That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus | Hacker News Reader

That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

cybersect.substack.com

1,058 pointssixhobbits622 comments

Previously: Cache of devices capable of crashing cell network is found in NYC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514 - Sept 2025 (283 comments)

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There is so much to address in this post but I want to look at just this part: "One of the reasons we know this story is bogus is because of the New York Times story which cites anonymous officials, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”. That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable."

It is not accurate to claim "that's not a thing". Citing anonymous sources is a long established practice (in particular when it comes to law enforcement activities or potentially sensitive political reporting). The NYT has formal editorial standards around the identity of anonymous sources that require editors to assess the justification for applying it. It doesn't mean the information is reliable, that's where an editorial eye comes into play, but it does fall under the category of normal journalistic practice.

Next the "Washington Game": there’s a grain of truth here, but it is overstated. Yes, leaks can be part of a strategic move by politicians and it can be a source of exploitation by political operators but to equate all anonymous sourcing with propaganda is misleading. Plenty of such reporting has resulted in significant truths being revealed and powerful people being held accountable (Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, Abu Ghraib). Responsible reporting involves weighing a source's motivations as well as corroborating and contextualizing that information as accurately and truthfully as possible.

The author's dismissiveness oversimplifies (or mischaracterizes, if I am being less generous) the reason and function of anonymity here. They overstate the issue with propaganda and anonymous sources. Accurate in the sense that anonymity can enable propaganda (it has happened), it is inaccurate in its absolutism.

I feel like this sort of tone, with the absolutism, the attempt to reduce the complexity and nuance of reporting to the point where it can be dismissed is pretty typical of what passes for commentary in today's blog/tweet/commentary culture but it really plays more into the hands of those that would sow confusion and mistrust than it does into that of the truth and accuracy.

One of the more sober assessments in this entire thread, and closely aligned with how I experienced it. It's not nothing to stress the fact that it was pretty far away from the UN and that it's not obvious why a case of SIM cards would enable surveillance (seems more like it would anonymize an individual bad actor). But a large part of this is completely unsubstantiated speculation that people are nodding along with, which, in my opinion, is showing a breakdown in the ability to comprehend logical or evidence-based arguments.

I think it's a form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.

The NYT article is not sufficiently critical (of something) so it is government propaganda but in other times and places the NYT was not propaganda.

> But a large part of this is completely unsubstantiated speculation that people are nodding along with, which, in my opinion, is showing a breakdown in the ability to comprehend logical or evidence-based arguments.

This is how I feel about the NYT article. So much doesn't add up, and the more I read and investigate, the flakier it becomes.

Odd to have officials speaking anonymously about an investigation while the Secret Service is putting out press releases about it.

There's a possibility that some of the evidence in the investigation is classified and/or stems from classified sources and methods. If the scammers are mixed up in foreign counterintelligence type stuff (very common with Chinese and Russian cybercriminal actors) then things get murky and people might go off the record because the documents they're reading have classification markings on them.

Just a possibility, I too feel this is weird.

One of the challenges here is that there are a lot of explanations that might be completely reasonable that cover all of the weirdness, but it feels like there's too much of it.

I think, if one wants to inform people, one should not claim things that require accepting the reasoning without thought.

So even if the NYT article weren't propaganda and all the claims were correct, it would still be problematic, since writing it in this way, effectively claims that things that look like propaganda are legitimate journalism and totally normal.

So even if it were correct, someone who reads it and begins to accept articles of the same kind has been brought into a state of not being to reason critically about reality, and creating that cannot ever be ethical journalism.

Well said.

Thank you.

Honestly the mechanism is missing. Having hundreds of SIM card or a physical device is not a conclusive proof of anything. Show us the attack vector - exactly how will this cause problem.

>Odd to have officials speaking anonymously about an investigation while the Secret Service is putting out press releases about it.

This is a bizarre new take that seems to be making the rounds. Not that they are right or wrong but they've been a staple of national security communication and reporting for as long as once followed the news, which for me is dating back to the George W. Bush admin. Glenn Greenwald in his heyday had a field day ripping apart credulous NSA wiretapping reporting that relied on unnamed officials. In fact I think he popularized the idea that the pervasiveness of such quotes was so widespread that they constituted a systematic problem with national security reporting. Not that I think it's necessarily a good practice but I wouldn't say it's presence in a story constitutes a "tell" that anything about the story is unusual.

I don't understand what's bizarre about it. When you're putting out a press release about something, you want the public to know about it for some reason. And the U.S. Secret Service met with a huge number of outlets and did lots of separate interviews about this particular takedown. A lot of self-congratulation going on in those articles.

And they try to tie the UN to this SIM card farm over and over in those official statements. Then there's this one anonymous source inside the New York Times article.

> There is no specific information that the network, now dismantled, posed a threat to the conference itself, Secret Service officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

So in the middle of a press conference and media blitz, including official posts on the U.S. Secret Service website, we're announcing this giant takedown, and then we have to go to one anonymous source to find out that there is no threat to the actual UN itself.

It could be that I'm the crazy one here, but that sure seems weird to me. Have you seen that kind of thing before?

The story has a number of technical problems with it, but there's a lot of other weird stuff besides this. I listed it out in a separate post if you want to go look.

Just to follow up, Schneier thinks something is weird as well.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/us-disrupts-m...

Click bait hating on other click bait

Came here to post this. Haven't we learned many times in the last 5 years that, on average, "The Literal New York Times" is a better and more reliable source than "Some Guy on Substack"?

Claiming that anonymous sources inside an agency/administration is "not a thing" clearly betrays the fact that this person knows nothing about actual journalism. Heck even a casual NYT reader will know that they cite anonymous sources within the administration all the time! Just look at all the reporting about the Musk/Rubio dust-ups!

News is a good source for facts. If they say the sky is blue, I would have no reason to doubt them. But if they say the sky is turning from blue to pink, and we should all be worried because this might be a sign of the end times, I wouldn't get up from my chair.

I found the focus on the source being anonymous odd as well. I think the correct lesson is that substacks have just as much propensity towards being propaganda as the nyt does.

They do quote anonymous sources all the time, and, more often than not, those anonymous sources are leaking to the media to push their narrative, ie propaganda. The NYT is very clearly the puppet of washington insiders.

The “literal New York Times” doesn't exist anymore. This is not investigative journalism. This is just acting as the mouth piece for some anonymous government official.

They do quote anonymous sources all the time, and, more often than not, those anonymous sources are leaking to the media to push their narrative, ie propaganda.

Citation needed. The New York Times has very strict rules about using anonymous sources. It's not some scary, shadow journalism effort. They publish their rules for anonymous sources right on their web site. Google is your friend.

The “literal New York Times” doesn't exist anymore. This is not investigative journalism. This is just acting as the mouth piece for some anonymous government official.

Having been a reader of the New York Times for almost 50 years, I can say the New York Times hasn't changed that much. I can also say that I look at it with a much more critical eye than most because of my journalism degrees and decades of experience as a journalist.

A major problem with society is that some anonymous low-karma recent-joiner rando spews things on HN like "The NYT is very clearly the puppet of washington insiders" and people believe it for no reason other than it tickles the part of their brain that agrees with it. Not because of any kind of objectivity, analysis, proof, or thought.

To pick a nit, you are correct: This was no investigative journalism. This was a routine daily story covering an announcement by a government agency. If you don't know the difference between the two, then you lack the knowledge and understanding required to be critical of any sort of journalism.

> Having been a reader of the New York Times for almost 50 years, I can say the New York Times hasn't changed that much.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/07/new-york-times...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-cov...

> To pick a nit, you are correct: This was no investigative journalism.

From the NYT article: "James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity researcher at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, said that only a handful of countries could pull off such an operation, including Russia, China and Israel."

Using the agreeable expert isn't "reporting" its BAD journalism. It's WMD's all over again.

The links you posted do not refute my statement. So I ask, how many times have you read the New York Times? As I stated above, I've read it almost daily for nearly 50 years. Do you subscribe? Do you read it regularly? Do you even read it at all? Or just parrot what you've seen on the internet?

The remainder of your comment is a non-sequitur, and has nothing to do with what I wrote.

The coverage of WMD's was appalling.

Both the BBC and the Guardian were reporting how fucked up it was, but NYT ra ra America fuck yea just went along with it. There were other us news orgs that spoke up but no traction.

And this is the thing. The NYT isnt doing reporting here. This isnt a presser they are covering where they are quoting cops and their claim on the street value of the drug sized. This is a "confidential source" whos narrative is then supported by a know insider but its made to look like its being fact checked.

Its not. This is not journalism, and if you want to make it that, then you have to admit it's awful. There needs to be a retraction, or better yet a mecupla and some interviews with real technical experts.

You're glossing over the fact that the journalist is not technical at all (she covers policy stuff) and so she can't be adversarial at all in the technical realm. But she's also not adversarial in any way I can see. Off the top of my head, from memory:

    How can you get browsing history off of SIM cards?
    If this case is historically large, how many other SIM farm cases as USSS investigated?
    If this is so unusual and dangerous, why does McCool say there's no reason to believe there aren't a lot more around the country?
    Why is the USSS only telling us about this the day of Trump's speech at the UN, when the SIM farms were found back in August?
    What evidence do these experts have that this could have only been pulled off by a nation-state? Is it that it is technically sophisticated? Is it because it cost so much? Is it because the hardware can't be easily obtained?
    What degree does this expert hold, and in what subject?  They heavily rely on an "expert" that has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1984.  What did he study?
    Is it even technically possible to have a SIM farm 35 miles away from a target and cause the towers to crash?
    Why is the journalist for the NYT choosing to repeat statements about this being a threat to the UN when there is zero evidence this has anything to do with the UN at all?
    Why are officials from the agency publishing the press release being cited anonymously?

I could go on, but there are so many pieces that don't fit. This was the first article I've read, maybe ever, where I got a very strong vibe of "This is U.S. government propaganda!"

> A major problem with society is that some anonymous low-karma recent-joiner rando spews things on HN

Not so sure about that. Sometimes the message is delivered in a sloppy way. I'm working here to not deliver my message sloppily, to show why simply disregarding what you read from a rando might not be the best.

> Not because of any kind of objectivity, analysis, proof, or thought.

Exactly my concern.

Both can be bad. The NYT absolutely publishes some slop from time to time, and I'm inclined to believe this is one such occasion. But this Substack essay isn't a measured correction and has its own mistruths and exaggerations. In other words, there's a middle ground between total credulity and solipsistic nihilism.

Uh, my recent experience is that "Some guy on Substack" is a significantly more reliable source than "The Literal New York Times".

Gel-Mann Amnesia affect applies here: every time I've seen mainstream media cover a subject that I have personal experience or expertise with, it's been shockingly inaccurate. This includes the NYTimes. It includes random guys on Substack too, but I've found that random guys on Substack when speaking about their area of expertise are actually pretty accurate. It's left to the reader to determine whether some random guy on Substack is actually speaking to an area of their expertise, but other comments here have attested that the author actually knows what he's talking about when it comes to SIM farms.

And what exactly makes "Robert Graham" such an expert in this particular domain? I don't know who this person is or why I should trust their personal blog over the NYT. The article itself is rather hand-wavy in it's assessment of the report. The thesis is essentially "bot farms use lots of sims & this is an example of using lots of sims, therefore this is a bot farm and not espionage."

Here's his bio from the RSA conference:

https://www.rsaconference.com/experts/robert-graham

BlackICE was a big personal firewall 20 or so years ago - you can read all the CNet/ZDNet reviews if you search for it. You can also look at his code (for a port scanner that can scan the entire Internet in 5 minutes, whew) on GitHub:

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan

Thank you for sharing. I recall blackice. I'm not seeing anything here would lead me to believe he's an expert in this particular domain though, which is more about nation state intelligence operations than it is anything technical.

I think his point is that it's not about nation-state intelligence operations, and that the capabilities claimed here are garden-variety cybercriminal operations. You or I could set up something very similar, if we were willing to participate in a dodgy business.

And by some basic napkin math and a few Google searches, he appears to be right. Prepaid sim cards are about $5/each [1]. A 16-port SimBerry server is $499 [2]; their full-fledged servers are "contact us" for pricing, but support up to 18,000 SIM cards [3]. Assuming their enterprise solutions are cheaper on a per-SIM basis than retail, that's about $35/SIM in hardware costs. For $100K in startup capital, you can run a 3000-SIM farm. And then, like this article suggests, once you get started you reinvest the profits: if you assume each SIM card gives you 1000 txts, then if you charge 2c/txt your $5 investment becomes $20 and you can expand your operations accordingly.

I wonder sometimes if, when it comes to cybercrime, "[Russia/North Korea/China/Iran] did it!" is actually code for "The FBI has no idea who did it, but if we said that it would encourage all sorts of script kiddies to do this for profit, so we might as well blame it on our nation-state level adversaries." Many of the hacks in question (eg. ransomware) are not out of reach of a lone malcontent in their 20s with some tech skills.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=prepaid+sim+card

[2] https://www.simberry.com/offers

[3] https://www.simberry.com/equipment/sim-server

Maybe on average, but we've also learned there are too many times when "The Literal New York Times" either repeats propaganda for money, or literally just makes shit up.

When has the NYTimes made shit up?

I also would appreciate an answer to this. It's one thing to say anonymous sources like to offer quotes when they can push a preferred narrative. It's another to say they straight up make things up, and this lazy attitude of reflexively accusing NYT of fabrication like it's the apex of wisdom seems to come from a place of not understanding their processes or history.

There's bias in the sense of selecting stories and editorial judgment, and narrative emphasis. But people have gotten way too comfortable just reflexively claiming stories are fabrications, which I think in truth is extremely rare.

to be fair, most of the people who could give you an answer have probably been banned/shadowbanned from this website (this website has a very blatant zionist influence, as does NYT)

There was one particular really important story a few years ago that massively affected global geopolitics, making a lot of people very angry, and they later admitted they just made it the fuck up.

I actually accept that as a legitimate example, and I do think that has important implications for the topic in question if we're thinking about something coming on its second anniversary in a few weeks. I don't think it's characteristic of NYT's reporting in other areas.

I know this is where you point to Murry Gellman amnesia but despite its fancy name I don't think I agree with its thesis, and in fact find it to be an incredibly damaging ethos in the misinformation environment we currently inhabit.

Judith Miller re: Saddam’s WMDs

Judith Miller reported total fabrications and helped lead the entire country into a disastrous invasion of Iraq.

For some reason I feel like reporting fabricated evidence is magnitudes different than fabricating evidence (making shit up.) From what I've briefly read is that Judith Miller reported on evidence that Ahmad Chalabi provided her: https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/

I'm not saying that the NYTimes doesn't have an agenda (it has one) nor do I believe that they are infallible. I'm just wondering when they've manufactured information like the days of yellow journalism or the likes of Stephen Glass or Janet Cooke

Correct. I got lost in the threads, and lost context here.

I have never heard of the NYT deliberately inventing falsehoods. They do have a history of credulously repeating falsehoods as truth to serve an editorial goal. I’ll grant that distinction.

Note that does nothing to defend the story in question.

I believe the story in question is overly hyped. I don't think anyone was planning on destroying the phone system. It seems like the secret service found a text spam ring and is trying to make it more nefarious.

> Haven't we learned many times in the last 5 years that, on average, "The Literal New York Times" is a better and more reliable source than "Some Guy on Substack"?

Humm... No?

It's possible the author is wrong, but one should consider the author's history and demonstrated technical proficiency, e.g., the programs he has written. Take a look at his code. He has been around much longer than "blogs" and "Substack"

IMHO, he is also proficient at explaining complex topics involving computers. If others have differing opinions, feel free to share

Anyone know where can we see parent commenter's code or something that demonstrates their knowledge of computers, computer networks or particular knowledge of "SIM farms"

> the programs he has written.

This is authority bias. Being a great programmer does not make one an expert in political propaganda, the inner workings of government, or the media.

"Sometimes departments want to float ideas that a spokesperson would not want to put his or her name behind."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-anonymous-sources...

IIUC, the blog post is not claiming there is no such thing as speaking with the press on the condition of anonymity, it is claiming that requesting anonymity for disclosing the existence (cf. the details) of an investigation into routine criminal activity is reasonable cause for skepticism. The blog post then explains why the author believes the "SIM farm" is a routine criminal enterprise, not something more

One does not have to be an "expert in political propaganda", nor rely on one, to question out of common sense why anonymity is needed to disclose the discovery of a "SIM farm"

That single paragraph is the weakest part of the article, IMHO. The other observations are quite well-taken, I think, including the observations about the experts cited in the article.

I think there is a bit of disconnect between people knowing what is possible and what people fear might be doable.

It's entirely possible that there are good non technical reasons for believing who was behind this while being technically incorrect about what it was that they intended to do.

Some of the more fanciful notions might be unlikely. Some of the evidence is only relevent in context. The distance from the UN is not terribly compelling on its own, the significance of the area of potential impact containing the UN is only because of the timing.

A state action might be for what might seem to be quite mundane reasons. One possible scenario would be if a nation feared an action suddenly called for by other states and they just want to cause a disrupting delay to give them time to twist some arms. Disruptions to buy time like this are relatively common in politics, the unusual aspect would be taking a technical approach.

> Anyone know where can we see parent commenter's code or something that demonstrates their knowledge of computers, computer networks or particular knowledge of "SIM farms"

The parent commenter literally never questions the post's technical conclusions or assumptions. Why are you acting like they did?

The commenter appears to be trying to make a point about how the post addresses sources, tone, and confidentiality.

"Yes, leaks can be part of a strategic move by politicians and it can be a source of exploitation by political operators but to equate all anonymous sourcing with propaganda is misleading."

AFAICT, the blog author never equated _all_ anonymous sourcing with propaganda. The blog post is not titled "The NYT is bogus"

Instead, the blog post discusses a specific story that relates to a specific "SIM farm"

It questions why _in this particular instance_, relating to a "SIM farm", the source needed to remain anonymous

But that is not the only reason the author thinks the SIM farm story is bogus/hype

Based on technical knowledge/experience, the author opines the "SIM farm" was set up for common criminal activity, not as a system purposefully designed to overload a cell tower

It is the later opinion, not the one about the NYT, that is interesting to me in terms of evaluating this "news" hence I am curious what similar experience the parent commenter may have, if any

After so many years of being exposed to it on HN and the developer blogs submitted to HN, I have become accustomed to dismissive tone and black-and-white, all-or-nothing, pick-a-side thinking from software developers, i.e., what the parent calls "absolutism", absence of "nuance", etc. Probably not a day goes by without some HN commenter trying to dismiss "mainstream media", making some nonsensical complaint about news reporting that they dislike

Silicon Valley is now intermediating the publication of these worthless opinions for profit: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on

But, like I suggested, if one reads the blog author's source code and discussions of programming and cryptography, then one might be more willing to tolerate some personal opinions about the NYT. Ideally, programmers would only comment online about programming, and not, for example, about journalism, but that's not what happens in reality

To me, the article is saying that an "ongoing investigation" is not a valid reason to grant anonymity, not that there are no valid reasons to grant anonymity.

Who is being protected from whom by granting this source anonymity? With your three examples it's clear, but not as much in this case.

Officials who are not supposed to talk about ongoing investigations, and might get fired if they do, but can't help themselves so they do it anyway under cover of "anonymity."

And honestly, probably everyone in a position to know, does know who the "anonymous" source is, but it's just enough plausible deniability that everyone gets away with it. They get to push their narrative but also pretend they are following the rules that are supposed to protect various parties in the process.

Meanwhile if I were on a grand jury and blabbing to the press every evening about an investigation, I could get in real trouble.

> The NYT has formal editorial standards around the identity of anonymous sources that require editors to assess the justification for applying it.

They should also have editorial standards that judge the quality of the information and then decide whether to even print it or not. In this case, without a second source, it probably should /not/ have been printed.

How do you know they didn't have multiple confirmations from different anonymous sources? Generally this is the case with high quality journalism (souce: dated a journalist).

Their own words.

"Secret Service officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity"

Their only stated source is "USSS officials" who bafflingly demand "anonymity." I would expect the reporter to tell those /officials/ they need to allow a direct quote or to provide another source; otherwise, their information simply won't be printed.

It's the difference between being a blind mouthpiece and being a reporter.

