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Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what happened in the past to create these policies. Seems like some crazy things.

They outright don't trust this group. Property damage?

What happened in the past was the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting [1] - the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in American history. It was conducted by shooting out of a hotel room window. The shooter had 24 guns and over a thousand rounds of ammunition in the hotel room - which went unnoticed partly because the guest put up the 'do not disturb' sign.

The hotel owners have presumably decided that the high-probability-minor-damage risk to their business from a few paranoid types avoiding their hotel is not as great as the very-low-probability-enormous-damage risk from a copycat mass shooting.

And so, ignoring the do-not-disturb sign and snooping on guests' rooms is the norm in Vegas these days.

And if they happen to have a large block booking of particularly privacy-conscious people and so a noticeable fraction of the rooms are declining maid service, I can understand why they'd want to be ready to carry out some supplemental checks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting

If this is true then why does the hotels list of what to search for include USB drives, breadboards and wifi routers, not guns?

And defcon dates? That shooting wasn’t during defcon, if I recall correctly..

The guns are on a separate list for an existing protocol. This is just an extention, probably temporary and only applied to DEFCON guests. The point is that the prior attack has chance how the industry views room privacy vs guest safety (liability) for any type illegal activity (even if there's no indication the tools are being used illegally).

Perhaps DEFCON should be hosted in a safer country :^)

I fail to see how this is relevant for DEFCON specifically. If this was a general policy sure.

A small number of Walter Mitty types believe hotel maids are planning to hide undetectable snooping devices inside their electronic devices - a so-called "evil maid attack" - and so choose not to have their room cleaned.

In the normal operation of a hotel, such guests are uncommon - but I expect defcon attracts several orders of magnitude more such people.

I aee a lot of disagreement here. It's not that it's specific to DEFCON of "hacking equiptment". It's that the prior attack has given hotels the will and potential legal cover to do room checks/searches. They can now apply this to anything, such as "hacking" equiptment, guns, hotplates, etc. There are even examples of hotels handing over property from rooms or valets to law enforcement without a warrant.

> There are even examples of hotels handing over property from rooms or valets to law enforcement without a warrant.

Do you have evidence of that happening?

Here's one where they handed over a key fob.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/travel/when-guests-want-t...

I would expect any hotel to do the same under the circumstances. Here are the details of what happened:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.187...

Update: I just found that his license to practice medicine in Pennsylvania was reinstated in 2022. Interesting. I hope he is doing better.

You asked for an example and I gave you one. If this was an expected outcome, then why ask for the example?

There's always the chance of some idiot who thinks they're going to take down society with nmap and metasploit. The hotel's safe, but I'd be worried about some other legitimate customers getting mixed up in it.

Though I also really don't want to be the one reviewing reports from housekeeping. "Yes, that's a laptop running hacky stuff, because it's a speaker rehearsing slides. Not a visually identical laptop running visually identical tools against slightly different numbers."

I posted it above, but it's a combination of the festival shooting and DefCon attendees hacking the maid tracking system to make it look like their rooms were cleaned/inspected when they were not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41229322

I think this was in response to the shooting a few years ago where the shooter put his DND on for days and had his guns and ammo out all over the room.

I’ve had “room checks” at many hotels since then and they said it was for security purposes.

> I wonder what happened in the past to create these policies. Seems like some crazy things.

Caesar's Palace and the MGM got hacked.

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