His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
Sorry u/sanj & hat-tip to u/cperciva ;)
Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.
But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.
You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.
It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.
So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?
I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.
You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer inspection van and hope you trick every single person who notices it into second-guessing themselves along the lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than that..."
Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced enough to facilitate this option.
Corporate ventilation. A wonderful thing. Everyone needs it. No one suspects it.
Or maybe it’s the aquarium guy.
No, those are the guys making meth.
Gotta love paranoia.
IIRC a hacked HVAC vendor was how credit card skimming software was infiltrated into Target and credit card data was exfiltrated a decade or so ago.
Edit, source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/target-hackers-broke-in-...
Shhhhh!
This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.
Multiple days would be suspicious but that would be true of even the “sewer inspection” cover van
in our country some spies got caught drivin around with wifi pineapple in plain sight circling govt and ngo sites.
in my mind thats next level dumb stuff, but maybe they arent really hackers and think its not conspicuous, or even the opposite, they know exactly what it is but think 'oh normal people wont stop to think about this, they dont recognise such equipment'.
if you werent there, didnt know the guys in the van etc. etc. - its all just guesswork.
even public record of a sewer inspection right then and there at that time (which i kinda doubt exists) wouldnt confirm or deny what that van was really doing there.
that being said, i would _assume_ its a sewer inspection van. but thats an assumption, not a known fact.
Why bother mimicking a sewer inspection van when you can just buy or commandeer an actual sewer inspection van?
They either find someone who has suitable vans they can threaten with prosecution. That person then agrees to be an "informant" because that's better than losing your life to the feds and then their handler asks to borrow a van. They like this because no money needs to get spent specifically on it so it doesn't tend to get scrutinized. If they're going full above the table they register a business with the state complete with valid HVAC license or whatever and then rent a van from some company the FBI owns/runs that rents white vans and have some decals printed up. (For those inclined to do further reading, the OSINT hobbyists have done a lot to expose this workflow as it relates to aircraft so probably start there.)
Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter against his ear? What kind of sounds need to be processed by a human for sewer inspection?
To their benefit, if it was sus, they would have kept the door shut.
“Hey boss, we just finished up the job. Everything is good here, what site do you want us to go to next?”
hangs up phone
Medicaid here in Arizona is called "AHCCCS" which is pronounced "access" so imagine the fun homophonic confusion in a conversation about "do you have access?" "well I got access but then I lost it..."
Many conservative Christians have termed homosexuality as "Same-Sex Attraction" or SSA, so they often speak of "suffering from SSA" or being afflicted with it. When I applied to the Social Security Administration for disability, I couldn't help but notice, and their disability program is called "SSDI" which has nothing to do with Reagan's "Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative"
Nor do my dealings with the F.A.A. in the past several years have anything to do with a pilot's license or flight clearances; the Family Assistance Administration here doles out funds for food stamps ("SNAP", another good homophone, lets you purchase plenty of alphabet soup for the fam) and other basic needs.
Fact: The "Obamaphone" program didn't begin or end with President Obama. Discuss!
Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"
Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."
It took just a couple minutes (less than 5) to go look this up and find the video, for what it's worth.
Maybe it's an NSA wet team! Wet, because they do sewer inspection work. :)
I agree though that it seems more plausible to just be a real sewer van.
I just went to Google maps to the address written on the van's passenger door and lo and behold, Google did drive down the alley behind and while this is a larger vehicle and not just a van, that's their look (they also have black versions if you look around): https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7851188,-118.211276,3a,67.3y...
As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance) that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs in residential areas.
I make sure to come to a complete fucking stop at every one of those signs. Partially because I hate the feeling of rolling through stop signs, but partially out of spite lol.
my lines are 4" PVC, if we somehow clog those, someone call me an ambulance.
TBH sewer main inspections should be required any time someone wants to rent a house out.
I had a company(wrongly) tell me I needed a new septic tank and drainfield installed, and quoted me out at 7800.
Which is way, way more work and parts than a sewer line.
> Block Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons.
My area is Australia.
Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.
The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
1. Spotless.
2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my) house.
3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I took the picture and drove off less than a minute later without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.
then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover NSA van.
And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/national-plant-services-inc_e...
Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line.
There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify where the crossings are.)
That truck isn't for inspecting your sewer, it's for inspecting every junction on that sewer line, 8 hours per day, every day. They will have a map and linear reference showing where every other underground utility (fiber/gas/electricity) intersects it and be recording and cross referencing it in case it needs to be produced in court at a later date.
People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability" role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was working for a bit, making copies of the videos and tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer causes explosions the settlements can be in the tens of millions.