There could be multiple USSS officials. Also they don't have to tell you if they verified the story through other channels. In fact this is common practice in my experience (source: pillow talk).

They're USSS officials. Officials being the keyword. That a bunch of people who share meetings and prerogative in the organization are saying the same thing is not an indicator of information quality. In fact, I would take it as a negative signal, and would push _much_ harder to get actual detail or corroboration.

I agree. Like I say you have no idea who they talked to or verified the story with. Using the words in a story to justify an opinion, but at the same time saying the story is inaccurate is not logically consistent.

No well trained journalist would ever write a story like this without verifying the information in redundant ways. If they didn't do that then they probably already know it's fake and could literally write anything they wanted to support the narrative.

A) Well trained journalists and editors are not stupid. B) If they write something false they already know it's false 99% of the time and are doing it for other reasons.

In light of A + B it makes no sense to rely on what is written in the article to support the idea that it is false or undersourced.

That’s exactly what those guidelines say: https://www.nytimes.com/article/why-new-york-times-anonymous...

> What we consider before using anonymous sources:

> How do they know the information?

> What’s their motivation for telling us?

> Have they proved reliable in the past?

> Can we corroborate the information they provide?

> Because using anonymous sources puts great strain on our most valuable asset: our readers’ trust, the reporter and at least one editor is required to know the identity of the source. A senior newsroom editor must also approve the use of the information the source provides.

Is there a particular change you’re proposing?

>> Can we corroborate the information they provide?

I can only guess, but based on the reporting, it looks like they skipped this guideline.

>> Have they proved reliable in the past?

Which is half the battle. The real question is "have they lied to us in the past?"

The change I'd propose is that they actually apply them, and not just to stifle cases that do not fit their narrative.

> this sort of tone, with the absolutism, the attempt to reduce the complexity and nuance of reporting to the point where it can be dismissed is pretty typical of what passes for commentary in today's blog/tweet/commentary culture but it really plays more into the hands of those that would sow confusion

I think this is the mechanism of action that will lead to america's downfall.

algorithmic content has connected dopaminergic interest to extremism while simultaneously welcoming influence from both agents of neutral chaos and malicious destruction.

i am currently watching a schism unfold in my immediate family over the death of charlie kirk. if we literally cannot discern the difference between charlie and a fascist/nazi/racist because complexity and nuance are dimensions of information that do not exist, then we are destined for civil war.

you cannot understand vaccine safety, israel v palestine, russia v ukraine, or literally anything else by scrolling instagram reels. stop having an opinion and uninstall the poison.

Same. If Charlie was a Nazi then half of America is.

It's quite annoying

In my extended family there's some government employees an auditor and someone in defense, and listening to them try to explain why the 'failed audit' fox news had their father ranting about as a reason everyone deserved to be fired by DOGE at the time and he was "loving every minute" was more nuanced and not good evidence for the conclusion he'd been fed was difficult.

Even in simple jobs I've worked there's always been something armchair experts don't consider that makes their quick fix "just do this" or "how hard can it be to do X" ignorant and irrelevant. But he was so enamored of Elon and "saving us money" he couldn't even fathom maybe his kids who are smart and have been in the industry for sometime might know or understand something he doesn't.

Later I asked him "What audit are you talking about?" And he said "Who cares, I know they failed and that's all I need to know." The brazen ignorance mixed with outright callousness masquerading as righteousness is not good.

Judith Miller taught me that either the NYT is totally corrupt, or easily misled. It is completely reasonable to place almost zero weight on stories they report on "national security" from nothing but anonymous sources from the intelligence community.

Real stories have real evidence.

No journalistic institution is perfect. And, there are indeed journalists who cut corners, tell misleading narratives, or are too credulous.

However, there have been important and sometimes shocking stories that have been told thanks to reporting based on trustworthy, anonymous sources. The Pentagon Papers is a textbook example.

You completely miss my complaint. Perhaps I was unclear. The Pentagon Papers is the exact opposite! Ellsberg actually shared the documents; there were literal "papers" involved in the Pentagon Papers. That's the "real evidence" I demand.

Off-the-record conversational, "I'd never lie to you" BS, from anonymous sources in the "intelligence community" is a lead to investigate, not a story. They weren't called the Pentagon Whispers.

Fair point!

And remember how quickly Powell’s “Yellow Cake” fairytale fell apart once they resorted to sharing the docs. The docs were fake! Actual evidence can be interrogated and disproven. While anonymous, evidence-free reporting is unfalsifiable.

It wasn't ever "Powell’s “Yellow Cake” fairytale". It was Bush-Cheney's. And the scandal is not merely that it was fake, but was publicly known to be fake in spring 2003.

The "Iraq tried to buy yellowcake in Niger" claims [0] were a story pushed by the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) which was set up Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz intentionally to bypass the CIA's assessment and stovepipe unproven claims in order to cobble together a casus belli. Powell refused to have anything to do with it. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson said it was BS. CNN reported it was BS. And on, and on.

And even at that, Bush still had to use Tony Blair's admin's name to try to inject the claim into discourse, the famous Sixteen Words in the 2003 SOTU "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Not Colin Powell. If you read between the lines of writings by Powell and others, he believed the neocons in the Bush-Cheney admin could not be deterred from taking the country to war on false premises; Powell was to that process like Robert Reich was to Clinton's NAFTA deal ("the train's going to leave the station whether you were on it or not").

Historians can decide whether Powell should have protested more strongly, e.g. resigning (as Tony Blair's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook did) and denouncing the thing, instead of playing along it at his UNGA address.

If Powell had not complied with Rumsfeld, he would have been trashed as completely as Major General Taguba for actually writing a full and truthful Abu Ghraib Report [1]).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taguba_Report

So Powell volunteered to sell Cheney's lie to the UN, knowing it to be a lie, because he wanted to stay in power rather than tell the truth like Shinseki? If Powell knew it to be false, and presented it with his credibility, I see no reason to not call it Powell's lie as much as Cheney's.

That's even worse than I thought. But fits with Powell's history in Vietnam.

DJT has shown us all that "Corrupt" and "Incompetent" are two sides of the same coin.

>Plenty of such reporting has resulted in significant truths being revealed and powerful people being held accountable (Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, Abu Ghraib).

And what, pray tell, is the major scandal in this case? The source isn't alleging any impropriety or illegal activity. Anonymous sources are for stories which are being suppressed or lied about, not for investigations which have not yet publicly been announced due to pending litigation. If there's no obvious motive for why the source would want to be anonymous then all you're reporting on is rumor and gossip.

You are attacking a straw man to make your arguments which makes me question your motivations.

Nowhere did the substack author say that cinting anonymous sources is not a thing, which your wording is implying. They say that citing anonymous sources to discuss an ongoing investigation is not a valid reason.

Let's look at the guidelines for ethical journalism and they quote the NYTimes guidelines: anonymous sources... “should be used only for information that we believe is newsworthy and credible, and that we are not able to report any other way.”

"... journalists should use anonymous sources only when essential and to give readers as much information as possible about the anonymous source’s credentials"

https://ethicsandjournalism.org/resources/best-practices/bes...

So the question is were these anonymous sources essential to the story? Have they given enough information about the sources credentials?

The "Washington Game" is described the Society of Professional Journalists. https://www.spj.org/spj-ethics-committee-position-papers-ano...

Citing anonymous sources is not established ETHICAL practice, it's corruption of the system. The roll of the journalist is to get sources on the record, not let them evade accountability by hiding behind anonymity. Anonymity is something that should be RARELY granted, not routinely granted as some sort of "long established practice".

What is the justification for anonymity here? The anonymous source is oath bound not to reveal secrets, so what is so important here that justifies them violating their oath to comment on an ongoing investigation? That's what we are talking about, if they are not allowed to comment on an ongoing investigation, then it's a gross violation of their duty to do so. The journalist needs to question their motives for doing so.

We all know the answer here, that they actually aren't violating their duty. They aren't revealing some big secret like Watergate. They are instead doing an "official leak", avoiding accountability by hiding behind anonymity. Moreover, what the anonymous source reveals isn't any real facts here, but just more spin.

We can easily identify the fact that it's propaganda here by such comments about the SIM farms being within 35 miles of the UN. It's 35 miles to all of Manhattan. It's an absurd statement on its face.

The article you cited does not agree with your assertions. It specifically tells you how and when to evaluate the use of an anonymous source.

If you don't ever use anonymous sources, many fewer people will talk to you. Being on the record about something that will get you fired, will get you fired - and then no one talks to journalists.

What separates actual ethical journalists from the rest is doing everything the article you cited suggests - validating information with alternative sources, understanding motives, etc.

You don't have to use every single source you talk to in your article though. Sure, I will grant my neighbor's dog anonymity but I won't include his opinion in my article at all.

Totally. If there's something to whistleblow then whistleblow, don't just gossip at a bar to a journalist.

> The anonymous source is oath bound not to reveal secrets

When you say this, what oaths are you specifically thinking about?

Author kind of made me trust him about as much as I trust the SS on not exaggerating when he spoke as if only he is an authority because he has declared himself a hacker. I think I might have trusted him more if he said "I used to run one of these SIM farms back in the day"

Your reply only addresses the tone of the article.

His claim is that they busted a common criminal sim farm, with little or no national security implications. You don't address that all.

While this comment is true, the bigger/real story is all(?) the media is lying.

Anyone on TikTok has gone down the phone farm rabbit hole. Some of us stay. This is teen level tech. There's phone farm ASMR.

Better question is why this is the best take down of a 'bogus' story on Hacker News?

This comment really should not be top or what Hacker News discusses as a side comment.

So in a meta conversation about news, there was discussion yesterday about social media and speech. One of the main reoccurring threads of conversation was that news should be left to the experts and those vetted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354893

If that was the model that society adopted, the fine article would be among the set of data being censored. Robert Graham seems to be competent in his field but he lacks the pedigree that the NYT wants to cite. Even worse, he disagrees with those who the NYT turn to as matter experts: https://substack.com/@cybersect/p-174413355

There is a lawyer (Alec Karakatsanis) who has been writing about police driven propaganda for years. His recent book "Copaganda" is fantastic. He carefully breaks down how major papers (NYT is chief among them) create stories that fit a narrative by using very one-sided sources. Like an article on crime written in bad faith where the only people quotes are police, police consultants, and ex-police.

It's a really good book, I wish more people were aware of it and read it.

Copaganda is indeed a good book, recommend.

Didn't read the book but I think it's more insidious than what you wrote. The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative (they think they're unbiased). They just don't have the judgement (or will?) to look beyond the initial narrative which is police-driven.

In the end if a journalist can get their story out faster by leaning on a few 'trusted sources' and then move onto the next article, most of them will and their managers will encourage it. Maybe you'll get a more in depth story if it makes it to On The Media a week or two later but that's basically all we have at this point which is very sad.

> The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative (they think they're unbiased). They just don't have the judgement (or will?) to look beyond the initial narrative which is police-driven.

No, they know what they are doing and you can tell they know what they are doing by the careful way language is used differently for similar facts when the police or other favored entities are involved vs. other entities in similar factual circumstances (particularly, the use of constructions which separates responsibility for an adverse result from the actor, which is overwhelmingly used in US media when police are the actors—and also, when organs of the Israeli state are—but not for most other violent actors.) This is frequently described as “the exonerative mood” (or, sometimes, “the exonerative tense”, though it is not really a verb tense.)

Carefully calibrated, highly-selective use of (often, quite awkward) linguistic constructs does not happen unconsciously, it is a deliberate, knowing choice.

> No, [journalists] know what they are doing ... Carefully calibrated, highly-selective use of (often, quite awkward) linguistic constructs does not happen unconsciously, it is a deliberate, knowing choice.

The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith. The way you are framing this is that nearly all journalists are acting in bad faith, which makes me believe the arguments of the parent ("The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative") more so than the argument you're making here.

> The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith.

Maybe, maybe not. It is also true that the incredible vast majority of people in the world aren’t corporate journalists, also.

> The way you are framing this is that nearly all journalists are acting in bad faith

Nearly all American corporate media has a conscious, top-down policy starting with the owners and editorial board to favor certain institutions, which is enforced by hiring, firing, promotions, and assignments of staff. The specific beneficiaries of this vary somewhat between outlet and outlet and over time, but both American police broadly and State of Israel are common beneficiaries across most outlets.

Journalists either comply are they aren’t journalists in the corporate media covering the issues to which these biases are relevant for long. Corporate media journalists aren’t independent actors.

The problem is that it is essentially impossible for a journalist to exist in the western world and not have heard of the criticism about how cops' actions get reported.

The term 'past exonerative tense' is dated to 1991.'"Mistakes were made" was popularized by Nixon.

To continue pulling this nonsense is wilful ignorance on the journalists' part, and effectively equivalent to bad faith.

>The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith.

this a very westerner perspective on society. Ask an Eastern European (like myself) how the vast majority of people are really acting.

How well has that worked for East Europe?

Really well, thanks for asking

Can you elaborate?

> The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith.

We have fundamentally different priors.

Which areas or circumstances are you observing otherwise?

I see routine bad faith in:

- politicians of both parties (eg, speaking disingenously on issues of relevance to their corporate sponsors)

- corporations

- judges, including in the Supreme Court, who abandon espoused judicial philosophies the moment they conflict with political expediency

- government administrators, much more so with Trump's appointments

- media organizations (The self-censorship of coverage around Gaza has been eye-opening.)

Chomksy to Marr:

"...I'm sure you believe everything you're saying, but ... if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow?t=597&feature=shared

I think your observations about tense and mood are very true, but you are undervaluing the extent to which someone can do something automatically and out of habit, especially when their paycheck depends on it.

I absolutely believe that a journalist can present two analogous sets of facts in two completely different ways without even consciously realizing it. These assumptions and biases are baked in deep, especially when you are writing day-in and day-out on short deadlines.

When the good guy riots it's called "unrest".

I thought insidious means sinister/evil, but what you point out just shows that we as a society don't value news enough to pay for anything more than the 1-4 hours of time invested per news article.

It's more perverse than that. Journalists know if they don't toe the party line, their access to voluntary information from law enforcement will be cut off entirely. Hard to write an article when everyone refuses to talk to you.

Who else would you have the journalists talk to, in order to get the other side of the story? Criminals?

Who better to talk to about crimes than those who commit those very crimes?

Yes? Journalists in the past talked to criminals.

of course, a criminal would have no reason to lie.

of course, a cop would have no reason to lie.

Breaking laws doesn't make someone dishonest. You should really think about why you think that's the case. Perhaps someone has an active interest in you believing that.

You've lumped everyone you don't like into one bucket - "criminal" - without considering their individual nature. You're probably a criminal (there are lots of stupid laws that people break all the time) but do you have a reason to lie?

well, that's part of the job.

when Barbara Walters was interviewing Fidel Castro , what do you think was going on from the perspective of the United States?

They're not all such prestigious examples, but the point stands.

Eyewitnesses. Often the police and the news narrative are very different than eyewitness accounts. Even if everyone knows what happened, it's completely obvious, the news and police still obfuscate.

Did you know that the so called "criminals" are also human beings?

vice did that. a lot.

Prosecutors are worse. Cops are going be cops. Our justice system is where the buck stops, or should.

Like touch fentanyl and you'll drop dead from your heart exploding?

Police propaganda is serious problem. But this seems like the least appropriate thing to dismiss as "just police propaganda". What's bad about police propaganda is it perpetuates a certain politics by maintain atmosphere of fear as well as pushing certain stereotypes of ethnic groups. But when the police are exaggerating the terrorist potential of actual organized criminals, things seem much muddier. I think people should concerned about organized scammers - their victims are usually the poor, notably. It's true their terrorist potential is overstated but only because they are profit-oriented but it's not like their other activities should be ignored.

I felt slightly...hm...confused when reading this. When I see something in the news, to the degree that I trust the source, I see it only as a statement of fact, and unless I trust the commentator, I ignore the comment. I only expect descriptive accuracy from the news. This sometimes requires resources that individuals don't generally have.

When I read a personal blog article articulating a personal opinion, presenting evidence and trying to make a case for their conclusion, I usually apply a different standard. From them, I expect sound reasoning, which often requires a form of independence/neutrality that news organizations don't have.

And let's just say this article is not exactly structured as a sequence of QEDs, so to speak. It doesn't seem like the conclusions follow from the premisses. That's not to say it's wrong, just that if it is right, it would be in part by accident.

[flagged]

...more like an ELI5? Sure.

When Bobby tries to convince his friend Jimmy that Charlie is lying, you shouldn't trust him if he says that "I know that Charlie is lying because apples are green".

> One of the reasons we know this story is bogus is because of the New York Times story which cites anonymous officials, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”. That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles.

>That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles.

I'm not even sure the apple is green! If you search `site:nytimes.com “anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation"` you'll see that this news outlet has done this multiple times in the past.

I suppose "valid" and "normal" are giving the author a bunch of wiggle room here, but he never backs this claim up.

Normal convention is that an agency will make no comment about any ongoing investigation, because making public comment prior to bringing charges could be prejudicial to the case.

If, for whatever reason, the agency feels like it's not risking its own case and wants to blow its trumpet... it really doesn't matter what the names of the spokespeople for the agency are. They don't need to speak anonymously, as they won't get in trouble with anyone at the agency for saying what the agency told them to say to the press. The NYT could just say "officials said" and not name them.

It is not like there is a whistleblower inside the Secret Service with scuttlebutt to dish, and the NYT need to protect the identity of Deep Throat 2.0... and all they had to say was the spam operation itself didn't pose any threat to the UN conference.

I think what the blog author's arguing is that this phrase is unnecessary detail that just adds intrigue to sell a rather mundane story.

I don't know about US laws, but in most countries agencies/PMs/experts or whoever has access and is involved in the investigation, cannot make a comment if the investigation is ongoing.

Breaching of this, especially as you're making a case, in most cases at best would invalidate the whole case + bring disciplinary actions upon the individual(s) that committed the breach.

Judging by the other comments, looks similar for the US too.

If you're ever partecipated as expert in any investigation or news article you'd know you'd get usually biased hypothesis, if otherwise it meant you wouldn't have the same impact for the news story. Or if you've ever heard of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

I understood them perfectly so I'm not sure what you're talking about. It's a thoughtful high-level overview about the difference between authoritative factual communication and vibes-based speculation. I made a similar point in a thread yesterday about the various disorganized allegations of "fraud" attributed to MrBeast and how they rarely cohere into a clearly articulated harm.

I think scatterbrained, vibes based almost-theories that vaguely imitate real arguments but don't actually have the logical structure, are unfortunately common and important to be able to recognize. This article gets a lot of its rhetorical momentum from simply declaring it's fake and putting "experts" in scare quotes over and over. It claims the article is "bogus" while agreeing that the sim cards are real, were really found, really can crash cell towers, and can hide identities. It also corrects things that no one said (neither the tweet nor the NYT article they link to refer to the cache of sim cards as "phones" yet the substack corrects this phrasing).

The strongest argument makes is about the difference between espionage and cell tower crashing and the achievability of this by non state actors (it would cost "only" $1MM for anyone to do this), but a difference in interpretation is a far cry from the article actually being bogus. And the vagueposting about how quoting "high level experts" proves that the story is fake is so ridiculous I don't even know what to say. Sure, the NYT have preferred sources who probably push preferred narratives, but if you think that's proof of anything you don't know the difference between vibes and arguments.

So I completely understand GPs point and wish more comments were reacting in the same way.

Please don't comment like this on HN. These guidelines in particular, ask us to avoid commenting like this:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Please don't post shallow dismissals...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Cute that another (days+ old) comment of mine was down-modded and flagged at the exact same time you wrote this. You know, the one that stated literal facts and nothing else.

I legitimately read the comment twice and couldn't parse it when I wrote this. I wasn't trying to be rude, I genuinely didn't understand. But pretty sure you don't care. But sure, point taken.

I didn't touch any "days+ old" comments. I did flag another comment of yours from about the same time as the one I replied to, but several other community members had already downvoted and flagged it, so I'm not taking any unilateral action here. I'm only seeing your comments because so many community members are flagging them.

> You know, the one that stated literal facts and nothing else

I don't know what comment you're referring to, but it's common for people to claim that they were "just stating facts", whilst sidestepping the fact that the choice of "facts", the context in which they are invoked and the words used to state them can very easily be inflammatory.

