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Comment by ProllyInfamous | Hacker News Reader

I worked in large union data centers, decades ago.

Cannot even imagine what is going on these days, inside & out.

Can you elaborate? This is interesting

I worked across several facilities and obviously cannot talk specifics about those. It is public knowledge that one of them housed a large metro area's main ISP "meet-me room."

During Snowden revelations I'd already been apprenticing for years; nothing Edward documented surprised me. I'd literally walk around our 500,000sqft elevated floors knodding my head [none of this exists, officially].

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Nothing is as it seems.

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During DEF CON ~XX~ (approximately same timeframe as story above) it was publicly revealed that intelligence communities had redefined the word "intercept," to mean when a human operator catelogs a certain piece of data/traffic (i.e. not algorithms sorting). #1984 #newspeak #elevenyearsago

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I no longer carry a cell phone. Don't use email. PO Box in profile

Yeah well aware of that stuff here. Two companies I worked at had entirely airgapped infrastructure because they knew the adversarial situation wasn't winnable. Everything was checked for implants at goods in. It's shocking some of the shit that goes on.

I run grey man where I can. Stuff that's private stays private. Paper and physical security is still good.

>physical security is still good

Possession is nine-tenths of the law (e.g. physical bullion; offline crypto keys; bullets; counter-bugging).

>checked for implants ... shocking some of the shit that goes on

I've seent some bullshit, myself — "shipping delays" — smelt their pure evil. Our facilities necessarily existed to be networked; but definitely had isolated departments.

> I no longer carry a cell phone.

I'm not quite there yet, but after Netanyahu made that comment like "if you have a phone you're carrying a little piece of Israel with you" right after the pager attack stuff.. I keep the phone in the back of my backpack away from my meat bits.

>no cell phone

A one-way beeper allowed me to phase out mobile phone usage. Obviously presents inconveniences, but I'm semi-retired with no rush to be anywhere. Bonus health points: no locally-generated EMRadiation.

[•] My provider (USA): <https://pagersdirect.net/>

If you use numeric-only paging, bots haven't figured out how to SPAM, yet. Also available is alphanumeric email-to-page; two-way pagers also exist (but why?).

Longer battery life than phone, no microphone to access via baseband.

> PO Box in profile

Pretty sure government agencies will have no trouble finding you from that bit alone, and then tracking your movements is trivial. I mean, you have to show up and check the box periodically..

They implement a physical Tor each time their check their box - layers of Taskrabbits hiring Taskrabbits. One picks up the Mail and hands it off to the next. The owner is one of the Taskrabbits somewhere in the chain.

Back in 2006, I became involved in a USPS investigation (witness/victim); barring specifics, the perpetrator's PO Box [0] was involved: the investigated would send minors in to retrieve packages, which is allowed ("possessor of key possesses mailbox privileges").

This made it extremely difficult to capture the actual perp. He eventually walked away with minimal consequence, for lack of evidence/possession.

[0] established with false identification

I am already found — not hiding — just have to follow their rules.

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