BigUtility uses trenchless directional drilling to poke a drill horizontally down the street and then laterally to each house saving millions of dollars in open trench costs. The gotcha is that they can't see where they are digging and thus can burn, electrocute, explode or kill taxpayers. The inspections help with sewer maintenance / cleaning but the big money/concern is on the liability for cross bored gas lines.
The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down completely with high pressure water from the truck once it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and the fact that the van guys typically don't go in the sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like $2k and you can rent them.
Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other crews.
With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.
They told me the door stays open even in winter because the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.
The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were just looking at one service main, if they were able to leave they must have been winding up already.
The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole where they parked?
If we can surveil people with drones from miles away, what technology are the FBI using that requires guys physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to park outside, why would you use a method that usually blocks the street?
I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head" part. The crew used the controls to move the head around until it was looking at my kids and they could see themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the door.) The kids thought it was cool: https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png
Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal directional drilling piercing a gas main:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/13/us/missouri-gas-explosion/ind...
I can't find any conference papers but the industry term to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:
https://blog.envirosight.com/sewer-school-preventing-cross-b...
ESRI page on using GIS to identify the potential crossbores and assign them 90 day inspection windows to try to detect it before the sewer backs up:
https://community.esri.com/t5/gas-and-pipeline-blog/arcgis-f...
You could Google "national plant services van" on image search and find similar vans, and that the company is owned by is the Carylon Corporation, with revenue of $300m/year -- but that couldn't convince you that a government agency (it wouldn't be the NSA unless they're violating the law) didn't borrow it or copy it.
You could read that their services include "Digital CCTV inspection. Laser profiling. Sonar pipeline inspection." but that couldn't convince you that the monitor+joystick and other equipment is needed for sewer inspection, because you already believe it is for surveillance. (The irony being that the kind of mass surveillance Mark Klein exposed, or Snowden exposed, means there's absolutely no need to park a truck outside someone's house. You can track who they're communicating with already, and you can subvert their own devices to listen in, instead of parking a van out front for their neighbors to notice.)
You could look at who has the contract to inspect sewers in your town -- it's public record. But you could still choose to believe that the federal government did the same check, and went out and got an identical truck so as to be less suspicious (although in this thread half the people are saying "that's too clean/fancy/technological to be a sewer inspection van!" so if they did it would have backfired.)
Was he under surveillance? Who knows. Does this truck prove anything either way? No. Everybody is going to leave this thread with whatever hunch they came in with.
In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.
The interesting thing is that the FBI was following and tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played out.
https://specializedmaintenance.com/services/digital-tv-inspe...
(Which would make it an excellent van for the 3-letter spooks to copy, so not really persuasive either way)
Are those fake companies both hosted on wordfence or something? What are the odds, huh?
Your access to this site has been limited by the site owner
Your access to this service has been limited. (HTTP response code 503)
A) I would question why they would do the effort of still doing surveillance on him
B) if they do, they are usually so smart to keep the door closed
C) like others have mentioned, sewer cleaning comes with a lot of tech (I assume remote controlled machines)
`Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in part, granted “retroactive immunity” to the telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state and federal laws protecting communications privacy was unprecedented.`
But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him in real life, and we should absolutely still be talking about the things he uncovered and what happened to them afterward. Please do tell those stories, too.
[0]https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/blog-posts/wild-ly-succes...
Man up and remove those splitters, cables, show us the drawings, reports and PPT slides!
R.I.P. Mark
It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
A full 24 Senators and 63 Representatives have held their seats for over 36 years. That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
This is a feature, not a bug. The system is architected, when something is controversial, default to no motion.
I doubt this. I'd also be interested to see if those people actually know, on any real level, what the NSA was actually doing.
> If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
They so reliably do the opposite of what people want and yet continue to win. You don't find this at all odd and you put it down to lack of consideration on the part of the electorate.
> That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
The joys of being old enough to remember the Church Committee, The House Select Committee on Assassinations, The JFK Records Review Board. PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY NOT OKAY WITH THIS. Yet those who carry water for the deep state are unimpeded by this. Please see this, or at least, don't repeat simple falsehoods about the electorate.
It's like coming across a drowning man and laughing in his face about his predicament.
Nobody needs to fake election results when Americans just don't show up to vote. It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
This is not completely true[0]. I'd also give the advice that you shouldn't take a "nationwide" average to mean much of anything. The wikipedia article shows wide variation across the states which is true for almost any statistic you can think of.
> actually vote in primaries
Bernie voters might give you a hint as to why. I guess this is the problem Mayor Pete's "shadow" app was meant to solve. It honestly seems like parties don't genuinely like people voting in primaries. The person who's "turn" it is might lose.