> I wasn't trying to be rude, I genuinely didn't understand

It's common for people to underestimate how harshly their words come across by the time they hit the page for others to read. We've had to warn you before, and you're still frequently making comments that are breaking the guidelines and being flagged by many fellow community members. You need to try harder to keep within the guidelines if you want to participate here. This is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to keep the standards up. We need to see you making an effort to be one of the ones to raise the standards, rather than repeatedly dragging them down.

> But pretty sure you don't care

My job is to uphold the guidelines and do what I can to keep this place from burning to the ground. That's all I care about when I'm posting comments like these.

> But sure, point taken

I hope so!

This article describes some secret service messaging about busting some basic (possibly?) criminal enterprise, how the NYT amplifies that messaging without question, and names a couple of experts who the author finds questionable (which is the part I'm most unsure about, but honestly I just don't want to have more names to memorize).

After everything the gov't has tried to hype in the last decade (I'm including some things under Biden's term too), and esp. the efforts made in Trump second term, sure seems like it checks out to me.

So maybe you could name one of the conclusions and its premises, and describe how they don't follow. Cause I certainly don't follow what you're on about.

The novel information in this article (confirmed by some technical experts on other platforms) is that this kind of SMS scam relay is a well-known sort of enterprise. I wasn’t aware of this, although it doesn’t surprise me. Once you have that context, the rest of the NYT article kind of falls apart by itself.

Ok, that makes sense. I couldn't quite fish that out of the article (there's a lot more being said that obscures it), but you're right. If this is indeed relatively common (at this scale and/or level of sophistication), then that definitely would make it much more likely that this is a PR stunt. Not completely settled, but much more likely.

I wouldn’t say the NYT article falls apart it is just less sensationalistic. Very likely as this substack article suggests that these SIM farms do knock out SMS from time to time because they DDoS the tower. So that part is correct. Nation state ? Ok maybe far fetched. These farms are not out of reach of a normal person who over time purchases the technical pieces. It’s an investment.

I don’t know whether it’s possible with modern networks, but it was basically impossible to DDoS a tower with SMSs. Either the tower was unavailable at all times even without text messages, or SMSs never caused a problem. You couldn’t even send many text messages at once, it took a while to send say 50 SMSs, like minutes. I know that the tech stack is different nowadays, but it really depends on prioritisation, which I don’t know much about.

Somehow I doubt telecom infrastructure in NYC is susceptible enough to completely drop service citywide when under attack from one DDoS source. In fact, I suppose this is technically just DoS, because all these SIMs should be served by 1, maybe 2 towers.

The NYT article fell apart the moment they quoted the silly "35 miles from UN headquarters" quote by the SS without pointing out it's an absurd attempt at sensationalizing. No need to read further than that before figuring out it's a propaganda piece.

That's the figure that has been cherry picked and everyone has run with to dismiss the announcement yes. While it probably was included to sensationalize, I fail to see how that is some kind of smoking gun that somehow falsifies all the rest of it. Everyone buying into this is showing their bias

It's the most obvious example, it's not the sole piece of evidence.

Let's pick through the official statement.

"In addition to carrying out anonymous telephonic threats, these devices could be used to conduct a wide range of telecommunications attacks. This includes disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises."

This is a mix of bullshit and mundane. Disabling cell towers? I don't buy it. DoS attacks? Yeah, any collection of internet-connected devices can do that. Anonymous, encrypted communication? Everybody's smartphone qualifies for that. You could be talking about arresting a pickpocketer and be technically correct in saying that you siezed a device that could be used to facilitate anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises.

"While forensic examination of these devices is ongoing, early analysis indicates cellular communications between nation-state threat actors and individuals that are known to federal law enforcement."

So some foreign government was using these services. You could say the same about AWS.

"The potential for disruption to our country’s telecommunications posed by this network of devices cannot be overstated"

A nice example of the genre of self-disproving statements.

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

It bears repeating that "within 35 miles" of the UN includes the entire New York metro area and a large area beyond. In addition to that, the very concept of electronic equipment being "concentrated within" four thousand square miles doesn't make the least bit of sense.

those are absurd interpretations, "nation-state threat actors and individuals that are known to federal law" = some foreign country? give me a break

You seem to not understand how propaganda puff pieces work. You are taking the anonymous sources and the SS agents' words at face value as if they are good faith normal language. But given the clear propagandistic nature of the piece, you should instead immediately suspect every statement as being the most weasely possible "technically true" statement that could have been made. When someone is willing to call 35 miles away from NYC as "close to the UN", you should absolutely expect that they would be willing to call "a known fraudster and a corrupt official from Kazakstan" as "nation-state threat actors and individuals known to federal law", which they technically are.

Compare with this statement from July about a counterintelligence operation: https://xcancel.com/FBIDDBongino/status/1940116391262118089

You get specific numbers (two arrests and eight search warrants), more specific locations (names of big cities aren't very specific, but they're more specific than a circle 70 miles wide), a specific country running the agents (China), and a specific goal (recruit spies in the US military).

The vague statement about the SIM farms is pretty clearly an attempt to puff up an operation that didn't accomplish much.

This is exactly right. Another note: they tried to time the announcement with Trump's speech - the actual devices were found weeks ago. The NYT article mentions August in the same sentence it mentions the 35 miles.

The cherry on top is that at the end of the article, they sort of let it slip that this isn't something that they expect would be unusual:

> “This is an ongoing investigation, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe we won’t find more of these devices in other cities,” Mr. McCool said.

The title of the NYT article is "Cache of Devices Capable of Crashing Cell Network is Found Near U. N.". The 35 mile radius is not some cherry picked number buried deep in the article, it is the explanation of the propagandiatic title. And the other parts of the title are also bullshit: it wasn't a "cache", which would suggest the devices were stockpiled waiting for some nefarious purpose - they were actively used devices. And describing SIM farms as "devices capable of crashing the cell network" is also bullshit - it's like finding a box of knives in a kitchen drawer and describing it as "a cache of implements capable of tearing human flesh".

"The reality is that this is just a normal criminal threat that sometimes crashes cell towers. SMS is an ancient technology that works slowly even in modern cell networks. Too many SIM boxes spamming SMS in one location can indeed overwhelm a cell tower" Are you agreeing with Cybersect or not?

Yes, I agree with the blog that this is quite obviously just run-of-the-mill criminality dressed up by the authorities and the NYT as some major cyber terrorism threat. I'm not sure what that quote has to do with anything I was saying, though.

I just read the article and it's clearly implying foreign powers attempting to sabotage a UN meeting.

The two "experts" clearly have no idea what they're talking about, and the agent quoted is implying heavily that this is some form of criminal, organised ring.

In reality, SIM farms are against the ToS for phone providers and can definitely be used for illegal activity such as telecommunications disruptions, but a butter knife can also be used for illegal activity.

I've run data centres and seen them set up in many places, operators I've seen are there for a profit and operating in a technically legal area but playing cat and mouse with the telcos. There is nothing implicitly illegal about them.

DDoS the tower? These look like they represent less than the aggregate crowd at MSG, or even a fairly dense office building (of which there are plenty in NYC). Didn't seem like enough to launch a coordinated DDoS attack. Also, just from looking at the base units, it appears the ratio of SIMs to radios/antennas is Many:1, so not all SIMs can be leveraged in a DDoS at any singular time.

That sounds plausible, but could you link to those technical experts? I never heard of the author of this blog and he’s all “trust me I’m a hacker.”

Article's subheading is "it's just an ordinary crime". It seem comparable to a situation where you have a gang with a huge weapon cache that gets found and the press says "enough fire power to outgun the police" and someone says "dude, they weren't aiming for the police, just their rivals".

Sure, the press may put a "threat to the nation" spin on things that might be a bit sensational. But the "you're making something out of nothing" claims seem to do the opposite. Criminals with the ability to cause widespread chaos seem worrying even if their may motivation is maintaining their income stream.

I think, the more extraordinary the claim is, the more proof is required. And I’m with you, I’d normally be incredibly skeptical of a substack post from an author I’ve never heard of before, who writes as egotistically as this. But there is just no extraordinary claim in this article. Only a very very ordinary claim that should be believable to any person who has ever owned a cell phone:

SIM farms are normal, common things that exist all over the place to allow messages from far-away senders to be sent as if they came from a local number.

That’s all the author is asking us to believe.

> SIM farms are normal, common things that exist all over the place to allow messages from far-away senders to be sent as if they came from a local number.

Meanwhile, many US companies won't let me, the actual legitimate user they're trying to authenticate, use Google Voice, because it's "so dangerous and spoofable, unlike real SIM cards".

Hopefully this helps a little bit in driving that point home.

Unfortunately that's part of the reason sim farms exist.

> And I’m with you, I’d normally be incredibly skeptical of a substack post from an author I’ve never heard of before, who writes as egotistically as this.

It's always funny to see comments like this; because there's always at least 50/50 chance that the article is from someone that is actually prolific, just that the person has a blind-spot for whatever reason.

That is, also, the case here.

Yeah, sometimes the random substack is from somebody really respected, and sometimes it’s just from somebody who writes like they think they should be really respected. And sometimes the respectable people can be wrong too.

But I think it’s wrong to call it a “blind spot”. This is not my industry, I don’t know the names, and I’m not qualified to judge whether the author deserves my implicit trust. So I treat this substack with the same skepticism I would any other substack.

The article for me was weird in the sense that it makes the claim that the purpose was of the farms were not necessarily nefarious in a terror sense, but merely criminal. Even suggesting that they could be legitimate (that was a stretch, sim farms in residential apartments? Please.).

It also makes the point that its purpose wasn’t to disrupt cell service, although these things can and will disrupt cell services.

So from my perspective, the article is strange in the sense that the author seems pretty intent on splitting enough hairs to prove the secret service wrong. For me, I don’t care if they are wrong about its purpose— If this helps decrease spam messages, great. If it means that cell services are now more reliable in that area, great. If it’s something that could be hijacked and used for terroristic purposes and has now been neutralized, great.

If the secret service were involved in policing that had nothing to do with national security, that might be worth reporting on. We should be wary of the expansion of their policing duties.

Rack mounts of cellular gear in an apartment. Dummy rentals. I don't understand the optimism.

How did this not throw flags with the carriers.

If a SS advance team for Trump’s UN address were following up on a lead that was based off detected unusual cell activity in the area…seems to me like that would have been within their responsibility profile.

We need to be especially careful about labeling things a terror threat during the current inflamed security and political situation.

"Freddy No-Lips is burning down Suzy's Bakery because she didn't pay protection money" is not the Reichstag fire and should not be weaponized like it was.

yeah, like you go on alibaba and can get them right away. i was even thinking about them like 10 years ago when we had to send transactional sms to our customers to get one instead of paying for somebodies sms gateway.

https://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/faf448fd0d906a15/prod...

“…which often requires a form of independence/neutrality that news organizations don't have.”

Really? I see a difference between 24h infotainment news and News.

The News I listen to (AM radio) is compacted into fact, point, counterpoint. And that’s it. When it repeats, no more news. I’m old enough to remember this basic News playbook, and it’s not changed on those stations I listen to.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm with you. I just meant more broadly - I think that inevitably, news organizations, as a whole, have more many competing interests - comercial, political, etc. I think that at least some of them at really trying their best to deliver accurate, factual claims. I'm generally less inclined to read opinion pieces, but I certainly get my news from the News, and I have a huge respect for honest journalists. I think they're one of the most under appreciated professions of our age.

I believe the kind of journalism you’re hinting at is practically dead in what many people are referring to when they say “the news.” It’s hard to determine if I agree with your stance though since you didn’t actually define what you meant by news organizations; mind listing a few of your favorite sources of news and trusted commentators? If they’re quite good, it’ll help people find reliable sources of descriptive accuracy!

But a meta point: Most commercial news rooms have become propoganda arms for The Party that churn out low effort AP ticker derivatives, social media gossip, and literal government propaganda from The Party whispered in their ear by an “anonymous source.” The “news rooms” appear devoid of any real journalistic integrity.

I think we are going to see an increasing trend of “true journalists” leaving the legacy news industry to places where they can build direct relationships with their audience, can own their own content distribution channels, and directly monetize those channels. I.E. Substack, YouTube, X, et. al.

> I think we are going to see an increasing trend of “true journalists” leaving the legacy news industry to places where they can build direct relationships with their audience, can own their own content distribution channels, and directly monetize those channels. I.E. Substack, YouTube, X, et. al.

Those independent channels seem far more amenable to "opinion-havers" than "true journalists" (though perhaps the "true journalists" transform into opinion-havers or secondhand-analysts when they change distribution platforms).

> ...churn out low effort AP ticker derivatives, social media gossip, and literal government propaganda from The Party whispered in their ear by an “anonymous source.”

That stuff is cheap. How do you expect someone moving to a place of fewer resources and less security to make a more expensive product?

> The “news rooms” appear devoid of any real journalistic integrity.

I think you're seeing the result of budget cuts.

> That stuff is cheap. How do you expect someone moving to a place of fewer resources and less security to make a more expensive product?

Investigative journalism is really not that expensive. A lot of it boils down to needing a phone and money for gas. Rather than costs, the much bigger obstacle to good journalism is censorship, much of it coming from company leadership, which doesn't want a bad relationship with advertisers or the government.

> Investigative journalism is really not that expensive. A lot of it boils down to needing a phone and money for gas.

Come on. It investigative journalism takes a lot of time, and in the mean time, the journalist has bills to pay.

An opinion-haver or second-hand news analyst can build a Substack following by picking a theme and pumping out a blog post every couple days, but that's not practical for someone who might only be able put out a story every couple months on varying topics (based on whatever scoops they get).

I suspect the economics of investigative journalism work out better for an individual who is personally invested in their work.

Your scenario is the same for a news company. Investigative journalism takes time. And, in the meantime, you have HR departments, corporate rent, etc., you’re trying to build a media empire and your ROI is being compared against just investing in the S&P 500.

And I don’t think the economics of corporate news make sense. I suspect people buy these news rooms because their ROI comes from manufacturing consent (power and influence) - not monetizing investigative journalism.

> I suspect the economics of investigative journalism work out better for an individual who is personally invested in their work.

> Your scenario is the same for a news company. Investigative journalism takes time. And, in the meantime, you have HR departments, corporate rent, etc., you’re trying to build a media empire and your ROI is being compared against just investing in the S&P 500.

No. In the mean time, you have opinion-havers and other investigative journalists writing articles, maintaining a steady audience. An "individual [investigative journalist] who is personally invested in their work" wouldn't have the steady output to maintain one.

> And I don’t think the economics of corporate news make sense.

The economics of solo news make even less sense.

The point isn't that it's cheaper to do investigative journalism than opinion pieces. The point was whether it's easier to do IJ independently or as part of a big news corporation. And I firmly believe that big news corps are mostly actively against IJ, so that going independent is the only real way to practice it.

> The point was whether it's easier to do IJ independently or as part of a big news corporation....so that going independent is the only real way to practice it.

I think you're pushing a fantasy. I don't think "going independent" is really viable for a person unless they 1) have pre-existing fame, 2) independent wealth (or a patron), or 3) cut corners with the project in some way.

It's not complicated. This is a normal sort of criminal enterprise. These rooms filled with SIM boxes are all over the world. The owners of them rent out the service to others -- letting them send 1,000 spam messages for a fee. One of the buyers of the service was indeed using it to threaten a politician. But this represents a tiny fraction (less than 1% of 1% of the SIMs normal use -- which is probably mostly phishing messages and other spam). It is a criminal enterprise and was used as some sort of political threat, but it's probably not set up by Russia or intended for that purpose.

These enterprises might not be setup by Russia directly but they might be setup by Russian criminal organizations which have been very active in the US over the last 20 years. That nobody in the current administration seem to be concerned with criminal organizations outside of some small or remnant groups from Latin America is very telling all on its own. This administration has never named any Russian gangs in official statements, even while they now dominate in some parts of the US.

That's easily falsifiable. Trump's DOJ and Treasury have multiple press releases regarding prosecutions and sanctions against Vory v zakone, thieves-in-law. Just search on either phrase and you'll see them.

Additionally, calling Venezuelan and Mexican cartels like CJNG small or remnant is extremely inaccurate, to be charitable. They are among the largest, best equipped, and most dangerous organized criminals in the world. You don't have be pro-Trump to acknowledge this fact.

This whole thing reminds me of the 90s when the government would bust some 16 year old hacker kid in his suburban bedroom who was abusing a PBX, and then parade him around like they'd arrested Lex Luthor (the cartoon villain, not the actual hacker) and prevented a global crisis.

"We just arrested this drug pusher. One of our brave officers got a 0.001 milligram piece of fentynal on his sleeve, but fortunately after being rushed to the Emergency Room we were able to save his life.

"The other 0.003 mg were lost while trying to get them in the evidence bag."

Yeah, there are some ridiculous theatrics going on.

> First responders who believe they are overdosing on fentanyl from simply touching it in fact exhibit the exact opposite of the symptoms we would expect. While fentanyl makes you euphoric and slows down your breathing, cops start breathing faster, sweat a lot, and become anxious. “I don’t want to discredit anyone or say they’re faking,” says Dr. Marino. “I do think people are having a true medical emergency when this happens. The symptoms seem most consistent with a panic attack or anxiety or a fear reaction.”

> Some will claim they had to administer naloxone (trade name Narcan), which can reverse an opioid overdose, in order to save their life. But if you are conscious enough to self-administer naloxone, you’re not overdosing on opioids. You would have lost consciousness and barely been breathing.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking/...

I forget what originally opened my eyes to the theatrics of a typical perp walk (probably Grisham) - the cops tip off the reporters, the reporters get their content for the nightly news, the cops use the front door of the station rather than using the parking garage entrance like normal. It's a bizarro red carpet event.

"dope on the table"

Your description can only refer to Kevin Mitnick. They threw the book at him to set an example. I remember being amazed at what a hacker he must have been. Later I read about his crimes and thought "that's all?" RIP Mr. Mitnick.

No, it's not only Mitnick. He wasn't even a teen when he was arrested.

If you want to read more a good place to start is The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling.

> That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable.

Yeah makes a lot of sense when framed like this, the timing of the secret service of all people busting this 'huge' operation was far too suspicious.

Also seems to be the first time NYT has used that form of words according to Google

`site:nytimes.com “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”` has no earlier results

Other outlets have used “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation” before though.

`site:nytimes.com “anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation"` shows more than one hit.

Just in a cursory check into some of the other articles using the phrase, it seems like they're mostly cases where an investigator might encounter retaliation for speaking out. It's hard to imagine that happening for the present example.

Usually it's not allowed for people involved in an ongoing investigation to talk about said investigation. Maybe the US is different.

That's a long enough phrase to be unique. Journalists often agree to speak to all kinds of sources "on condition of anonymity". Even if you just don't want to be sued by your employer you might not be comfortable being named.

Overall I found the substack author to tell a good story and speak with what seems to be relevant technical experience so I reposted the link that I saw in another hn thread as a separate story, but as other commentors have pointed out it's possible that both he and the original journalist are hyping up conspiracies in both directions (compromised press vs state actor hackers) and actually the truth is often a more boring mid ground (Journalists hyping up stories and shady people doing shady things)

The wording I often see is along the lines of "a source who was not authorised to discuss the case publicly".

>That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles

Are they just making up these "normal journalistic principles"? I see different newspapers publishing quotes anonymously under similar conditions all the time.

The author explains it in the next sentence.

> It’s the “Washington Game” of “official leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable.

In general, you can spot this kind of propaganda by realizing that the anonymous source is actually promoting the government's position and so isn't actually in danger. I.E. they aren't a whistleblower, they have no reason to fear repercussions.

Wouldn't there be repercussions for discussing an ongoing investigation with a journalist?

Not if people higher in the agency the employee works with are aware of the contact and have blessed it as a useful conduit to establish a narrative.

They are obviously allowed to discuss certain aspects, "We have a suspect," "We have our best detective, Sherlock Holmes, working on the case," "Here is a photograph of our suspect, please contact us if you have any information regarding the suspect."

Then there are other aspects that they would be prohibited from sharing in some legal jurisdictions, that hinge on privacy law (divulging sensitive but irrelevant details regarding the suspects alibi that they learned by interviewing the suspect) or on affecting potential jury members.

Instead they use the idea that they aren't allowed to share any information to just avoid answering questions.

