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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Is there a less clickbait-y source? There's no tangible link to the United Nations described in the article; that seems to be a gratuitous flourish.

> "several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters"

That's the entirety of New York City!

edit to add: This very weird part was actually lifted from the USSS press release,

> "These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly now underway in New York City."

https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s... ("U.S. Secret Service dismantles imminent telecommunications threat in New York tristate area")

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We've taken the UN out of the title now.

It does seem like the sort of PR-rewrite for a press release that results in distances measured in football fields.

Looking at a map, a 35 mile as-the-crow-flies (and as the cell network signal flies) radius of the U.N. Secretariat building almost gets one to Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, in one direction and past Stamford, Connecticut, in another.

It reminds me of those "how to promote yourself" things about say turning "did routine performance optimizations on the website" into "saved the company $ZZZ million" and such.

I read they were in Armonk, Greenwich, Jersey and Queens. A perimeter around Manhattan.

The article:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/23/us/swatting-investigation-ser...

Armonk and Greenwich don't really make sense if the idea was to create a perimeter around Manhattan.

The idea being there were caches to the West (Jersey), North (Armonk and Greenwich) and East (Queens).

The article mentions a "circle around NYC's cellular network infrastructure".

It's worth highlighting that that link suggests this may be linked to foreign states rather than just garden-variety organized crime ("...early analysis indicates cellular communications between nation-state threat actors...").

That probably just means that some foreign states were among the customers of these SIM farms.

"Concentrated within this 10000 km² area" sounds not nearly as impressive. Granted, "concentrated within 35 miles" sounds already rather dilute when talking about mobile phones.

Not a lot more detail but a better source in general https://therecord.media/secret-service-cellular-network-disr...

That quote comes directly from the Secret service press release lol

News organizations should not uncritically repeat press releases like these. It is an ethical failure to do so.

Sorry to be nitpicky, but the US Secret Service really, really prefers the acronym "USSS" over "SS."

(I've removed the distraction).

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