> elections that actually have the most impact
Unfortunately we're talking about the legislature here because they write the laws in question and are the proper party to wage your grievances against. Have you ever looked into how competitive those primaries actually are? Anyways this is why I vote for Greens and Libertarians. Then they might stand a chance of cracking 5% and getting recognized fully by the Federal Election Commission.
> Americans just don't show up to vote.
All evidence to the contrary. What they don't do is vote in senate elections. There districts with as low as 25% voter turn out. Which means you only need 12% of the eligible population to turn out for you to secure your seat. So you're right. No need to cheat. Just be arbitrary and capricious to the point that busy and worried people no longer feel that using their time in the voting booth can actually change something.
> It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
As always, back to where this conversation starts, who should bear the responsibility for this? I don't think blaming the electorate itself brings you anywhere other than helping to chase people further away from an important civil institution.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
Unfortunately, in a representative democracy, the people. It's right there in the Constitution, first three words.
Then _immediately_ after you get Section 1: "All legislative powers herin granted shall be vested in a congress of the United States." Which, by the way, prior to the 17th amendment, the Senate was selected directly by the states. Then again immediately after that you get a set of limitations as to who can be admitted to this congress. You'll also note that as citizens we have absolutely no voice in the operation of this congress, the selection of it's bills, nor in the voting on them.
No, in a representative /republican/ democracy, it's the representatives that are first and foremost responsible. The most I can do is offer my input on who those people should be every 2 years, so I certainly bear some, but it's inane to suggest that the current outcome is the fault of the electorate. In particular when billions of dollars are spent every year on campaigns and advertising.
Your idea is austere and unhelpful to a broken and corrupted system. I'd like to develop a notion of jurisprudence that helps the people out of their predicament, not points the finger blamefully at them.
I don't know who else's fault it can be but the electorate when they saw how the current President operates and re-elected him. To say nothing of re-electing the same Congress over and over despite that body having a sub-30% approval rating.
... and if the people don't hold the responsibility, what would you recommend the people do? I'm not sure what "a notion of jurisprudence" means in this context: are you suggesting replacing he power-at-a-distance of an unpopular legislature with rule by nine unelected life-appointed officials and their underlings?
The United States has elevated voter suppression to an art form. Last minute polling relocations, inadequate polling locations, unreasonable ID requirements, unreasonable registration requirements, “accidental” voter roll purges. It’s not easy to vote here. And it’s especially hard if you are in a group the incumbents don’t like.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965.
If those in power cared about our opinions it would be a national holiday and we’d vote by mail.
The bulk of it is that voters don't show up. We had the most turnout for any Presidential election in 2020, when people were literally quarantining to escape a plague... Turnout was around 66%. Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day.
In 2020 voting by mail was widely expanded because of the pandemic. In 2024 it was rolled back. It was easier to vote in 2020 than it was in 2024.
I wouldn’t describe voting in 2020 as constrained. More like enabled. It’s the closest we’ve ever been to a voting holiday.
Americans get distracted. That's the big secret. We're such a generally satisfied, busy, and entertained group of humans that we literally can't be arsed to go pull the one lever that is most politically powerful every time we get a chance to pull it. Some people are actively marginalized. Most of us just don't bother to read the one-pager on the county website and then show up in the fourteen-ish hours set aside to do the thing (let alone try to, say, actively study the candidates or the on-ballot issues).
I literally had a young man confide in me day of election in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he liked him on the TV show. That's your American voter, when they show up at all.
I don’t find extrapolating a single anecdote to the entire population a compelling argument.
I'd love to give you some hard data on this in modern times, but AFAICT no polls are even asking questions as simple and obvious as "When did you first hear of Donald Trump?" or "Do you trust an actor more than a politician?"
Why does it matter if people trust politicians who were actors more than politicians who weren’t actors? They’re all still politicians when they run.
You’re promoting an extremely negative, defeatist, unsubstantiated opinion and frankly it’s depressing.
Trump in 2016 was able to use his lack of political history as a selling point; with no history of service in office, he'd had no scandals in office. Clinton's long political career worked against her in public perception.
I personally believe that there's some benefit to political expertise and demonstrated history of good choices and good leadership; the American electorate doesn't seem to value these things when they reject a career politician for someone with no track record in the highest elected office... And then reelect him in similar circumstances.
> It's depressing
We're in the second term of President Trump with a Congress that has carried a sub-30% approval rate for decades. I'm not going to be able to offer many optimistic observations about America's Federal elected offices... Or the people who elect them. It is entirely possible the American Experiment ends in this generation with the conclusion that Americans had a good thing going until they lost the tools to successfully self-govern.
I would welcome counter-evidence that didn't fail the conspiracy theory test.
Reminds me of George Carlins words, “ It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got.”