You’re so close to completing the thought

Yes, most newspapers are publishing anonymous quotes from government officials without scrutiny; quotes that are later found to have been completely bogus.

We live in an age of constant memetic warfare and a majority of our content distribution channels have been compromised.

If the objective is to knock out cell towers, just jam them. It's clearly a SIM farm for middle-man communications. It just happened to be close to where the UN were.

Close being 35km.

I think it's 35 miles (X 1.6).

So anywhere in NYC but it must be targeting the UN /s.

Also funny was that it was considered espionage at first ... but they found lots of drugs on site -- clearly not espionage.

They found 50g of cocaine, which is more than a personal (not Scarface) use amount of cocaine, but more on the scale of a single dealer. Like the guy running the sim farm was also selling coke on the side.

Also "most of them" within 35 miles (~50 km).

The World Trade Center is/was closer to UNHQ ;)

Edit:ascii emoji fail

It's super weird how unusual activity done by humans is correlated with dense human population centers.

I cannot conceive of a reason why that would occur

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Also hard to imagine how this could be used for espionage. Listening in on cell traffic requires defeating security measures in the protocol. Generally something like a 0 day. This might require a single SIM card, but probably not lots of unless there’s something very unusual about the vulnerability that requires lots of valid seeming actors on the network. Plausible I suppose. But “SMS spam” is a vastly more likely explanation than a security hole that can’t be brute forced on the radio.

Paying for residential / mobile proxy[0] traffic for scraping is becoming more common - this is what I always imagined the other end of the mobile part looked like.

[0] https://oxylabs.io/products/mobile-proxies

The hardware in the pictures of the NYT article don't resemble what I am familiar with when it comes to mobile data farming, they look like traditional sim equipment for texting.

Wow, I knew there were residential proxies for sale (for bypassing geofenced VOD content etc.), but I didn't know that was a thing for mobile data yet.

Is it time to stop treating somebody's IP address as an authentication factor yet?

That time was always

You know that, I know that, but the only thing that matters is decision makers at big corporations also knowing it.

Cell phone farm devices are a thing. Here's one you can buy on Alibaba.[1] This is a little more pro looking than the ones seen in New York. It's 20 phones in a 2U rackmount case. Costs $1880, including the phones. Cheap shipping, too.

Lots of variations available. Vertical stack, different brands of Android phones, rackmount, server racks for thousands of phones, software for clicking on ads, training videos. "No code".

Product info:

"only provide box for development or testing use.pls do not use it for illegal"

Description

Package

Each Box purchase includes the hardware (20 Phone motherboard ,USB cable, box power cord, phone motherboard +advanced control management software (15days free,after that $38 a year) download software from our website (in the video)

Whats is Box Phone Farm ? It is a piece of equipment that removes the phone screen/battery/camera/sim slot, integrates them into a chassis, and works with click farm software to achieve group control functions. 1 box contains 20 mobile phone motherboards. Install the click farm software on your computer and you can do batch operations.

Function:

Install the Click Farm software on your PC, and you can operate the device in batches or operate a mobile phone individually. Only one person can control 20 mobile phones at the same time, perform the same task, or perform different tasks separately, and easily build a network matrix of thousands of mobile phones. As long as it is an online project that mobile phone users participate in, they can participate in the control. The voltage support 110v- 220V, and when running the game all the time, one box only consumes about 100 watts.

Ethernet:

[OTG/LAN] can use USB mode, and can also use the network cable of the router to connect the box.Two connection modes can be switched.

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/S22-Server-Rack-S8-Bo...

You do not use this thing for SMS spamming as a primary objective.

Actual phone farms are for when you need actual phones, such as to run apps.

Sophisticated actors likely roll their own virtualization (w/ masking) solutions.

Yes, that multi-phone rig may be overkill, but it's cheap.

I'm puzzled about how the phones get their RF signals in and out when that tightly packed in metal boxes, though.

I think these phones in a rack boxes are likely more oriented towards automation of apps, and can use ethernet via tethering rather than mobile networks. Could probably leave the top of the box off if you need mobile networks to work a bit.

The sim boxes used for bulk messaging / calling from the photos posted yesterday had antennas poking out everywhere. If you wanted these phones to work inside metal cases, you'd probably want an antenna per phone sticking out as well (or a shared antenna, if you've got rf skills)

The https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514 discussion has indeed raised all of the same points.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Cache of devices capable of crashing cell network is found in NYC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514 - Sept 2025 (283 comments)

I'll put that link in the top text too.

Yeah, the majority of the people in the posts were also highly skeptical of the USSS press release. Some of the media outlets did skip over some of the more outlandish points from that press release, but none of them were willing to call the bullshit for what it was. There is always the slim chance that the USSS has some extra info they didn't release that made this more than just a SIM bank operator who had no KYC program.

The somewhat annoying part is that it seems like it is pretty easy to spot these sorts of SIM farm setups and yet nobody in law enforcement seems to care enough to actually do it.

Reading between the lines, my guess is something like this happened:

* some of the US government officials protected by the Secret Service were the targets of swatting

* the USSS found the swatting calls were anonymized by a SIM Farm in/near NYC

* their investigation of the SIM Farm found "300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites"

* it could have hypothetically been used for swatting officials at the UN General Assembly, but that seems to be conjecture by the Secret Service, rather than anything they actually have evidence of

Does that seem consistent with what we know?

> Reading between the lines, my guess is something like this happened:

cough 35 miles cough.

I don't understand your reply. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with the parent-poster?

For what reason are you highlighting that the SIM cards were present within 35 miles of NYC?

So if some rando were to just find one of these huge SIM farms, who could they call, and would anything be done?

With the number of radios seen in the photos from the original story, there must have been a great deal of SMS from that structure. That is very easy to spot with low cost equipment: a TinySA[1] and a directional antenna should be sufficient. Hams do "fox hunting" with similarly basic equipment.

Given the resources of cell operators, the most charitable explanation for how something like this can exist for more than a brief interval is total indifference.

[1] The more recent versions ($150+) are pretty powerful and can see all 4G/5G bands.

> Given the resources of cell operators, the most charitable explanation for how something like this can exist for more than a brief interval is total indifference.

And why should they care?

A paying customer is a paying customer, never mind the health and integrity of the public phone network (which coincidentally also serves as the primary identification and authentication method for ~everybody in the US).

These are by and large the same companies who created the caller ID forgery problem to save money when deploying VoIP around the turn of the century. Everyone technical knew that was a bad design but the executives were thinking exactly how you described it, collecting payments for all of that extra traffic until legislation became a risk.

Was there any specific bad design?

As far as I understand it, it's more of the lack of a design (for authentication) that got us into all that trouble, similar to BGP, Email, and many other protocols that were originally designed with trusted counterparties in mind.

It just so happened that the illusion of mutual trust broke down earlier in the Internet than it did in the international phone network. (Some even still believe in it to this day!)

The problem was that they didn’t want the extra hassle of verifying that senders owned the numbers they were announcing. In the earlier SS7 era that was manageable because all of the parties were major phone companies but VoIP opened up a wave of small fly-by-night players. Porting the system forward without recognizing that change in the security assumptions was recognized as a mistake in the early 2000s but the telephone companies saw preventing it as a cost which would also reduce their revenue from delivering all of that spam.

SIM farms are probably against the ToS for most carriers, but otherwise they're not fundamentally problematic just massively inefficient

> One of the reasons we know this story is bogus is because of the New York Times story which cites anonymous officials, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”.

Yes, we should be skeptical of anything that is entirely sources from anonymous sources.. even if they align with what we want to believe.

And further, I'd love to see reporters start burning sources that lie to them. After all, the source is risking/destroying the reporter's credibility along the way. Unfortunately, we'll never see that as it's all an access game.

Does anyone know what crime is being investigated? It looks like the malicious activity was sending spam text messages and forwarding international phone calls. Is there a federal regulation against sending spam messages?

Is it somehow illegal to have many sim cards in the same place as having many radios?

The telco's are also capable of bringing down the network, and they are legally allowed to turn their services off. Its not government infrastructure, its a business. If the backbone ISP providers decided to turn off their services for an area for a time, thats fine, there are contractual provisions to deal with that. its not a crime.

There has been no mention of arrest, was this 'crime' perpetrated by the infamous hackerman in ablack hoodie?

In other countries these setups are fairly illegal because it bypasses the international call tariffs that the typically state owned telco company would be entitled to. A local domestic call might cost $.01 per minute and an international call $.20. They call it "bypass fraud".

But in the US, I'm not so sure since things are already deregulated.

US doesn't really have bypass fraud as a category, no; there's no real pricing difference based on the source of a call. Inbound international calls don't have to pay extra termination costs vs domestic calls and outbound international calls aren't paying much more than the cost of a local call + whatever the foreign carrier charges for termination. If you were doing bypass fraud in another country for calls to/from the US, you don't need SIM farms in the US, because you could just get a SIP account.

These boxes would be used for pricing arbitrage where a mobile phone user can get 'unlimited' calling or messaging but a bulk messaging/calling customer would have to pay something per message or minute, or to avoid customer identification or restrictions on message that would happen with a bulk account.

First thing I thought when reading it. This story makes no sense. Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal. Having lots of phones (even in a rack-mount form factor) isn't illegal. Even if the phone network could conceivably be DoSed with that many phones all calling at once, it's not illegal unless you actually do that or intend to do it. And their other justification was that this equipment could be used to send anonymous or encrypted communications - that's not illegal either. Even this government hasn't gotten to the point of making encryption illegal.

> Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal.

What about sending spam and threaths over one of these SIMs? I'm pretty sure that warrants legal action.

Spam is illegal? I'd love that to be true but I don't see any spam police under the current administration (who are prolific...spamers).

Have we actually established that they are used for sending spam? It's very likely, but the press release does not provide any evidence of that. All we know is that they could be used for spam.

And even if they are, if you provide a service and someone uses your service to send spam, that's not valid grounds for seizing all your equipment.

<< First thing I thought when reading it. This story makes no sense. Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal.

A lot of things are not, but US for a while has been on a path that suggests that whether something is legal or not is not the standard. The standard is basically, based partially on personal vibes.

Naturally, this comes years after it was normalized in banking, red flag laws and so on, so I suppose this is not a surprise, but I am surprised that people are making 'this is not illegal argument'.

In this setup, illegal does not matter. If it is suspicious, you are in trouble. For example, I invite you to look at DHS/FBI 'signs'[1][2] to report by private orgs:

- Producing or sharing music, videos, memes, or other media that could reflect justification for violent extremist beliefs or activities

Note the could and despair at the future we are gleefully approaching.

Anyway, I don't disagree with you on principle, but I want you to understand that the system behaves differently these days.

https://tripwire.dhs.gov/documents/us-violent-extremist-mobi... https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/counterterrorism/us-viol...

I stopped reading once the author claimed it was a lie because the SecSrv knew technical terms, then claimed it was a lie because they didn't know the technical terms. It's too early in the morning to be purposely confused.

I knew they were overhyping the National Security/United Nations impact when they said it was 35 miles from the UN building, in the NYC area there must be hundreds if not thousands of cell sites in that 35 miles. They certainly weren't targeting the UN building.

One comment I saw elsewhere: why didn't we see an announcement of an arrest by FBI at the same time this story came out?

Now I know why.

I fully agree the narrative is nonsense, the ways, means, and timing of the story is suspect, but I don't buy the "don't trust those experts, trust me, I'm the expert" vibe of this article. Criminal enterprises and nation states aren't mutually exclusive.

I got the same feeling. If anything a nation state would want to operate under the guise of a "normal criminal."

I thought it looked suspicious how neat the cabling was done and cables taped down to the floor to prevent tripping hazards. This would most likely not be the case for a one-time event.

Why not? That's the standard on film shoots in locations that are absolutely "one-time events". People do that all the time.

Criminals don't file for workman's comp.

They don't like tripping over their own gear, either.

They also aren't known for having high levels of common sense in general, but I would also kind of expect anyone willing to work with this amount of equipment would think about cable management at least a bit.

Unless you're claiming this was pulled off by a pro film crew, that point is irrelevant.

My computer setup is far from a one-time event, and my cabling is a nightmare.

The point that people tape off cables to prevent tripping over them is irrelevant? Not sure that's the case. Just because you don't care about cabling doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. I've watched network engineers do marvelous work on short order.

Both scenarios could be right?

It could be just a scam bot farm but a scam bot farm with the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?

You're right, it could be the sensible most likely thing AND the far-fetched thing.

You're assuming the conclusion in order to argue against it. It's slightly surprising to me that this is not obvious and actually, pretty common. You can't argue against X ("It isn't completely obvious that is bogus") by assuming X ("far-fetched thing").

I don't mean this in derogatory sense. I wasslightly...hm...confused when reading this. When I see something in the news, to the degree that I trust the source, I see it only as a statement of fact, and unless I trust the commentator, I ignore the comment. I only expect descriptive accuracy from the news. This sometimes requires resources that individuals don't generally have.

When I read a personal blog article articulating a personal opinion, presenting evidence and trying to make a case for their conclusion, I usually apply a different standard. From them, I expect sound reasoning, which often requires a form of independence/neutrality that news organizations don't have.

And I can't say that this article is structured as a sequence of QEDs, so to speak. It doesn't seem like the conclusions follow from the premisses. That's not to say is wrong, just that if it is right, it would be in part by accident.

Is this a bot? This reply has been essentially pasted into several places now in this article.

No, I'm not a bot, I just wanted it have it as reply to the article itself too, separate from this reply. It has been pasted exactly once and edited accordingly. Also, my account is 15 years old :)

Why would you need to target "vulnerable UN delegates" from blocks away from the UN, though? Literally anywhere in the US would do. It's literally SMS, the location of the transmitter says nothing about the location of the recipient.

No, they put this in lower manhattan because of the cell density there. It makes the fraud harder to detect in all the noise of normal usage.

I believe if you connect directly to the tower a phone is connected to you can bypass central spam filters.

Why?

This is interesting. Can you explain? What leads you to believe that? Do you have any references, or is this your area of expertise?

Cell networks are not my area of expertise, but cybersecurity is, so I am genuinely interested to learn more.

I work directly with telcos. All text messages, calls, etc go through telco systems that are in data centers far from the towers. There is no benefit for one cell phone being geographically close to another to send spam messages.

No, that’s not a thing.

Absolutely not. Why would they spend a significant amount of time and effort engineering a special mode which is far more complicated, less secure, and will rarely be used?

And how is it even supposed to work? How are you going to handle billing? Does a cell phone tower even know the phone number of the connected devices? What's going to happen when the recipient disconnects mid-SMS? What happens when the same number is in use by multiple SIM cards?

This farm isn’t anywhere near the UN, though—35 miles away. Which could put it in westchester, connecticut, new jersey, long island..

> the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?

It would have been so much easier to be closer to the UNGA and then it would be more effective if that was the intent.

You do not need to be within 35km of someone to send them a spammy text message.

The whole U.N. thing is nonsense for several reasons, many of which got discussed just yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514 .

If one is setting up to target the U.N. one does not need this sort of setup to do so. Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building are just as (in)valid a guess at some purported central target, which one does not have to enclose. The 35 mile radius is ludicrous, and very probably a "telephone game" garbling by PR people of the rough range of SMS to a 2G cell tower given certain conditions. And targetting just a few delegates for scams, with kit that costs thousands of quid per gateway box, is stupidity. The scams thrive on large volumes because they don't net 100% of the marks.

This is a way of having VOIP on one side and what will appear to callees like (doing some simple arithmetic based upon the various photographs) a few hundred (in the site where they're on the floor) to several thousand (in the site where they're on garage shelving along the wall) seemingly legitimate cell phones in multiple locations on the other side. The far more sensible hypotheses are an (overseas) scam support operation, or a dodgy telco operator of some kind.

Everyone is debunking a claim that wasn't made.

> The Secret Service dismantled a network of more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards in the New York-area that were capable of crippling telecom systems and carrying out anonymous telephonic attacks, disrupting the threat before world leaders arrived for the UN General Assembly

> that were capable of

They didn't say this is what it was used for but that it was capable of doing so. Are we sure that's false? It sounds correct that the equipment is capable of such things.

It's an unnecessary claim to be made that only serves to promote FUD, which is why a lot of rationalists are debunking it.

That's like saying "during an arrest a car was impounded - this vehicle has the capability to plow into a school and harm children". Like yeah sure the capability is there, but without evidence of intention, why say it?

The story isn't bogus, it's just blown out of proportion. That's unfortunately how most news articles work, especially ones related to crime. The ironic part is that this article is just as much "bogus" with the assumptions it's making.

The story is bogus, the evidence isn’t*

By that measure, all stories are bogus. Even things like how a story is framed (NLP scoring for positive vs negative sentiment) would be a made up part of the story since the evidence and facts reported typically do not provide explicit evidence for whether an event should be viewed and positive or negative. This sentiment is created and added by the reporter.

If the story is espionage, but it isn't actually espionage then the story is bogus, flimflam, propaganda. Made to make you believe, i mean look, we asked all these experts too. And you are not an expert on this, so better believe us.

I thought the point of espionage is complete plausible deniability. For all you know it could be part of a bigger (psy)op to see what "lights up" when people go about sharing analyzing, critiquing this _news_..

there is literally no point discussing further here. you've made up your mind already and will defend that no matter what.

Don't be so quick to judge -- I _think_ it could all be BS too. eg: getting hooked into ufo's and alien conspiracies as a kid until Mick West came along with real pragmatic analysis.

It really seemed bogus to me, but also assumed that the Secret Service had evidence of criminal behavior that wasn’t publicized which this essentially confirms.

This is the exact feeling I had.

I have a bridge to sell you

First thing that came to my mind was SimFarm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimFarm). And I was really confused.

Reticulating splines

Given the reluctance of the US government to name the actors behind this apparently quite real sim farm, Israel would be the top suspect?

https://apnews.com/article/unga-sim-farm-threat-explainer-52...

If it is PR then it seems a bit odd. I suspect most people would care way more about them busting an SMS spam farm than protecting the communications of people at the UN. Maybe it has a specific intended audience, but protecting a UN meeting they're hosting is kinda assumed so I'm not sure who would give them much credit here.

Maybe building a case to send military assets into New York? Breaking up an alleged international spy ring threatening diplomatic meetings could be grounds to deploy types of forces not normally allowed otherwise...

This is odd, considering Stingray type devices in back of rideshares targeting phones by IMEI in developed countries is definitely real. But this article doesn't sound bogus, either. One plausible theory is that it was a closest plausible scapegoat that the authority could find, which isn't confidence inspiring.

Great to see that I'm not the only one thinking that the espionage story is totally bogus.

"an actual jacket like myself"... That's _sigh_ you're doing the thing that you're ranting at the agency for doing. At best you'd be an experienced pen tester in the tech industry, which is still good. Don't try to pretend you're living in a Hollywood drama.

We get it you have some political bent and don't like those in charge, but given the professionalism of the setup you don't know how quickly it was setup. If the place was rented last month that _is_ a $1M investment all up front. If it's over time it's still a professional setup all the same by people looking to abuse the system in some way or other for profit. I.e. unknown threat actor until proved proven otherwise.

Honestly picking at a public body bigging up the work they do for the public isn't worth a rant. If this was close enough to the UN buildings and Embassy's to cause a problem then yes. That becomes an international issue. Do you honestly think if this was just a scam farm they wouldn't take money from someone else to burn the thing and turn the city into a circus?

Besides if this was an agency with tech skill but limited funding, like a certain northern province in Asia, they'd bankroll it by scamming to start anyway wouldn't they.

I'm a little vague on how this works.

So the "bad guys" have loads of SIM cards installed into machines that can make calls or send SMS text messages, right? Doesn't each SIM card require an account with a cell phone provider in order to access "the phone network"? If not then are they getting free cell service and how do I sign up with that (ahem) provider? If so then how were those sim cards paid for? Can we follow the money?

If this is not a red flag to stop reading the news I don’t know what else is. If you know a little about SIM card industry, calls, spam sms, verification farms then you can clearly tell that this is that kind of farm and seeing that news you start to question all other spoonfed news.

Maybe they were going to use them to hack Google Maps and fake traffic jams!

An Artist Used 99 Phones to Fake a Google Maps Traffic Jam:

https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...

