involved, and I think we all know the great lengths people will go to for both of those things. Not defending China, but harassing and stalking is fairly tame compared to things like assassinating journalists and starting wars.

Sounds conspiratorial/not my experience doesn't mean not true. Humans are great at conspiracies. The word gets used dismissively because paranoid types claim conspiracy without evidence and experience. If you went to your local court you'd hear about many people witnessing conspiracies

This was an actual documented Stasi tactic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

> the Stasi did attempt to entrap individuals, as for example in the case of Wolf Biermann:

> The Stasi set him up with minors, hoping that they could then pursue criminal charges.

Am I reading this right? They leveraged child abuse laws against political opponents? Essentially weaponizing children? And this practice is well documented?

Check out Operation Freakout:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout

> Sometimes I think this sounds conspiratorial

The DOJ is explicitly accusing five specific persons of conspiring:

> In one of these schemes, the co-conspirators sought to interfere with federal elections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88&t=5614s

There is a significant difference though. If foreign governments do it, you have a clear legal recourse. If your own government does it...

Have you heard of this guy called Snowden? Or maybe Aaron Swartz. Govts have been harassing them too. One guy even took his life

Any chance you have a source for the bicycle tire story? I'm keen to read more about it (and similar stories).

There are several stories like this at the Stasi Museum[0]. Highly recommend checking it out if you are ever in Berlin. The Jugend Widerstands (Youth Resistance) Museum[1] has some interesting stories about life in the DDR too.

[0] https://stasimuseum.de/

[1] https://widerstandsmuseum.de/

The East German Police after WWII had a policy of Zersetzung, their type of petty, persistant psychological harassment that disrupted people's lives.

I'm curious, did they stop teaching in school that Zersetzung happened in East Germany in the context of WWII? I was taught in High School about that.

I was educated in the US and took AP US History in high school. I don't recall a specific reference to Zersetzung within that curriculum, but the idea that life in East Germany was difficult due to Stasi oppression was covered. I don't recall specific examples like the story I asked about though (besides my own extracurricular references from movies/books).

Thanks for the complete answer! It doesn't actually answer what I wanted to know, but it does answer exactly what I asked.

Did a quick search and didn't find it. All I remember is it was written up in a rather major publication some years ago talking about the fall of Stasi.

While trying to find my source, I did find out Putin was in East Germany when the wall fell, and was working for KGB. Along with Stasi, Putin burned so much evidence of their wrongdoing, it broke the furnace.

So I guess Putin was a questionable fellow even back in the 1980's and 1990's!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com