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Comment by jahsome | Hacker News Reader

An acquaintance of mine is an FBI investigator and moonlights as a higher-grade Realtor.

He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.

One day he uploaded the entire contents of the memory card to the MLS on one of his public listings, surveillance photos and all. I'm pretty sure everything was up for a few days before being cleaned up.

It's been years but I still haven't made up my mind on whether that makes him a worse agent of law enforcement or real estate.

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I err to the side of incompetence, but want to believe it was a deep cover op to penetrate an enemy org by making them think he was compromised and had to act as a double agent, immediately rendering him a triple agent on behalf of the FBI...

Maybe I can moonlight as a writer in Hollywood

The entire scenario is pretty unbelievable, and played out like an awful Adam Sandler movie. If I hadn't witnessed it with my own eyes, I would have trouble believing someone with dueling top credentials such as his could possibly be such an idiot.

Realtor top credentials? That made me LOL.

Yeah, I know right? And the higher end you go has nothing to do with any competence - your clientele becomes more and more like the fucktards that bought into SBF.

I mean to say that among Realtors he was pretty elite, whatever that means. Put another way, he dealt in million dollar listings, not just average family homes.

If you were getting any significant number of million $ homes, why would he keep the day job? Real estate transaction fees are pretty high.

Government pension, avoiding traffic tickets among other benefits, I'm sure.

It's possible that his connections and encounters from his work as an agent formed the foundation of his 'book' - and being a real estate agent is like 99% about building that book and 1% about doing things the rest of us might refer to as "work". Many if not most of the successful agents I know are moonlighters for this very reason.

Not ragging on real estate agents, it's not an easy thing to pull off; convincing someone to hand you 3-6% of the biggest financial transaction they've ever made just for you to negotiate for what's probably a grand total of a few hours and do some online shopping. And they do provide value insofar as knowing the landscape can really help a client avoid getting bent over a barrel.

Source: did it myself (poorly, which is why I'm in tech).

They might like the work.

Depending on the location, soon enough million dollar listings will be average family homes.

Makes sense. Triples makes it safe. Triples are best.

Clip: https://youtu.be/8Inf1Yz_fgk

He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.

This really surprises me.

I would have assumed that an FBI memory card used for taking surveillance photos would have all kinds of security and encryption on it for chain-of-custody purposes. Otherwise, the photos won't stand up in court.

The healthcare company I work for has cameras it uses for photos, and for HIPAA reasons those cards are encrypted and secured. They won't even mount on an unauthorized computer.

Why would you say it wouldn't stand up in court? As long as the agent shows up to say, "Yes, I took these photos of real things that happened," that strikes me as the heart of the evidence.

Because companies like Canon sell multi-thousand dollar cameras and attachments to police agencies that are designed to make sure photographs can't be tampered with so that they're admissible in court. There can't be the possibility that a rogue cop altered a photograph, or the case can get thrown out.

It's why the cameras police departments use cost 5x more than the consumer versions.

I'm not sure "government agency buys expensive thing" is proof of actual need of said expensive thing. And even if it were, it's not clear to me that the need applies in this case.

He surely should have lost his job or worse.

I would have expected his job have guardrails in place to prevent this sort of mishap, like a full audit log and chain of custody of all evidence gathered during these investigations, as well as SOPs on the handling and storage of such evidence.

Physical evidence is perhaps handled with a greater regard, but from what I understand, background info gathered during surveillance isn't always intended for use in court and often really only serves to further the investigation itself. Usually a stakeout is gathering enough probable cause to effectively justify requesting search warrants, which is when the "real" investigation kicks off.

My shared connection to the Realtor dope I wrote about originally is someone I'm quite close to, and through them I've learned some pretty alarming realities of law enforcement.

It seems like the higher up the chain you look, the more indifference or incompetence you find.

> It seems like the higher up the chain you look, the more indifference or incompetence you find.

Well, let's say, you have a really competent investigator. Is that the person you want to be promoted into a position where they are not doing any investigating anymore? In that light it's good to have the incompetent higher up so that the people doing the real work are those that are competent. :)

Nope. Usually all the court needs is his attestation that he always had sole custody of the evidence

>An acquaintance I know is an FBI investigator and moonlights as a higher-grade Realtor.

I really, really, really tried my best, but the only appropriate i could think of was "Fucking hell!".

Are you sure they're not a realtor masquerading as a....well, at this point, who gives a shit?

It's always stuck with me he was basically at the top of both fields, yet somehow simultaneously and spectacularly incompetent in both roles.

No, it's a very practical combination. Let's say you're investigating a murder, talking to the wife of the victim: "I'm sorry for your loss. Is there anything else you can tell us about what happened? And I can totally understand if you can't bear to live alone in this crime scene any more. In fact, if you want to move out, I know someone who would be interested."

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