Google Maps Hacks by Simon Weckert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5eL_al_m7Q

>99 smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic. #googlemapshacks

> using radio “triangulation” (sic)

Why is triangulation an error?

It's literally not, which casts the rest of the author's conclusions into doubt.

Ah. I thought they meant that 'triangulation' was a spelling mistake. Like:

> The share price of Maple Leaf Gardens, which owns the Toronto Maple Leafs (sic) hockey team...

Ok, that's not the Sim Farm I expected.

I mean yeah, it was kinda obvious that they busted an ad fraud sim farm but needed to pad that resume for the bosses. There's no glory in "just" fighting fraud right now.

Ironically, the Secret Service's PR people missed a trick with the press release. They could have painted this in a way that strongly resonated with people.

Just tell people that this is the sort of setup that is used by (overseas) scammers to send messages to thousands of potential victims at a time to rope them into various scams.

Fighting scammers is a hugely popular thing with the general public. No need to dress it up with that U.N. nonsense to get the general public's approval. People wouldn't even have minded that the Secret Service ended up uncovering a scammer support operation whilst tracking down something else.

But what if they are currying favor from the administration, not the public? The POTUS had some embarrasing speech in the UN and now various Republicans call for airstrikes on the UN.

Is it within their jurisdiction though? "National security threat targeting foreign leaders and the UN" clearly is, but just fighting scammers and fraud is local LEA or FBI job

Possibly https://www.secretservice.gov/investigations/cyber

It was where they started, which was following up on threat telephone activity, false police reports directed at prominent people. For the making of which the malefactor had probably seen this kit as an ideal opportunity, but for which purpose it is massively expensive and over-provisioned.

And that's the point. No-one would have thought bad of them for following up on stuff within their bailiwick and uncovering a scam support operation. It's the old caught-the-major-bad-guy-in-a-routine-traffic-stop tale, after all.

I was kinda puzzled by the story of this setup, with all these antennas, and then "35 miles from UN". Um... those aren't those kind of antennas...

I haven't seen it suggested so I might as well say it: What if that equipment was actually being used by election campaigns to spam phones with election ads?

Well, yeah, the pictures they included with the articles is a sim farm with devices available on a TOR site the same way you lease space on a server with EC2.

So, it maybe could have been used to initiate a TDoS attack if someone rented the capacity but that's not what it was there for. They caught a subcontractor and they want us to think they caught a kingpin.

That story was overblown. But it wasn't bogus. SIM farms exist, this was one of them and it definitely wasn't put there for the general good of the population. They're common enough that the UK has specific legislation targeting acquisition and use of these devices.

Which parts of the story were embellished and who they were embellished by is an interesting question but the degree to which the original story being bogus is balanced out nicely by the degree to which this article (and the overblown title) itself is bogus.

The facts: a SIM farm was discovered. It had a very large number of active SIMS. It was found in NYC. It was active when it was found.

What is speculative/hard to verify:

It was used for specific swatting attempts. It was put there by nation state level actors rather than just ordinary criminals.

What is most likely bullshit:

That it had anything to do with the UN headquarters being close by.

But that still leaves plenty of meat on the bone.

Well put. I think both the NYT and this blog post are stretching for conclusions.

I've spent about an hour a week on this since Jan. Traced a large % of bogus news stories this year back to Reuters (fwiw) before they are picked up by other outlets and spread.

I've found legitimate stories also sourced from Reuters, but haven't found illegitimate stories NOT sourced from Reuters (in other words, they seem to originate from the same source, not sure why)

Seems like kind of a long way to say something that everybody had already here had already figured out in the comment threads when the original story ran. I'm not sure you need all the journalism kremlinology to say "these are normal devices used by organizations that do mass phone and message operations".

Reminds me of the time when I consulted with a very large newspaper chain in the US which owned a lot of papers - both left leaning and right leaning. we used to get feeds from all of the usual sources.

But the news articles themselves were "massaged" in various ways by some of the same editorial teams to suit the left-leaning or the right-leaning newspapers. The idea that completely different spin can be put to the same news - and by the same editorial teams, was a big eye opener for me.

What this taught me is that the media's primary role is to polarise people to either the left or the right so that they can be herded to vote along or act along prescribed lines. What the media and the establishment hates are people who are not either left or right leaning and who are capable of picking and choosing the narrative depending on what makes the most sense - that is, the so called centrists.

But here we are more than 2 decades later from that time and I see that the spin doctors are busier than ever and the "centrists" have almost completely disappeared.

I think this is a consequence of our plurality voting system and the resulting game theory. Polarization is the most effective strategy, and it also has a bunch of other knock on effects that benefit the people in power.

>What this taught me is that the media's primary role is to polarise people to either the left or the right so that they can be herded to vote along or act along prescribed lines.

It has nothing to do with voting or acting. It has everything to do with locking in another consistent reader (aka "ad viewer"). If you can get someone ideologically driven, they become hooked, and you can stroke their ego by feeding them confirmation bias news. It becomes addictive, where the person gets hooked on news that tells them they are right.

All of that just to get them to scroll past or listen to ads multiple times a day.

I genuinely believe if we could scooby-do style pull off the mask of who is destroying the country, it would be the media. I have seen too many people in my life (and seemingly everyone online) go off the ideological deep-end because they fell into the media's ad-farming psy-op game.

The ad viewer rationale is parallel to advertiser interests and state goals. The media will try to satisfy it's advertisers editorially as well as comply with some state narratives for state favors.

Advertisers have massive leverage over what gets published in the media through pulling and pushing their ad funding.

And "Ex" NSA/CIA/FBI employees work in all branches of communications/media and many in editorial roles like "Foreign Policy Editors/Analysts", "Law Enforcement Analyst" or as consultants for editors.

It's not just "the media" who is destroying the country, it's capitalism and their profit motive.

You might have the causality reversed. Another model might be that the electorate naturally divides into tribes, for a similar reason that competitive sports exist: people want to have a team to root for. And then media needs to adapt their message to make it seems like they're on the same "team" as the viewers/readers, because that's the only way they get clicks. So you may have the same parent media company running different spins on different brands to get left or right voters, but their only true incentive is to make the most money by getting the most clicks.

Arguably, the reason that the pre-Internet media oligopoly was more centrist was simply because it didn't face competition. If you were NBC and ran a moderate story that didn't quite please hard-core conservatives or leftists, they could...go to ABC and get the same story? But if you do that now, the MAGA types will go read Infowars instead, the leftists will go read Wonkette, and you'll be left with no viewers and no money.

You assume that the left and the right already existed - and the media is just pandering to these divisions. But I think it goes beyond that. The same media houses own the left and the right wing media and I think it is part of their agenda to polarise the public towards these two extremes.

There's a Fox News video of this on Youtube and the comments are literally completely insane. A third of them saying it was Democrats, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc. Another third saying it was immigrants and it's Democrats' fault for letting them in. Another third saying it was the Chinese. A few saying it's the woke Marxist agenda. Not a shred of sanity in sight.

There wasn't a single "hey maybe it's just some random people trying to earn money", much less a "hang on, this isn't actually a crime".

Interesting. When I read the story I was wondering how banks of sims allow for eavesdropping

You know I dont really care to "set the story straight" on lowlifes with a million modems for scams or spam or what other possible activities these were up to that are a guaranteed net negative to this world.

No one’s suggesting giving their stuff back. The Secret Service bullshitting the public is still an issue.

The media is also to blame by just taking their press release at face value and just parroting them, zero research and critical thinking at all. If law enforcement knew the press would critically report, they wouldn't bullshit us nearly as much.

Was thinking about this the entire time, not sure why they’re saying it has to be govt sponsored threat actors for a bunch of SIM cards

Didn’t understand how it’d be used for espionage either, doesn’t even make sense

sim farms are also used for certain types of seo optimisation and generating organic traffic and is a systematic way of generating infuence, much the same as the ways publication mentioned does it

I'm inclined to agree with the premise of the article.

There's no reason your super evil plan to knock out cell service couldn't just sit hidden.

Rather this just seems like a criminal scam setup that got caught.

Is it a fair accusation that the "NYTimes is lying"? That seems to imply they are complicit in a propaganda campaign with the government, which seems unlikely.

Not only that, but the Wall Street Journal ran the same story. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/un-secret-ser...

>That seems to imply they are complicit in a propaganda campaign with the government, which seems unlikely.

in what world is that unlikely? [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

> New York Times story which cites anonymous officials, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”. That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles

Stopped reading right here. That is a completely valid reason to talk to the media and happens quite often only under that specific condition.

The rest of the article is interesting and doesn't depend on the validity of that statement.

I'm curious why they are using actual modems rather than just doing it with VoWifi that merely requires a SIM card reader (pretty much just an UART)

They do this so they are harder to track & block. If they were sending over Wifi then they have to hide the IP, so they have to use VPNs, which are often blocked, etc. But with their solution they have a standard SIM on the standard cellular network, so it's nearly indistinquishable from a regular cellphone.

Among other things... having hundreds of calls and texts onramping from the same IP would be a rather large red flag.

I'm a little surprised that a behavioral analysis didn't flag these anyway. Probably did, just the networks don't care as long as they get their cut.

>having hundreds of calls and texts onramping from the same IP would be a rather large red flag.

Use VPNs? Surely paying for some subscriptions at $3/month is cheaper than renting an apartment in manhattan?

You'd probably need thousands of residential IP addresses to pass under the radar with so many SIM cards.

There are bot nets that specifically offer such services

...and perfectly legal services too, e.g. joinmassive.com, brightdata, etc. (they're used for gathering listing data from e-commerce sites, job boards, etc.)

disclosure: I'm an investor/advisor in massive.

Somehow, if you have to use residential proxies, its going to he a TOS break.

This IS the botnet that offers the service.

> networks don't care as long as they get their cut.

Pretty clear this is the case, almost all of it could be stopped overnight with a simple whitelist to people you know and a blocklist of countries and regions where you’ll never ever need to take a call from.

Seems like it would be easy for phone companies to locate SIM farms, no? They can triangulate based on the zillion texts coming from one location?

Speaking to the Secret Service agent who found this: "These aren't the SIMs you're looking for."

btw the escalator and teleprompter story being sabotage was also bogus

https://newrepublic.com/post/200833/trump-team-messed-up-un-...

fwiw - these sim machines are heavily used by ticket brokers who get unique phone numbers and tie them to ticketmaster accounts and then gets tons of verified fan codes for concerts for big tours. the big brokers import lots of these from aliexpress.

Wow, government-led mobile proxy network. Did they attempt to build a search index? :-)

Where's the list and where's the prosecution of the people on that list?

>Who are you going to trust, these Washington insiders, “people who matter”, or an actual hacker like myself?

To be honest, with the contents of the post, probably neither. It's fine if you want to point at different sources and go "ooooh WEF" and make scare quotes with your hands, but that's not actually evidence it's just a description of your existing bias.

Frankly, the overstating of the threat in the original article is frankly about as bad as the overstating of the article being bogus. The feds shut down some sim farm. Is is a massive national security threat? Probably no, that's a bit of an overstatement. The NYTimes ran a clickbaity article, is it bogus? Probably no, that's a bit of an overstatement.

I don't understand why people like this get so wound up by the way places like the NYTimes write up articles. This is the way journalism is written, you don't write articles that say "X happened, but it's probably fine!". You write "X happened, and it could have Y impact!". People are smart enough to read the article and understand, we don't need you making baseless accusations about their sourcing.

Exactly! Thank you! :)

I believe we're making very similar points in essence - see my other reply. Personally, I'd say that foreign security services having some involvement in this is slightly more plausible. If nothing else, just because some are basically nation-wide gang states, which very well could be doing this just for monetary reasons. Seems a bit more likely, not much, than a fed agency trying to do something (unclear what the author claim is about the point of the lie - "hype it up", I guess), concluding that lying about what they know in a case is a good way to do it, and choosing this case and this particular lie.

Is there an rss feed for this blog?

The Trump Secret Service is not a trustworthy institution based on the fact that they "accidentally" erased all their comms from Jan 6th 2021

Why spend the effort to refute this? No one who is going to believe the original story is going to believe this.

I believed the original story. Now I don’t. So it helped me.

It will never happen, but I'd love to see the NYT follow up their story and pit some of what Graham says against their cadre of experts and see what parts of the story they agree on and which ones they don't.

I would think the people at the Times would want to know if they are just being useful idiots here.

Last time the NYT needed to correct a major story (the 'starving children in Gaza' turned out to be a boy with a genetic abnormality) they issued their correction on the '@nytimespr' X account.

https://x.com/NYTimesPR/status/1950311365756817690

Now I understand what Chomsky was saying when he said most mainstream news media in the West is just propaganda.

It's actually a combination of warning and bait, and it's not the first story like that nor will it be the last. Picking at the details of it misses the point.

The real question here is who and what it was intended to warn off, and you'll never get a real answer to that.

The answer to that may be “no one”. The more likely scenario is they exaggerated a mundane crime into an exciting one.

They have all year to do that. The giveaway there is something odd about this is the timing.

The timing is the President went to the UN and this makes leadership look like they stopped a big threat for some attaboys.

You make it sound like there must be a real high-Level strategic reason behind this. More likely it’s just a low level face-saving exercise. Someone probably spent 10s of millions of Secret Service budget chasing some threatening text messages sent to government officials, and in the end what they have to show for it is taking down a $1 million spam operation. So they hype it as a cyber-espionage threat anyway to make themselves look good.

You have a mind for government work!

> Picking at the details of it misses the point.

I ask god to make the people I bullshit all agree with you about this. Please don't pay attention to the details; in fact, they were probably placed there by our enemies to distract us from the story (that I told you.) In fact, you're a genius, and this goes deeper than even I thought. I'm going to need access to your bank account.

And china writes a blog entry on substack. And now hacker news and ycombinator are on the Chinese side of things, along with their bots. Downvoting and shadow banning. What else is new?

> Technically, it may even be legitimate enterprise, being simply a gateway between a legitimate VoIP provider and the mobile phone network.

No. This is not how any of this works

Just use SIP?

Yes, that’s how this works, and it uses SIP.

The boxes all basically turn the cell lines into SIP trunks, then they’re used for grey routes for international VoIP providers to dodge termination fees into the target country and get cheaper per-minute rates, because the game of pennies really adds up in telecoms traffic.

Ah I see, "grey routes" makes more sense

in the original article they had to do explain the threat carefully to help guide their readers go through the same mental gymnastics loops to reach their absurb conclusion.

Once a Chinese grad student explained to me a difference he noted between Chinese and American citizens. He said in China no really reads or watches 24/7 major news outlets in China. They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life. He said Americans seem to get really emotional over content in the press and seem to really struggle with the idea of propaganda / journalism in the news.

I tend to agree with student, NYT and major news outlets are clearly used for propaganda and if you sit back and look at it from perhaps another angle it makes sense , why wouldn’t a world super power with a massive government apparatus use media to influence and control citizen behavior?

So yes the anonymous experts, the anonymous intelligence experts, the experts on CNN panels .. etc etc. It’s the government pushing a narrative for a purpose. My two cents live your life and spend your precious emotional energy for the people you care about around you. Do things in your local community and help when and where you can.

While I think I agree with most of what you're saying, I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme, so I'll just leave a quote from the absolutely fantastic 20 lessons from the 20th century by Timothy Snyder:

> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

The important point is to distinguish between truth and the co-ordinated release of information in the NYT, BBC etc. The latter is very much intended to send a message, but it is not to be taken as literal truth.

I cannot about the NYT, but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available.

So much so that the left and the right accuse the BBC of biasing the other in equal measures!

If you want to talk about bias in the UK press then you’re better off looking towards The Sun, The Mail and anything owned by Murdoch (that guy has done so much damage to the world it’s unreal).

> BBC is one of the most impartial sources available.

I really hope that is sarcasm. BBC is highly skewed to the left. No debate on that. Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right?

I hope you're being sarcastic. If you do want a debate, there's plenty of research on bias at the BBC, and there are examples of bias left and right, pun intended.

> Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right?

They're saying that the BBC is relatively impartial, not that it is biased to the right.

If you're saying that the BBC has left-biased stories, and therefore the claim of impartiality requires evidence of counterbalancing right-biased stories, I think you need to start by providing evidence of the former. (Even if you think it's blindingly obvious that the left-biased content exists, your examples will clarify what would be required to balance it out.)

Is the BBC highly skewed to the left, or is reality?

I don’t think this is the flex you think it is.

their treatment of Israel-Palestine

or, both in modern times and during 'The Troubles', Ireland.

Biased does not mean it has to skew to a certain political leaning all of the time.

> BBC is highly skewed to the left. No debate on that.

The fact that you argued that shows there is some debate. ;)

> Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right?

No, because my point is that it isn’t biased to the left nor right.

What the BBC does is offer both sides of the political spectrum to have equal time sharing their arguments.

If you think that’s biased then what you’re actually saying is that the left deserves less time than the right. Thus it’s not the BBC exhibiting bias.

BBC is impartial till it reports on anything which has to do with its old colonies. Then it becomes high brow British aristocrat weapon of propaganda.

The left accuse the BBC of bias because, eg, the new Green Party leader has not been on any relevant BBC politics programs while Farage and other right wing politicians are regular fixtures.

The right accuse the BBC of bias because they fact-check them when they lie.

These things are not equivalent.

The BBC has lost a lot of credibility over the last decade or so. I can completely understand why they rolled over (often pre-emptively) to placate a Tory government that talked a lot about defunding them, but ultimately it has not served them well.

The newspaper situation in the UK is diabolical for sure.

> but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available.

I almost spit out my coffee in laughter reading this. Entirely ridiculous assertion. You are completely blind to the fact that the BBC is insanely partial by picking and choosing what it reports on and what it doesn't. This is just level 2 detection of bias that you aren't reaching, imagine all the other things you're missing.

You’d need to have literally infinite resources if you wanted to avoid a situation of having to pick and choose what you report on.

What matters is that all sides of the debate get representation. And the BBC does this almost to a fault.

The ironic thing is the fact that BBC is so good at doing this, everyone feels their voice is marginalised and then complains of bias.

So when people call the BBC “biased”, and as ferociously as you have, what they’re actually saying is “the BBC airs too many opinions that oppose my own biases”

>the co-ordinated release of information

That hit the nail right on the head, with ONLY 6 companies controlling all the mainstream media. News are just like coordinated company memo.

[flagged]

Unless you get your eyes open to Intuitionist Math and then you realize math isn't "true".

Then again... where in the trillion or so parameters of any LLM is The Law of the Excluded Middle that classical math requires to be "true".

Even more comical is that there are certainly embeddings in there _about_ an excluded middle. With thousands of dimensions and billions of values in each one.

Lord help us all... Lol

Thank you for reminding me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299539

and here I was just going to say that math requires numbers, and numbers are often made up

It is possible to accept that one can’t know the absolute, complete, detailed truth without giving up on identifying and rejecting lies.

That’s the whole authoritarian / fascist shtick: if you can’t be 100% certain that no formulation of any vaccine has ever increased illness, then “vaccines kill people” is just as true as “vaccines save lives”.

I don’t need to have personally reviewed all records of every single version of every single vaccine to confidently assert the two statements are not remotely equivalent in accuracy.

Both statements as written are true: vaccines do kill people and vaccines do save lives.

If you insert the implicit “all”, then both are false: not all vaccines save lives and not all vaccines kill people.

But your knowledge of medicine is quite deep if you know the relative rates of vaccines with zero deaths ever versus the rate at which defective vaccines are produced. Do you have a good source you can share?

So many fallacies. To be charitable, I will assume you are just trying to wind people up with nonsensical rhetoric.

There are no zero-death vaccines, as you know. There are also no zero-death diseases, as you probably know. The relative rates of death between the two are not even close, as you know.

relativism is indeed wrong, but thinking that because knowing the truth is somehow “hard”, that you should throw out objectivism is also wrong.

Well, Snyder himself is a bit of a propagandist with his ridiculous double genocide theory.

Here's a longer discussion[1] with examples of how he is an ideologue. (I would have liked to post a reply to the people responding to me but alas, I cannot.)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1brdk1l/comm...

Indeed, everybody except me is a propagandist with their ridiculous 'saying things I don't believe or want to agree with'.

I, on the other hand, am always right.

There are many academics who disagree with his characterisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory#Bloodla...

The point is, he's an ideologue (who may end up being right even if I think he's not) which makes it a bit ironic to mention in the context of talking about propaganda.

