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Comment by inasio | Hacker News Reader

There's a story in the news this week about an undercover Russian spy that had a jewelry shop/brand in Italy [0], one funny detail about the story is that the jewelry was actually sourced from Aliexpress

[0] https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1563060250269589505

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This thread is wild. It's shocking they'd issue consecutively numbered passports to spies. Using random numbers seems like it would have huge benefits for essentially no cost.

I won't tell them if you don't!

I'm not an intelligence expert so this is purely spectulation. However, this assumes lots of things. Perhaps the Russians are truly that sloppy. However, more likely in my eyes is that this is a strategy to make them appear dumb and sloppy. The US claims to not send spies into foreign countries without the cover of a diplomatic passport (whether or not this is actually true, I don't know. However, this is one of the reasons a lot of people formerly in the intelligence community believe that Paul Whelan was not a spy). Most other Western countries claim to follow this standard. Perhaps this is Russia's version of "obvious" spies?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/what-does-alex...

That's the call where Alexei Navalny tricked an FSB agent into admitting they had poisoned him.

I think often people try to come up with too clever explanations for stupid behavior. Sometimes it's just stupid behavior. Often times this is the catalyst for conspiracy theories - it's a nice explanation for random or stupid events.

I'd bet it's a case of sending in batch requests. The office coming up with fake identities sends them all it to the passport office at once and then the passport office proceeds to use their normal processes to issue passports and that processes generates sequential numbers in this case because they are processed one after another. Obviously easy to fix, but also seems pretty easy to happen without anyone realizing

In another universe they did use random numbers, but based on the old C rng, people figured out the seed and were able to again find all of the GRU passports

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