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Comment by ryanisnan | Hacker News Reader

I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.

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Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Can I interest you in some fresh alien urine? Still plenty saturated with Zephyron. I'll give you Dale Gribble's price! :)

I think it was a sewer inspection van.

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.

A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van.

You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.

From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...

That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.

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.

Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing

Or, you know, they're inspecting the sewers.

I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.

There is no hack. The system sends data to NSA by design.

> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley

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.

I see it like this:

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.

I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully pull off low key 100% of the time while actively monitoring someone from the street in front of their house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.

That, and it would be an FBI van, not an NSA van. But the point holds.

Sometime there’s vehicle from at least three businesses and two government agencies gathered round an inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that’s costing.

I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!

There’s an HVAC company like this also, I’ll bet.

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.

Crypto AG confirmed this sort of thing to be possible.

Gotta be paranoid. :D

> There’s an HVAC company like this also, I’ll bet.

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-...

> Or maybe it’s the aquarium guy.

Shhhhh!

> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this

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.

I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.

My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.

With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling of hyperbole for effect.

Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on

Unmarked vans drive around all the time. They don't typically park out front of a whistleblower's house. There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be required.

An unmarked white van (without windows) parked a house or two down the street hacking your wifi might not be that noticeable. One across the street with a radio dish spinning around and a parabolic mic sticking out the window and a few people entering and exiting it with donuts and coffee multiple times probably would be.

An unmarked van could park in front of any arbitrary public neighborhood house with street parking for a few hours and nobody would care. As long as people aren’t visible in it.

Multiple days would be suspicious but that would be true of even the “sewer inspection” cover van

In Russia people "fall out the window" all the time. It is intentional. We need to adjust.

Legacy of Ashes is a great book about the CIA on this, on how they basically stumbled into some of their biggest accomplishments.

Wouldn't it be the perfect plot to LOOK like you are a goofy badly run agency to hide the reality?

Now I'm starting to wonder if that guy habitually leaves the door open because he got sick of people winking at him with a wry smile every time he had to go to a job.

Reminds me of the joke where students prove by induction that the teacher is not actually planning a surprise test, and are surprised when there's a test the next day

haha well dont assume spies are some godmode infallable people. spies also are humans and can have varying degrees of freedom to express their stupidity in their work..

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.

Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.

You're thinking like a normal person. You need to think like an institution that has the entire weight of government behind them and who nobody wants to be on the wrong side of.

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.)

> mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour.

Why bother mimicking a sewer inspection van when you can just buy or commandeer an actual sewer inspection van?

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