Indeed, everybody except me is a ideologue with whom at least 2 academics and a reddit poster disagree. I, on the other hand, am always right, of course!

Additionally, as a jew, I was raised on an ironclad ideological assertion that the holocaust was the worst thing people have ever done to each other, and no genocides have or will ever rival it. I'm keenly aware that there is a vested interest in maintaining that view [0], even if it is not true (many academics say that an equal, perhaps greater number died in The Holodomor, for example – not that that need be true for the two to be compared).

Take your own link, for example: it describes David Katz, a holocaust scholar, who commented, "Snyder flirts with the very wrong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin". This is just a dude saying his opinion, even though a moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin is not, in fact, "very wrong".

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_uniqueness_debate

Stalin is very, very, very different from Hitler.

(Again I cannot reply to the comment below, but my point is not that I am not ideological; of course I am. But Snyder is also extremely ideological and uses his history to push a very particular kindideologues of politics, which is ironic given the context of the thread. )

(Adding another edit since I can't reply! But again, I don't understand why my interlocutor cannot understand that both sides can be ideological and that one needs to take that ideology into account when evaluating claims. Snyder is one such ideologue who consciously seeks to minimise Polish and Ukrainian collaboration with the Holocaust and claim that Jewish Soviet partisans fighting the Nazis were "criminals", see: [1] for examples (also an ideological source--of course--but some of the quotes from Snyder are really quite damning. ))

[1]: https://jacobin.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/

Your entire reply to my post, from beginning to end, is 1 sentence, quoted below for posterity (before subsequent edits anyways, I can't keep track of all your changes made after this reply):

> Stalin is very, very, very different from Hitler

We see that you're literally ideologically repeating, almost verbatim, an ideological opinion, while complaining that someone else is an ideologue. Thus, your comment is extremely ironic given the context of this thread and your prior complaints. Indeed, you are the only one who appears to be the ideologue, and so all we have to go on as far as Snyder, are the naked, unsupported assertions of an ideologue.

Sure, stalin is very, very, very different from hitler, just like an isosceles triangle is very, very, very different from a scalene triangle. Any 2 different things in the universe are different by definition, and "very" is nebulous, therefore your logic also means that anything can be described as "very, very, very different" from everything else. A truly meaningless statement.

In short, the evidence presented indicates that Snyder is not an ideologue, and there aren't actually any issues with what Snyder is saying, only ideologues who either disagree with what he says or don't like that he's saying it.

For example, Stalin probably killed a lot more communists.

That's preposterous. Hitler intentionally created extermination camps, which targeted "Bolsheviks" above all. He then forced his armies on a bloody rampage into Russia, where he overextended and was defeated, after violently murdering millions.

There is a dominant thread of anti-intellectualism that lumps virtually all WW2 deaths as "victims of communism". This is total nonsense, obviously, promoted by neo-Nazi and Nazi sympathizer groups.

Stalin likely killed more of his own people than Hitler did if you count artificial famines, which I do. This shouldn't be surprising because Stalin was in power for longer and had a greater degree of unchecked power over the Soviet Union than Hitler ever did. Of course, many of the people murdered by either regime weren't actually communists.

> There is a dominant thread of anti-intellectualism that lumps virtually all WW2 deaths as "victims of communism". This is total nonsense, obviously, promoted by neo-Nazi and Nazi sympathizer groups.

That's not what I'm doing and I'd advise you to review the HN guidelines, particularly the one that reads, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Lecturing about "good faith" in the same comment that equates (extreme) economic mismanagement with intentional mass murder. Spare us the sanctimony.

Are you consistent and therefore interpret the Great Depression as a mass murder of Americans by the government?

> Lecturing about "good faith" in the same comment that equates (extreme) economic mismanagement with intentional mass murder. Spare us the sanctimony.

The 'assume good faith' guideline pertains to our fellow HN posters, not stalin.

As far as I know, it's totally ok to conclude stalin was not acting in good faith when he killed millions of undesirables.

> drew scholarly criticism for being seen as suggesting a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust.

That's a propagandist?

I'm not educated, let alone a historian, but there do seem to be some parallels here and it seems like the most disparate factor would be the very specific oppression of Jewish people. But the Soviet mass murders involved the death of a huge number of 'undesirables'; most just happened not to be Jewish. They were thrown into unspeakable conditions of torture, murder, starvation, etc. so I can see why Snyder would see them as similar.

Could you please stop repeatedly editing multiple comments to respond to replies? The "reply" function exists for a reason, and your backedits disrupt the directional read of a thread, confusing the discussion.

If the HN system tells you that you're posting too fast, and you need to slow down, that also exists for a reason: you are, and you do. You can still reply (so please stop saying you cannot), you just need to slow down, be patient, and wait. It's ok to wait. Don't try to evade the restrictions. Wait.

I'm just replying to make my position clear since you replied with very misleading content. It's not my fault HN wants to be an echo chamber and makes it difficult to respond to people when they are wrong.

Looks to me like you can use the "reply" function just fine. Good job! Keep it up.

That is actually orwellian as fuck.

This reminded me of a YouTube clip I watched years ago. It was basically a retired KGB agent explaining how the media purposely puts out conflicting stories. This breaks the brain of the citizens, and they're unable to know what is true.

We indeed see this here in the US. I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively. I can choose what I want to believe is true, though.

Known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

This wikipedia article needs some work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Firehose_of_false...

Be the change you wish to see in the world

I'd also put Gish Gallop in there somewhere as well. Or "unfalsifiable" is also certainly in the neighborhood.

I would expect to see conflicting narratives in any country with free press. Why would we expect different outlets with different biases to run consistent narratives?

Deniability and having a response for different lines of criticism. It derails the critic who operates under the assumption of a consistent narrative and meaningful arguments. It gives the believer something to hold on under most scenarios. It removes truth and reality grounding from equation. Its diabolically effective.

Edit after down votes: The paragraph above was meant on why would one expect conflicting narratives not from different sources, as the Parent Comment stated, but rather from supposedly official sources or propaganda outlets. My bad, must have read the comment on a hurry.

I agree it’s healthy for Americans to be more skeptical of journalism, especially the sources they think they trust. But a key difference between NYT and Xinhua in China is that NYT explicitly doesn’t want to be duped. Sure reporters are lazy and will run an article quickly about a breaking story they get from a government tip. But if they find out it was wrong the editors will be pissed and likely print an update or even retraction. That’s the key difference between independent media and government propaganda.

which is fine and all but majority of people will take that first piece of news and not see the updated information / article piece. The damage is done at that point.

Sure, the damage is done, but that doesn't make it _propaganda_.

Retractions are a blimp in the sea of falsehood. 30 second retraction statement has no weight against 1 day of false narratives.

The only way to create a true counter weight is the amount of time encompassing the false hood should be the same amount of time given to the retraction. 1 day of false hood should equal 1 day of retraction.

Will this mode of operation exist, most likely not. The closest the USA had to such would be the Fairness Doctrine. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

> But a key difference between NYT and Xinhua in China is that NYT explicitly doesn’t want to be duped

The NYT intentionally runs stories that are highly dubious or they know to be false, then later issue a small retraction in a footnote.

The latest fake news they published was the story around Zohran Mamdani where they used hacked data from Colombia University to claim he checked "black" on the admission documents to gain an unfair advantage. That's because they are partisan hacks. I don't necessarily like Zohran, but he represented a threat to mainstream Democrats therefore the NYT had to do something about him.

Yes, when the Russian military was assembling outside of Ukraine, I was chatting with a lot of Russians on social media who were convinced (by their media) that it was just a normal drill, and that the Americans were just buying into their own government propaganda. Over the course of those conversations, Russians would say things like, "We know our media is propaganda, but you don't know that yours is just as propagandist". It was interesting that the goal of Russian propaganda wasn't to get Russians to believe that their media was infallible, but rather to get them to believe that there were no facts, that the truth was subjective, that every country's media was equally propagandist.

I saw a similar theme in right-wing American propaganda wherein American conservatives know that their media is biased, but they assume that "mainstream media" is just as bad.

It seems like in all of these cases, propagandists aren't trying to get people to believe the propaganda, but rather to discredit the entire idea of objective facts or reliable reporting.

There should not be conflicting narratives on the press about things like if the COVID vaccines work or not, or if the disease kills people or not. Or if the world is warming.

Why not? Two reasonable people can disagree about the cause of some complex issue even without the media.

When one side has to ignore all of science, that has build Western society and allowed it to live in unnaturally dense populations with unnatural life spans, that is not disagreeing on cause. That has driften to theological/emotional belief in something. Keep those out of news.

Because there is no real doubt about those.

If some media comes disagreeing, they are blatantly lying. Also, there should not be diverging narratives about whether if you jump off a cliff, you will fall.

there is more scientific doubt about the true effectiveness of COVID vaccines than you think.

Do you have any study that found any of the 3 western ones ineffective?

The effect is so strong and universal that everybody finds it.

No, I don't really argue about individual studies with individuals on the internet. What I'm describing is the current consensus opinion of the larger medical and research community.

Interesting. But how should we determine which narrative is correct, and whether conflict should be allowed? Perhaps some sort of "Ministry of Truth" in the federal government could do the job?

>like if the COVID vaccines work or not

Okay, if there is any such thing as objective truth then this (by which i mean your statement that there should not be conflicting narratives, not the statement about the vaccine itself) is objectively false.

The COVID vaccines were pressed into widespread public distribution on an emergency use authorization; any other newly-developed vaccine would have spent years mired in clinical trials and debate. The first COVID vaccines deployed would have taken even longer because they were also the first mRNA vaccines. There was not by any means a consensus that they were safe or effective, only that the risk was justifiable in light of a sudden global health crises.

In a free country, people can publish whatever nonsense they want.

In a healthy society the professional media shouldn't be composed of lying crackpots.

Is there any “healthy society” that prohibits lying in the media?

Plenty of them had the government following the money that pays for all the gifting and arresting the fraudsters, yes. Lying for the love of the sport isn't a crime, for deluding a society into giving you money and power is.

And also have a diversified professional media, so that the money leaves a track.

I don't even know what what a media organization "lying for deluding society into giving [the media organization] money and power" refers to or what kind of criminal codes might exist against it.

I don’t think it’s some master scheme. They are trying to make money more than anything else. So they distort the truth to what sells the most. That just happens to be one of two major ideologies that hate each other. The effect is the same, but the motivations, and thus how you counteract, are different.

>They are trying to make money more than anything else.

Who knows what some people will do these days, just for that.

Well, we actually have a pretty good idea, without all the gory details.

But I know what you mean, it's not too easy for multiple sources to be on the same page even when they really try sometimes.

However, only the few most popular are what most people listen to, and those biggies are usually well aware of each others' stance. On an ongoing basis. And if a combined effort were to take place nothing else would have a chance.

Sometimes even sharing personnel, concurrently and/or sequentially, which can also lay the groundwork for approaches that seem competitive but are really complementary. As designed with a single, possibly obscured agenda designed from the ground up to deceive.

Things like this might be why "trust but verify" may have to be deprecated, and reversed to "verify and still be skeptical" if the propaganda keeps getting worse.

> I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively.

The parenthetical is doing a lot of work. The only real truth is that which you experience with your own senses. For everything else, you are choosing to believe somebody else's truth. It's worth remembering that whenever you consume media.

You can't really believe your own senses either. Science is our only systematic way to arrive at reliable information, you really can't know anything, but you can construct reproduceable experiments that increase your confidence enough that those facts can be relied upon to construct more complex theories by linking experimental results together, and those links increase your confidence because their co-occurrences help validate each other and when experimental results diverge you can also reduce your confidence deconstruct or iterate on the theory.

Science relies on our senses too - that's all the data we get. But yes, science is a way of compensating for bias in our individual perception and building durable models that make useful predictions even for phenomena we can't directly perceive.

Be wary of overgeneralizing scientific conclusions, though. Science may say that the measles vaccine is 99.7% effective, but if your kid comes down with a rash 3 days after a high fever and a week after being exposed to a known measles case, it starts from head down, and they've got white spots in their mouth - congratulations, they're probably in the 0.3%. Likewise, science may say that men are on average better in spatial and mathematical reasoning than women, but if you meet a top-notch woman programmer in your job, believe your experience, not the science. That science makes a conclusion about the averages doesn't prevent you from having an outlier right in front of you.

Yes, also there's science the social system, and science the method. I'm only really speaking about the portion where senses are prone to a bunch of different failure modes, and science is a way to compile a bunch of sensory observations as a form of parity check or error correction mechanism. Science the social system also has failure modes, but the system is the only thing we have that has shown any actual progression in its results, and has a strong track record.

One thing that’s interesting is that if you intentionally consume media with different viewpoints, you can often glean what’s true and what’s not by comparing how they each spin the story, because the opposite sides will almost never be in coordinated collusion about their misrepresentations.

>> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.

That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.

During covid the Governor of Michigan banned shopping for gardening supplies. This raised a big fuss. One of my FB friends shared a reporters story saying the ban was fake news and that the order did not include anything like that. He even provided a link directly to the order itself so you could see for yourself. Most people would not bother because hey, he went to the source! I followed the link, found the paragraph - which was super clear and explicit about the gardening thing - and posted a direct quote of it in response. I lost a FB friend that day. Facts are hard to find (you must do it yourself) and just piss people off when they don't like them.

> That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.

You’re implying they don’t include a video of what they claim he said and any reputable news source pretty much always does.

Don’t get your news from Facebook and Twitter and you’ll be starting from a much better position.

Indeed, source very much still matters. "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

"Qui bono," who benefits, is a great question to ask about the organization and the story when reading it, especially when combined with Hanlon's Razor. Tend not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. And when malice is reasonable, then make sure to ask Who Benefits from the malice. If that's difficult to determine or the benefit seems small in comparison to likelihood of human stupidity, assume human stupidity.

Is the organization historically trustworthy? (MSNBC and Fox News, when not being talking heads and not talking about the current culture war buzzwords, tend to do good reporting.) If the story is wrong, is it reasonable to assume it's because someone somewhere misread something, mistyped something, misstated something, or otherwise made a mistake? (Perhaps the story breaking or otherwise too recent for slow, quality research. Perhaps the reporter, while trained in research, is not expert enough to come to the correct conclusions of their research, or is not researching or can't find nonexistent peer criticism to the research, both big problems in science reporting, especially when the reporting is of initial findings that haven't been peer reviewed.) If the story is not accidentally wrong through human stupidity, then qui bono, who benefits from malice? (Does it present a politician as unhinged or out of control? Does it ? And especially, would the story impact wealth, either to hurt it or protect it?) Sources like PBS, which (while they are NOT immune) are impacted far less by click-through ad rates and through funding partially derived from donations and public funding have less incentive to push narratives that benefit particular monied and/or political interests, or foreign sources like BBC or AJ don't get as much benefit when it comes to stories about US events that don't tie directly back to their organizational/political benefits. (When these are NOT the case, of course, then malice become far more easy to assume for these sources!)

So is it more likely that Governor Whitmer targeted gardening supply stores during the early pandemic because she was testing/pushing the limits of government power to limit the freedom of citizens to go where they wished or to expand government's economic control over the American marketplace, or is it more likely that there was political power to be derived from presenting the image of the governor as petty, tyrranical, and nonsensical? Or is it more likely that everything, both the initial EO's presentation, the angry response to it, and the fact-checking of the response, were victims of our human foibles?

Personally, I think it's far more likely a mix of human stupidity in writing the EO in a way where it was easy to misread the EO as specifically targeting gardening stores, combined with a malice decision to push hard on what was probably originally a misreading because it presented a view of the governor that worked to politically tear down her trustworthiness as she was taking actions that were having an economic impact on monied interests in the state (the EO essentially tried to turn big box stores into grocery-only stores to limit gathering, which during the Fog of War of the early pandemic was a reasonable health goal even if years of hindsight have given us a far better view of how impactful that actually was or not). Plus some stupidity on pushing back far too hard on the fact-checking response to give the impression that the EO didn't even mention gardening (it completely did, very clearly, in the list of attempts to pre-empt loopholes to the EO's attempt to limit the uses of large stores in order to minimize the reasons for people to gather in them to limit crowd sizes). Also, the Facebook/Twitter viral news sources get their money from clicks, so their stories tend to be far more about pathos than ethos or logos and truth is all-too-often a casuality for them.

I'm sorry about the length of my thoughts here. Bevity is the soul of wit, and I'm a rather witless man.

But what if you don't know the facts? And how can you if you don't have eyes on the situation or know someone who does. I'd rather go with Mark Twain:

> 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.

Fantastic quote. Spot on. Thanks for sharing it!

> I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme

That applies to anything, when taken to an extreme.

I can’t think of a worse person to cite that principle; Snyder has lied and evaded historians with basic inquiries about his work.

As we speak, his official position is that Russia and China are both engaged in genocides and another state categorically is not and you should be punished for inquiring. I don’t think that position is going to age well, for him or for you.

The propaganda is so effective because the propagandists can rely on your lack of basic rigor and media bubble to present abstractions as a real moral position. And there’s no way to say this without hurting feelings and causing people to get defensive. Look up what any historian who isn’t on tv has say about Snyder’s work on libgen, it’s not sensationalist or context-free, it’s just someone going through and documenting mendacious claims and poor historiography: https://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Omer...

What is telling is not that one reviewer can be authoritative, but more that the response is "Shut up and go away, I'm trying to have a media career." Pretending to be a controversial truth-teller speaking for principles is how Americans like to be propagandized to and how we like to become niche celebrities instead of doing work that requires accuracy and rigor.

...and let someone else pay the price in the end for letting these things happen unchecked. Perhaps your children :)

This. I can't keep myself from quoting another 20th century lesson from Snyder:

> Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

you caring a lot doesn't change reality in your favor. You get one vote that you can exercise once a year or so. Thats about all the agency you have on the wider world (and probably rightly so, if its to be proportional to the population)

Being informed just enough to choose the less horrible of the two clowns the systems presents you... takes very little effort. Everything past that is a waste of brain cycles. Spend your energy on things you can affect. If you care about your children then spend the emotional energy on your friends, family and community. It'll help them more

That's right, one person caring and not acting doesn't change reality, neither does one person caring and acting (most of the time). A relatively small number of people caring and acting, however, can change the course of history.

While it is in nobody's interest to care, individually, we're all better off if we care and act just a little bit.

i assume caring and acting here you mean in the context of larger issues. bc effort spent on your immediate world definitely does change reality

there is no mechanism past voting to change the big picture. Nor should there be. The person going around with the megaphone convincing other people their right inherantly feels their feelings are more right than others'

And you dont need to care an aweful lot when it comes to voting. Any caring past that is basically like getting worked up about the weather

> there is no mechanism past voting to change the big picture.

I hope I’m not reading this too narrowly, but this seems too reductionist. Everything probably rolls up to a vote at some point, sure, but there are lots of things citizens can do to change the big picture between filling out their ballots every few years.

During the Great Depression, protests were a driver of policy change (New Deal, labor rights…) that still endure, and protests laid the ground work for the American Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.

Ultimately, these work because politicians do need to win elections, sure. But there are plenty of ways to organize or be a part of a movement to change society that aren’t simply filling in a bubble in a ballot box.

This is straight nonsense, why do you think Jimmy Kimmel had his show reinstated yesterday? The pendulum is constantly pushed and pulled in different directions outside of elections, if you decide you don’t need to care all you do is give way to those that do.

That's silly. Talking about such things; with friends, family, online, etc; raises awareness of it. And the more people that are aware of such things, the more likely they are to vote against it. So if you're relying on votes to change things, then discussing it helps.

i think when it comes to big picture stuff it makes sense that everyone has proportionate input. just bc you care a lot, doesnt mean you should have more say

just make your opinion, cast your vote and let other people make their own decisions. Feeling youre right and gotta go convince all the wrong people is sort of inherantly a bad selfrighteous place to come from

EDIT:

I think there is a broader sentiment that we all just have to care more and everything will get sorted out. I think recent history hasn't bore that out. People seem to care and have extremely strong emotional opinions about everything now a days.. and I don't think in the net it's brought anything positive

What your Chinese friend isn't saying is that all those Substack writers in the US would be disappeared into Chinese gulag's. The US has a strong freedom of speech clause baked into its core governance system...When I was fifteen I'd be subscribed to five different punk zines and would be creating mix-tapes from 10 different sources (and much of it wildly offensive and political).

And yet people are getting fired over making comments about Charlie Kirk on social media.

By the government?

No, but by Party supporters running campaigns against their employers. Or by the use of the administrative state to pressure the employers.

Government officials are specifically calling for it.

In some cases, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplinary_actions_for_comme...

> Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that any non-citizens who celebrated Kirk's death would be immediately deported…

> Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated on Katie Miller's podcast and in subsequent Department of Justice announcements that she intended to "target" speech against Kirk following his death as hate speech…

Plus teachers in public schools and universities.

Since the very clear, repeatedly court-upheld, very specific wording of the 1st amendment protects free speech for anyone at all residing inside the United States (Yes, even including illegal immigrants, not to mention residents and visitors, though by voicing a politically disliked opinion they might risk becoming fast-track targets for deportation through other "formal" justifications) and also offers no legal classification for what exactly "hate speech" is, both of these lying, corrupt, inept, would-be parrots of Tinpot Trump are at least legally wrong.

It's amusing on the one hand, considering the hatred their very boss and most of the MAGA types poured on cancel culture and its notions of speech that shouldn't be allowed as hate speech, only to now reveal one more show of whining, gross hypocrisy.

On the other hand it's also deeply worrisome, to see key enforcers of federal U.S. law being so completely mendacious and cavalier about the actual legal part of their jobs in that very same territory.

Cancel culture won. Conservatives are not being hypocritical for having been against it and now for it. If your opponent is using an effective weapon and you don't also pick up that weapon, you will lose.

Republicans started cancel culture. It really gained steam in 2001 when they cancelled the Dixie Chicks for being anti-war (turns out they were right). So I guess you're right, the left adopted it after realizing they'd lose if they didn't use such an effective weapon against fascists.

Yep. Imagine I punch you. You say: "Don't punch me". I punch you again. Then you punch me back. I say: "Aren't you being hypocritical? I thought you were against punching."

The path forward at this point is for the left to admit they made a mistake, apologize, and work to negotiate a new set of ground rules.

Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies#Tinky_Winky_contro...

Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_comments_on_Georg...

Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries

Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_kneeling_...

Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O%27Connor_on_Satu...

But sure, the left invented it.

It's not about who "invented" it. It's about who started the most recent round.

We had a big discussion about cancel culture just a few years ago, where the left responded to complaints about it by saying: "cancel culture doesn't exist", "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", "free speech isn't hate speech", "you're just saying that because you're a racist/sexist/etc."

In other words: "Our ideology justifies large-scale, systematic application of public shaming for mild noncompliance with our ideology. We aren't going to stop doing this."

A lot of prominent left-wingers simply lack the moral authority to complain. What goes around comes around.

If you, specifically, were complaining about left-wing cancel culture, I'll grant you have the moral authority to complain about right-wing cancel culture as well.

> It's not about who "invented" it. It's about who started the most recent round.

Starting when? Several of the examples are quite recent; there's no point in my life where people of both political persuasions weren't boycotting or criticizing things.

> freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences

This remains entirely true. The First Amendment protects us from government-applied consequences. Being fired for being an asshole by a private employer has always been kosher. Being fired because the FCC threatens your employer with revocation of their broadcast licenses over protected speech has not.

>Several of the examples are quite recent

The only one I'd consider recent is US national anthem kneeling.

I'm in my mid-30s. I only have the vaguest memories of cancel culture around 9/11. I have very vivid memories of progressive cancel culture during the late Obama administration and onwards. It very much was not a one-off sort of thing. It was a systematic practice which was systematically justified. The 9/11 stuff died down as 9/11 receded into the past. Progressive cancel culture only started dying down when Elon Musk bought Twitter.

I agree that progressive cancel culture was mostly not implemented with the help of the government. I agree that Brendan Carr overstepped in a way that wasn't a simple case of "tit for tat", and I think he should be fired.

On the other hand, consider Karen Attiah. If you took what she said, but replace "white men" in her statement with "black women", and imagine a white man saying it, he absolutely would've been risking his job just a few years ago. People were fired for far less.

> I only have the vaguest memories of cancel culture around 9/11.

Maybe you agreed with the canceling enough it wasn't noticeable; I cited two specific examples directly related to that day. It was… not a fun time to be anti-war.

Go back a few years and you'll find further prominent examples, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppy_Episode

> On the other hand, consider Karen Attiah.

I disagree with her firing, but there are no First Amendment concerns here. The Washington Post is free, under the First Amendment, to be shitty, even with regards to employment. They canceled her, as is their right, and as our ape evolutionary cousins do despite a lack of language, social media, or political parties. "I don't like you, so I won't associate with you" is deeply ingrained in us.

>Maybe you agreed with the canceling enough it wasn't noticeable; I cited two specific examples directly related to that day. It was… not a fun time to be anti-war.

I was roughly 12 years old when Iraq was invaded. I was sitting in class staring at the clock and waiting for recess. It was a different political era from my perspective, and it feels a little disingenuous that you keep harping on it. It seems to me that there's been significant turnover in the US political power players since that time, so the hypocrisy accusations don't seem to land very well. Remember that Trump gained popularity with the GOP electorate in part due to his willingness to unequivocally condemn Bush & friends for their middle east misadventures.

>"I don't like you, so I won't associate with you" is deeply ingrained in us.

Sure. But when explaining why they fired Attiah, the Post wrote: "the Company-wide social media policy mandates that all employee social media postings be respectful and prohibits postings that disparage people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics".

They're applying the exact standard that progressives requested. It appears to me that they are actually applying it in an even-handed way. If I was a journalist circa 2017, and I made a post suggesting that America was violent because of people caring too much about "black women who espouse hatred and violence", in the wake of a black women recently being murdered, then the risk of progressive dogpiling, and my subsequent termination, would've been extremely high. It's not respectful, and it disparages on the basis of protected characteristics. Remember, Al Franken lost his job (even after he apologized!) for things like squeezing a woman's waist at a party.

I think you're a little fixated on the government thing, as cancel culture is generally speaking a non-governmental phenomenon, regardless of who is doing it to who. At least recently in the US.

> I was roughly 12 years old when Iraq was invaded. I was sitting in class staring at the clock and waiting for recess. It was a different political era from my perspective, and it feels a little disingenuous that you keep harping on it.

It's a little disingenuous to go "I only have the vaguest memories of cancel culture around 9/11" and "I have very vivid memories of progressive cancel culture during the late Obama administration", in that case. I, similarly, have few memories of paying for health insurance when I was in middle school.

> They're applying the exact standard that progressives requested.

Maybe! But describing him as a "white man" is accurate, as describing Obama as a "black man" would be uncontroversial. If you start talking about white/black men as monolithic groups, you start getting into trouble.

> I think you're a little fixated on the government thing, as cancel culture is generally speaking a non-governmental phenomenon…

I am, because the people who whined incessantly about that phenomenon are now weilding governmental power to do the same thing, in a way that is clearly far less acceptable legally.

As I said in another reply above,

where's the room for a firm set of beliefs and moral framework, or perhaps a principled stand against or for something by this dogshit logic of yours?

The only important thing is to get them votes and followers then? The conservatives can fuck off just as hard as the radical left if that's all that matters.

>moral framework

Tit-for-tat is a moral framework.

So is Nazism, that doesn't mean all moral frameworks are created equal. Also, tit for tat is a type of cynical pragmatism, not a thing based on some principle (misguided or not) which is a basic requirement of a moral framework; the notion of doing something or not doing it because you feel it to be right, regardless of benefit.

well so much for a principled stand against or for something by this dogshit logic. I guess the only important thing is to cheer on whatever gets the votes, never mind how badly all things deteriorate as a result?

I'm no fan of democrat progressive culture, but if the crap you describe is what passes for a bottom line in the conservative camp, then it's garbage either way.

I’m not a libertarian

What does being a libertarian have to do with it? Do you take as for granted that unless you're a libertarian, you shouldn't bother with at least a few firm moral principles in your politics? That anything goes so long as it garners votes and social media "engagement"?

Winning is the only moral principle. On the scale of human history nothing else matters.

Even if gov isn't involved directly - it could very easily press some corps for such firings.

As we've already seen.

I agree with you. I get tired of people complaining about "cancel culture" and the reactions of private individuals and groups to the opinions and actions of other private individuals and groups. People have the right to say what they want and to do what they want up to the limits of causing harm to others. They can shout their inflammatory opinions from the roof tops. They can boycott and petition to try to convince private groups from giving platform to opinions or people they don't like. All of that is protected speech.

This current executive branch is weighing in and using its influence to try to control speech. It's not "you'll get disappeared by secret police for what you told your coworker in confidence" levels of control, but that it's happening at all is alarming. I worry that they have no problem trampling on the first amendment and that it seems like no part of the government is going to restrict them from it.

>"you'll get disappeared by secret police for what you told your coworker in confidence"

Not if you aren't brown. But if you are... well you can easily get caught up in an "immigration" "sting"

Fair. That does seem to be happening unfortunately.

"Call them out, hell, call their employer" -JD Vance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngofqx9EfcM&t=7398s

https://x.com/SecRubio/status/1967784061721776521 revoking visas

Censorship in oppressive countries is often not carried out directly by the government. Instead, to save face, it is enforced along invisible power lines. The government gives a silent nod to other actors in society nudging them to act accordingly. For example, an Eastern Bloc citizen might not receive a formal penalty for leaving the communist party, but their children's admission to university could suddenly become more difficult, of course without any official acknowledgment of the fact.

There’s something hypocritical about a person who thinks it’s an injustice for them to be fired for expressing their opinions, when that opinion is that they are glad Charlie Kirk was murdered for expressing his opinions.

Karl Popper said,

“But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."

Excellent point. Love the Popper quote.

We can't be suicidally principled.

> when that opinion is that they are glad Charlie Kirk was murdered for expressing his opinions.

You are conflating the expression of an opinion with the opinion itself.

Generally, the point people are getting fired for making is that the very circumstances of Charlie Kirk's murder are precisely the circumstances he advocated for. I don't find it hypocritical to draw attention to that irony. I do, however, find it hypocritical to fire someone for expressing dissent about the opinions of a man who literally became famous for directly asking random people in public to enter into arguments with him.

> Generally, the point people are getting fired for making is that the very circumstances of Charlie Kirk's murder are precisely the circumstances he advocated for.

He never advocated murdering people over political disagreements. He disagreed with banning guns, but even the people who advocate banning guns don’t usually openly advocate banning bolt action hunting rifles.

The sentiment here is to cheer and laugh at a premeditated murder. If you want to rationalize it, whatever. It’s no use trying to have a discussion with someone who cheers and laughs at a man getting murdered for having discussions.

He said that school deaths are worth it to uphold our 2nd amendment rights. So the irony is extremely thick here.

That's the same tradeoff we make with all civil rights.

Lots of people criticized Donald Trump's proposal of a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on", and rightfully so in my opinion. Do you think the irony would be thick if some of those people were murdered by Muslim terrorists?

You're right that he didn't cheer on political assassination.

He merely intimated that trans people's lives are less valuable than others and that black people and women are incapable of intellectual equality with whites and males. A debate about whether that is an indirect encouragement to violence is a valid one.

And to be very, very clear: ambivalence at his departure from earth is not equal to ambivalence of the manner.

I was happy Rush Limbaugh died of skin cancer. I was not happy Charlie Kirk died of murder.

> He merely intimated that trans people's lives are less valuable than others and that black people and women are incapable of intellectual equality with whites and males.

False.

> A debate about whether that is an indirect encouragement to violence is a valid one.

Lying about what other people say and mischaracterizing those statements as an incitement to violence is itself an incitement to violence. Stop lying and stop inciting violence!

"Transgenderism is a middle finger to God"

That's a provocative statement, especially taken out of context like that, but it doesn't necessarily imply the devaluation of anyone's life, and the broader context of everything Charlie Kirk said and the way he treated people, including people who identified themselves to him as transgendered, makes it obvious he didn't feel that way. But then again, that's exactly the reason you stripped that quote out of context and posted it to an online argument in which you are much more explicitly devaluing the lives of people you disagree with politically.

>makes it obvious he didn't feel that way

But he said it. So you're either wrong and he meant it, or you're defending the words of a disingenuous sack of... Well, let's say "lies". That bad faith provocateur act has no role in decent society.

His speech was legal and despicable. He was not a good person. He may have believed himself to be a Christian, I don't know his heart, but he was not Christ-like.

when that opinion is that they are glad Charlie Kirk was murdered

I have yet to see anyone express that opinion. I've seen plenty of dark jokes, and even more comments calling him out for saying that the second amendment is worth a few deaths, but I haven't seen a single person say they're glad he was murdered.

I tried to look up the supposed 30k tweets that have been collected by the site used for organized harassment, but it doesn't seem to be openly published, counter to their promise.

People were getting doxxed for far less than "celebrating murder". Saying he was a bad person made you eligible for your name, location, picture and job to be plastered on a doxxing site before it got hacked and shut down.

Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences. People aren't "making comments," they're celebrating the murder of a man whose opinions they disagreed with.

Many Americans are waking up to realize that a large number of people they considered friends and colleagues would revel in their death if they let their political opinions be heard.

I would 100% fire someone for celebrating murder. Sorry, call me old-fashioned, but I believe in hiring people of integrity, and I will fire you if I find out you don't have any.

As the joke goes, in soviet Russia you are also free to criticize America.

> Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences.

Freedom of speech requires freedom from government consequences. I have freedom of speech still if you say "I don't like your speech"; I don't have it if the cops say "I'm arresting you for your speech".

> I would 100% fire someone for celebrating murder.

And you can. You can also skip their birthday party. But "I'm glad so-and-so is dead" largely can't be a reason to, say, lose your drivers' license, social security benefits, or government employment, because the First Amendment applies to government specifically.

Facebook, Google, the grocery store, etc. have never been subject to the First Amendment.

(People can, and do, get fired for espousing Charlie Kirk's beliefs, too. That's free speech/association for you.)

> "I'm glad so-and-so is dead" largely can't be a reason to, say, lose your drivers' license, social security benefits, or government employment, because the First Amendment applies to government specifically.

Unless I'm mistaken, that's not happening. If it is, it's wrong and should be corrected.

In Jimmy Kimmel's case, the FCC chair threatened ABC's broadcasting licensure to pressure them to punish his (very, very mild, incidentally) protected speech.

I don't believe that the FCC threatening ABC's broadcasting license has anything to do with free speech. There were murmurs about lawsuits for defamation of character all over Twitter. I'm no lawyer, I don't claim to know if that's even possible.

But it's clear that with the emotional tension of the situation, ABC wasn't about to get itself in legal trouble over a second-rate, late-night show host.

So, while the FCC may have been threatening, we have a legal system designed to prevent such over-steps of power, should they occur. It seems pretty clear ABC wanted no part of the storm that was brewing.

> I don't believe that the FCC threatening ABC's broadcasting license has anything to do with free speech.

Even Ted Cruz is able to see it. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1kwzgrwdd0o

And Vance is trying to play it off as a joke now: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5521172-vance-fcc-carr-ki...

> we have a legal system designed to prevent such over-steps of power

That legal system recently immunized the President from the protections.

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Shouting down other people deprives them of their freedom of speech, and is rightfully prevented. Padilla was detained because he was attempting to do that: disrupt someone else from exercising speech. He could have made the exact same speech in his own space without consequences.

If you disapprove of how Padilla was treated, that's fine, just be honest about why he was detained: not for the content of his speech, but his attempt to prevent another from speaking.

Interrupting or questioning people isn't a denial of first amendment rights. You're using extremely sloppy logic, mixing "freedom from interruption" with "freedom of speech".

Absolutely, repeatedly interrupting people with questions can get you arrested. Go to a public commentary session at your local town hall. Exceed your allotted time period and keep questioning the officials. You'll eventually be arrested and taken away. Because in doing so, you're depriving the rest of the town from their opportunity to give a public comment.

There's nothing complicated about this. Padilla isn't being treated any differently from anyone else. Freedom of speech does not entail freedom to prevent others from speaking.

Alright, here's another example: try speaking up against Israel policies.

What about it?

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Everything is relative. I'm an immigrant from a post-USSR country and the US is still orders of magnitude more democratic and free

Doubt. What are post-USSR countries (except for Ukraine) where government detains lots of people who hasn't committed any crimes? How many people get wrongfully killed by cops in post-USSR countries? In U.S. that's like a sport for cops to find an excuse to unalive someone.

And what is democratic about the fact that majority of people votes for candidate A, yet candidate B becomes the president because... because it's people don't actually vote for president, they vote for someone who counts pro-some party and it's THEY who vote for president in the end. What's democratic about corruption being completely legal (lobbying)? Do you know a single post-USSR country where lobbying is legal? (Hell, how can it be legal at all? there's no distinction between lobbying and corruption, that's the same thing!)

Does it matter if you can speak if the system is designed do that you can't be heard?

You can be and are heard. It may only be a tiny minority, but odds are good someone hears you. That is better than disappearing if you speak.

A more serious problem: do people want to listen? Do they want difficult truths or comforting lies?

Honestly, it doesn’t matter.

Staying silent generally doesn’t take an act of courage. No one exercises their speech muscles by staying silent.

The true revolutionary act is exercising our right to speech, honestly and frequently.

The important part is not to keep silent.

Suggest googling “compelled speech”

Loudest voice in the room wins. Crying baby gets the milk. Always.

You can pick any opinion you got from media. Whether it is the whole discussion around autism or the push for DEI. Everything comes down to someone speaking or maybe even shouting.

The unfortunate fact is that people try to see everything through a conspiracy lens and hence miss out voices are still heard - loud and clear.

I think the main difference is, in liberal countries people depend on the media to manufacture consensuses, while China does not need anyone but the leader to create them. No society can survive without a certain degree of consensus

I believe it’s a mistake for liberal countries to rely on centralized content distribution platforms for consensus - that’s how you end up with consensus being for sale.

that's capitalism baby, look at sinclair broadcast group for example

I would need to see an alternative before I can agree. There are other things tried on the margins, but so far none really seem better to me.

Don't the results of elections that are generally perceived to be fair give leaders a mandate that is accepted by most to do what they campaigned on?

Could be, I think the main point missing here is the independence of media from the state, wherever the place.

Isn’t it a feature that people are vocally dissatisfied with what the media reports? To just accept it quietly in silence seems in fact the worse outcome. Even if everyone knows the media reporting is wrong, keeping quiet about it creates a strange meta state where the reporting is true enough that no one wants to publicly question it, because nobody else is questioning it, so it’s unclear whether your fellow citizens accept it as true or not, so you need to assume they believe it’s true.

I used to work for a large semiconductor manufacturer and the first time I visited the headquarters in the US I was shocked to see Fox News was on 24/7 in the cafeteria.

Whenever I see a major negative news story about republicans I always visit the Fox News website and you’re lucky if it’s a sub heading at the bottom. If it’s a particular bad story there will always be a Biden or Hillary story dug up as a headliner to change the narrative.

I keep joking that instead of the normal repressive state-controlled media, the West has media-controlled states. Electing a TV host is just a culmination of that. Or a media owner, like Berlusconi. Coincidentally he was brought down by his underage sex trafficking.

Westerners voluntarily tune into their propaganda, leaving the 24/7 news channels blaring.

But there is a critical difference in that elections do happen, they do get counted, and they do make a genuine difference in the political and economic outcomes which affect millions of people.

For now.

Wolin is insightful in this regard

The other thing to note is that journalism in the US has gotten really lazy. A lot of the articles you will see in the MSM are based on leaked info and press-releases from PR firms, etc. It's easier to for journalists to regurgitate stories hand-fed to them than doing truly hard and costly investigative work.

I think it's less laziness than the fact that the news media has been in a constant state of disruption since the internet. It's a much riskier business than it used to be.

I think treating the government as a singular entity pushing a narrative is missing a bit. There is no singular government moving in lock-step, I think we've seen a lot of those seams showing recently.

There are factions, supported by various wealthy powerful interests. Those factions include people in government but also people funding or controlling media.

The owner and CEO of a major social network was literally given a public-facing government position, and others in the administration were previously TV personalities.

Wealth, media, and government are an ouroboros, not a one-directional megaphone from The Government to The Citizens.

This is true in a _well functioning democratic government_ - by design: as long as there are differences, a single actor cannot take over.

Understanding that the media is owned by powerful people, and people have agendas, is a key point to media literacy that should be taught at schools. It doesn't mean media should be ignored, nor that they always aim to manipulate (with some exceptions). It's, again, healthy if you understand it as it is (a viewpoint, espoused by people with a specific worldview). Interpreting the news require critical thinking. Most people never develop critical thinking.

Lack of critical thinking is a bit of a worldwide schooling system failure. Underfunding on one hand and not having an education plan for people to develop those skills leads to what we have. Some are lucky to get those skills from home or from top tier schools.

I imagine that this state of things was somewhat beneficial for the ruling elites but Russia is now showing the whole western world, that dumb population is a huge liability.

Indeed it is - and likely by design anyway (critical thinking is bad for political control, after all). You generally want the ones in power (preferably the ones aligned to you) to be better educated than the masses.

In a 'well functioning' aristocracy the rich and titled tend to go to the best universities and get educations an such. In authoritarian governments the opposite tends to happen. Anyone that is too smart could take over and rule themselves and must have an accident before that can happen. You end up circled by ass kissers.

>a single actor cannot take over.

This is a distinction without a difference. People can screech about "we're a democracy, we don't have a king" all they want but if the overwhelming amount of discretionary authority in the system is held by a fairly small group of people cut from approximately the same cloth it doesn't really matter, they're all gonna decide things the same ways and the results are gonna be just as divorced from what people want.

It doesn't matter if you have a thousand people working to appease the ideological whims of one absolute ruler or a thousand people with the same set of ideological whims, it's still one set of ideological whims being worked towards.

it's a distinction with A TON of difference. Well-functioning democracies have a push-and-pull that tends to slow things down BUT also prevents massive outreaches. Systems with tons of "sides" are stabler than dual systems because of this.

> It doesn't matter if you have a thousand people working to appease the ideological whims of one absolute ruler or a thousand people with the same set of ideological whims, it's still one set of ideological whims being worked towards.

that's exactly the point - there's a third option.

>it's a distinction with A TON of difference. Well-functioning democracies have a push-and-pull that tends to slow things down BUT also prevents massive outreaches. Systems with tons of "sides" are stabler than dual systems because of this.

Right, a democracy won't succumb to one insane leader peddling particularly insane whims the way a dictatorship possibly can. But for the other 99/100 years of the century when things are business as usual it's a distinction without a difference.

The fact that we have a nominal democracy doesn't change the fact that we're being ruled by the small ideological minority that holds the bulk of the power in the system.

>that's exactly the point - there's a third option.

Yeah, we could have a government by some semblance of the people and all the diversity of that implies, but we don't, at least not to any serious degree at the federal level, so here we are.

> But for the other 99/100 years of the century when things are business as usual it's a distinction without a difference.

"business as usual" under a totalitarian regime is slightly different from "business as usual" under a democratic regime. We have plenty of examples of both in the world right now. They're not equivalent...

You're contrasting dictatorship vs oligarchy. The key differentiator for democracies is leaders who are subject to re-election incentives.

Populist parties are surging all over the world. Perhaps there are a few modern democracies where all the political elites are "cut from approximately the same cloth", but if so, they aren't countries I am very familiar with.

Sure, it's a bunch of silos made up of sub-silos with people with their own goals.

But, I have far too often seen this "the government isn't a monolith" assertion used in the most deceitful, dishonest irredeemably bad faith arguments here on HN (and other parts of the internet as well) to shut down discussion of cases where some subset of the government is doing things that are bad for it's own selfish reasons.

Ditto for the "they're not literally conspiring" assertion used to shut down discussion of cases of where interests align and no conspiring or active coordinate is needed to achieve the results.

Comparing Chinese media with American media is insane. One can argue most big media companies in the US have an editorial line that is aligned with one ideology, particularly true for most legacy media outlets. But many are still putting out very high quality mostly unbiased content. News are not meant to be consumed as facts but to challenge one’s own beliefs and seek out the truth or truths. Living in a bubble completely disconnected from both national and global events that impact us all is irresponsible and usually exactly what totalitarian regimes expect us to do.

The other thing is the completely different information universes left and right live in in America. It's difficult to have a conversation with someone on the other side of the political divide because they believe a completely different set of facts. Meanwhile, in China, everyone knows the news is B.S and they only trust information they get directly. In the past, before the Internet, there was a lot more time invested in maintaining relationships just to get good information. Is that the case in China?

It reminds me of this business litigation a company I was an investor in had between the partners. I wasn't very close to the situation, so I had no first hand knowledge of what actually happened, but each side had a contradictory set of facts. Both could not be true at the same time. Each side asked me to join their side, but I told them that that's what the judicial process is for: to find out who's facts the jury believes. Unfortunately, this means it's going to be a long process that will go to trial because they are so totally far apart on the facts that they will have to have a trial. Also unfortunately, this also probably means someone is lying in a pretty pathological way. The same thing seems to be occurring in American politics and there's no real neutral arbiter I guess except the voters.

In US politics, while one side may lie considerably more than the other, neither side is really committed to truth. One is selective in the truth and distorts the interpretation to push their narrative; one just blatantly lies to push whatever is their position of the moment.

This sounds like "nobody drives in NYC because the traffic is so bad".

This is perfectly reasonable when people know that they have no control of the government, it’s like the weather then…you just deal with it.

The problem is that in the USA , we’ve been told that we have a democratic republic, and that we have significant self-determination in affairs of the state, and that justice, freedom, and the right to live relatively un-disturbed are inalienable rights.

It’s bullshit in practice, of course, but we’ve been told this, and we’ve been told it’s our duty to protect those rights, up to and specifically including armed insurrection.

Many people actually believed what they were told.

Perhaps none of us have living memory of how when the chips are down there is no place to turn to but a source of truth. For every propaganda(ish) outlet, there is a place you can check for real news NYTimes,CNN,Fox juxtaposed to things like propublica,snopes or icij.

One friend got taken in by a fake news story and rued the internet is full of fake news and propaganda that spreads in a minute, I am so dismayed, how can I know what is real?. a friend replied: the internet is wonderful too you can check in under a minute if something is fake.

Amen !

No. In the West, there are competing news sources(despite the best efforts of many). They might be equally biased but you do get a devil's advocate system. China is a one party state that controls all media. Not remotely the same.

In China, you would not have known the story was bogus.

I'd like to point out that the student's advice, "of course the news is ridiculous propaganda, just ignore it and go about your life and focus on your friends and family" is the the response desired by the authoritarian Chinese government who has carefully engineered the situation in the first place.

The purpose of constantly publishing obvious lies is not for people to believe them (though some always will), it's to devalue the idea of truth in general. Combine that with overt (but unpredictable) penalties for supporting the 'wrong' cause, and a disinterest in politics becomes the easiest and safest path for a member of the public. As long as the economy's good, people just don't care about anything that doesn't harm them directly.

also was the outcome fostered by the USSR

> it's to devalue the idea of truth in general.

You see a common theme in some people talking about science related things, aka "The science was wrong", which is very rarely the case. Most of the time when that is said it's "The conclusion was slightly incorrect because of statistically insignificant findings" (probability based) versus wrong (binary). You end up with a class of people that start thinking all science is wrong and at any moment their crackpot crap is suddenly going to be correct.

I mostly blame bad journalism for this. Always looking for sensational content to capture attention, outlets publish credulous articles on single journal articles without providing enough context for their unsophisticated audience. It would take much more time and effort to properly contextualized them, and in many cases, it would be apparent that it is too early for the general public to draw any conclusions from the research. It wouldn't be newsworthy.

There is really some wild fan-fiction on HN. If you're being serious, how do you know any of this? Based on what evidence?

I don't have particular knowledge about how things are in China, but the underlying strategy is real and employed by authoritarian regimes against their citizens and adversaries.

In the US, the right-wing media and Trump have been doing it to us, in addition to our adversaries.

In the old days, propaganda was used to make people believe specific things. But information streams aren't as easily controlled today, so instead the idea is to create confusion and distrust. It's a DDoS on reality. Sadly it can be very effective.

Exactly this. Without an active interest in politics people stop caring if their rights are taken away one step at a time. The thought process becomes - the government will do what the government will do, I just need to toe the line and be happy that I am not in jail.

Regarding the good economy = apathy, my conclusion is the opposite. I think our good economy is the reason a significant portion of the US population with overwhelming outgroup preference exists at all. As quality of life deteriorates I think that behavior will be selected out and those remaining will get back to the basics of tribe survival. I think it is the fundamental fallacy of the modern socialist that if things get bad enough, people will undergo some personal revelation about climate or vote Bernie or something. I think when you look at extremely poor places like Yemen, you don’t see fertile ground for progressive idealism.

You're strawmaning the socialist view. The stealman version is that people who are feeling economic pain are more likely to want to do something about it, and may be primed to develop class consciousness and become politically mobilized. Socialists generally consider material conditions to be more important than identitarian concerns, which in their view, are often used as a wedge to divide working class people who might otherwise be united by their common economic interests. They don't think poor people are somehow magically less likely to be bigots.

> is the the response desired by the authoritarian Chinese government who has carefully engineered the situation in the first place.

But they are an "authoritarian" government so they don't really care what their citizens believe. Right? Doesn't your logic apply more to "democratic" and "free" countries. No?

> The purpose of constantly publishing obvious lies is not for people to believe them (though some always will), it's to devalue the idea of truth in general.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." -- Thomas Jefferson

Are you saying the US was "authoritarian" from the very beginning?

> As long as the economy's good, people just don't care about anything that doesn't harm them directly.

Isn't this true for every government? "Democratic", "authoritarian", "monarch", "anarchic", etc?

The problem with this statement is that your Chinese friend comes from a place where every information source allowed by the government can be safely assumed to be propaganda, by definition. That's how their system works. Not so in the west.

This extreme naivete is exactly what the parent comment's story is addressing.

No, it's not. There is a big difference between Chinese-level control of information and what is seen in the west. Naivete would be believing that the west has none, or maybe that the West has so much that it is somehow already an Orwellian Big Brother state.

I object your reference to the collective west. As a Canadian, i believe my country has very little in common with the US. In fact, the US is pretty similar to China when it comes to propaganda.

Im Canadian too and I fear our country becomes more American every year.

So you are saying that experts on CNN are paid by the government?

That's a ridiculous statement and honestly this blog post itself is very misleading. The quote taken on condition of anonymity is someone saying there is no evidence this was a national security threat. The NYT article is not at all a hair on fire credulous tale of near disaster. It quotes government officials and experts, connects it to "normal" criminal cartels and offers some opinions on what could be a worst case scenario. As much as this could easily be a simple criminal case, it was already connected to threats made to politicians so it's not far-fetched.

This is just wrong. There is a huge difference between having a free press vs not. And while publications like the NY times are not perfect, they pretty much never outright lie, unlike state propaganda.

The good news is, the only people who watch cable news in the US anymore are either boomers or in an airport.

There are certainly some news outlets that operate like propoganda. I mean Fox comes to mind, if you ever watch you’ll notice they carefully craft their statements and rarely talk about facts, mostly feelings. News is at its core a business, and they know they get eyes on things by scaring people or talking about things that seem shocking at face value. NYT and other outlets that do long form articles (Wired) have invaluable information. But we live in a world where most people (especially perpetually online people) just browse the headlines and take what they want from it. We’ve lost nuance, and because of that in the US one party is using that to their advantage.

Fox (and the right-wing media more broadly) act as boosters for the right and negative partisanship generators for the left. They protect republicans from accountability. They manufacture scandals about the opposition.

And it's so effective we couldn't even collectively manage to banish from public life the guy who nearly murdered congress and his veep on television. Truly scary.

I agree from a high level, but I think the major difference is that: - Chinese news is propoganda in the traditional sense - directed/approved by the central government - US news is not centrally controlled like that, but most sources lean heavily left or right, and distort narratives to fit their views.

I feel like liberals believe that, while Fox News is clearly presenting things from a right-leaning perspective, most of their chosen news sources are neutral. That's absurd. NYT is certainly far left in how they spin the majority of their stories.

The fact that you think NYT is “far left” is a great example of how incredibly far the overton window has shifted.

The whole democratic party has shifted drastically left in the last 10 years. If you can't recognize this, you're just deep in the echo chamber, IMO.

Where did I mention the democratic party? I’m talking about the NYT. I also disagree with your statement, irrelevant as it is.

NYT is staffed by democrats (I'm a disaffected democrat too, believe it or not), but the democratic platform is far left of what it was when Clinton was in office.

NYT is definitely not far left and is still the cream of the crop when it comes to fact-based reporting

According to this outfit the NYT "skews left": https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive

Their opinion section is mostly center left but has pretty wide ideological diversity

They do still do a lot of fact-based reporting, that why I'm still a subscriber. But their staff is 90% liberal, and it certainly comes through in a lot of their reporting, not just in opinion pieces. The left is as much as an echo chamber as the right, if you stick to media aligned on either side.

Yea, there can be an echo-chamber/bubble effect.

There are certain issues in particular that can derange them more than others (e.g. Gaza), but IMHO the NYT's cultural biases usually soften Trump & R's image more often than not these days, because of the way they sane-wash/both-sides to the extreme (to avoid accusations of bias).

The right-wing media is a category difference though - it's not an echo-chamber, it's a disinformation factory.

There are a couple of exceptions, but they are few and far between. WSJ has managed to maintain it's cred despite being owned by the Murdochs (its opeds are another matter). The Dispatch is another good one. A good way to filter out the bad ones is to look at their coverage of the 2020 post-election. If they helped reinforce Trump's stolen-election lies they are either crackpots or bad actors.

I need the check out The Dispatch, thanks.

unfortunately we are trending toward that direction, trust in media is hitting all time lows in the US.

The constant news consumption isn't just an American thing.

I live in Britain and have colleagues and friends who (admittedly) watch or read news first thing after waking up, and read news website articles constantly throughout the day.

We're talking, multiple times per hour. They read the news more frequently than things happen to be in the news.

Okay I got a little bit rage baited by this but to summarize- we Westerners value openness in government to prevent abuse and corruption, so getting mad about propaganda is common.

I basically agree with every word you wrote. But also, it means you wake up one day one day and tanks are rolling through the capital city, and the President is threatening American cities with illegal military occupation.

>They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life.

In my experience with people I've interacted with in China is that there is quite a range of belief in the propaganda. I've had people say some truly wild things that were clearly the result of how news and history have been presented to them. Its also important to consider that we are interacting with people that are more engaged with the West and aren't seeing the perspective of a lot of the country.

Ah, so like Russia. The ultimate dream of all authoritarians. A society that no longer even dreams of freedom, that becomes fully apathetic.

Do you know how many independent newspapers there are in China? Zero. Even ones with what we'd call liberal ones are controlled and will be dealt with if they go too far.

Just because things aren't working well does not mean we have to tear it all down

What's the most popular tag-line for YouTube/TikTok videos and online spammy ads? "The TRUTH about ..."

Americans have PTSD, and paranoia.

Before Nixon, Americans had an idylic belief in "America" as some bastion of exceptionalism, independence, idealism. We're the best, and we can do anything. We never got attacked, we had the most money, power, etc. Everything's good and we're the best.

But since Nixon, they learned their most-venerated politicians lie to them. But not only politicians; the news lies, corporations lie, scientists lie, their neighbors lie. And when 9/11 happened, suddenly the facade of invulnerability fell (because it was a foreign terrorist, rather than domestic, like Oklahoma City). Year after year, the media bombards Americans with terrifying stories of somebody lying to them, secretly hurting them. They're all out to get you. And polls show year after year that Americans are less trusting of their institutions.

To function in a society, you have to trust somebody. So they still watch the news, listen to politicians. They hide in some in-group, like a political party or ideology, or even just a Facebook group. But they are hyper-aware that anybody could be lying to them at any time. That some commonly-held truth is actually a weapon used to hurt them.

They have been bombarded with fear for decades by the media and politicians. Every single day they are told that "the enemy" is working to destroy everything they love. This isn't an exaggeration, this is literally the line given by politicians, and then parroted by their favorite media source. This is why Americans both obsessively watch media, and are really emotional about everything they hear in the media. It's why so many Americans latch onto conspiracy theories now (they didn't used to). We are all afraid because our system has made us afraid, and we don't know who to trust.

That's fine but it's also the end of self-rule and agency

I disagree about "the government pushing"

it's *different groups* of power - some have more control, some less

but all push one big agenda or the other, so instead of centralized propaganda you get affected by targetted propaganda

I had a teacher in high school that married a Chinese woman, and when her parents came over they said "Your propaganda is so refreshing, you hardly even notice it."

It's always struck me how hamfisted the Chinese government sound in its communications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

> That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Surprised this hasn't been posted within a comment yet :)

They aren't mutually exclusive; Westerners get emotional about news, but still understand that there is a propaganda component. That doesn't mean the news isn't useful. Outlets might be selective about what they say, but the truth in reporting sort of stands in plain sight; if you read a balance of sources, you get a decent idea what's happening, surrounding a particular issue.

News organizations very rarely lie. They might be misleading in framing or selective wording, but they won't outright put something in print that is a complete lie.

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 changed restrictions on disseminating propaganda materials domestically. Passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, it amended the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which had previously blocked the domestic distribution of content produced by U.S. government agencies like the State Department. This is a driving factor behind a lot of the decline in quality of news as propaganda starts to drown out legitimate reporting.

I mean your comment, number one on this post, is propaganda to ignore the major sourcing of information that least pretend to have a system for evaluating what i true, what is worthy to present and replace it with.......? In the USA we have historically tried to keep abreast of what is going on in the world, partly because we are a nation of immigrants with ties/emotional ties around the world. Is that a thing in China? It didn't seem so when I was working with people in China. Giving a Chinese cultural position (ignore the world) might not be a fit for an American.

Look up Manufacturing Consent - good read!

Propaganda gets too much credit.

The entire Republican platform (especially since ~2016) has switched focus to something less like propaganda, and more like engagement for engagement's sake. Conservative talking heads do tend to frame everything from a particular perspective (that's the propaganda part), but rather than try to convince everyone to agree with them, they do the opposite: try to get as many people as possible to disagree with them, so they can get themselves and their audience into eternal "arguments". These "arguments" are never intended to be logically defensible. Instead, they are intended to fail as spectacularly as possible. Naturally, most other media outlets love this, because they get to profit from their own participation. The only value left in this dynamic is engagement.

By leveraging the alleged "two sides" of American politics, both politicians and media corporations have managed to create an infinite feedback loop of engagement with their media; and at the same time have managed to direct that feedback into political support for their preferred policies. Knowing this, it's entirely unsurprising that many of the highest positions in government are now held by household TV personalities, like Dr. OZ and Donald Trump.

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So what can we do about it? If engagement is the new currency, can we simply boycott this entire thing by disengaging? I doubt it will be possible to get enough people to actually participate, particularly those who are currently the most engaged. Disengagement only creates an implicit victory for whoever is speaking loudest.

Honest argument is incredibly important. There is no value in diversity of thought until differing positions meet each other and collaborate. Media corporations have found huge success by replacing argument with bickering. I think the first step in undoing that damage is to help people understand the difference between the two: argument is goal-oriented, whereas bickering is goal-avoidant. Knowing that difference, I think we should find ways to practice argument with each other, and redirect our engagement into collaborative progress.

Perhaps propaganda is not the right word. I think a better word is "sensationalized" which happens often even here on HN with titles trick people into clicking on the link. With each click having monetary value, this is just the norm.

Sounds like Americans are engaged in a democracy they see the ability to shape whereas China is a lost cause, so just bend over and ignore it? :)

You do realize practically everything every bad said about Trump was the same anonymous sourcing?

I don't like when people are inconsistent with how they apply standards.

What's with substackers these days putting hideous ai images on every other article?

So, I should get fewer texts from random numbers asking 'hi, wanna grab coffee? I'm definitely not here to steal your kidney' /s

Can we perma-block nytimes since we discovered it's gov propoganda:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com

The author does not dispute devices were found. Author expresses a belief it was controlled by a criminal enterprise. Author then claims to understand the intent of said enterprise.

The pattern: 1. Corroborate fact. 2. Pose plausible cause of fact. 3. Present unsubstantiated claim as fact.

Sounds like propaganda to me.

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