Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.

But where else would you keep it? A safe-deposit box at a bank?

I think, if I received illegitimate gold bars and figured the FBI might look into that, I would choose to keep them somewhere where a judge would think twice before issuing a search warrant for. Judges don't generally just issue search warrants for residences willy-nilly (because there can often be collateral damage); they're much more blasé about issuing search warrants for safe-deposit boxes.

Or are you imagining he'd go bury the gold in a hole in the woods somewhere?

View on HN

Everyone is a criminal mastermind after reading about someone else getting caught: You only have to say you wouldn’t do the thing that they did and you can smugly imagine yourself getting away with it.

He didn’t acquire 300 gold bars and the other currency at once. He was getting these over a long period. He works for an intelligence agency, so he knew that his actions were going to be investigated. If he was doing any of these routines suggested in the comments like buying a rural plot of land to bury them or taking up camping (alone, by himself) these are all going to raise suspicions and become another thing that could give me away.

> he knew that his actions were going to be investigated

I disagree - my take when I first read this was that this was likely a pervasive thing that senior people all did, and they all knew about it. This guy pissed off the wrong person and so they took him down. Same for the lying about credentials - I am sure everyone is like "hey Jim, did you want to apply for that promotion?" with the response of "I can't because I didn't serve long enough", and the final reply of "oh just make up the numbers, everyone does and they don't check".

> Or are you imagining he'd go bury the gold in a hole in the woods somewhere?

Why not?

Why not make multiple trips to carry extremely heavy metal, as a frail office worker, into the woods, which are full of hikers and hunters, on country roads in a suspicious-looking sedan, with a shovel in hand? And then do it all over again whenever you intend to retrieve these gold bars to do whatever it is you want to do with them? Why indeed.

"as a frail office worker"

They could be CIA SAC/SOG, aka Ground Branch.

Why not carry 600 lbs of gold bars out into the forest and bury them, then hope nobody thought it was suspicious to see someone carrying a shovel into the forest on any one of the trips necessary to do it?

A small plot of forested rural land without utility service doesn't cost much at all. Go car camping at your new private getaway for a few days. This isn't rocket science.

Also if you drive out to a remote part of the US who is going to see you? There are some very empty places in this country. Not quite on the level of Canada or Russia but still.

flock or any number of cameras that contribute to flock would see you.

They would see you driving out into the sticks to go camping for a few days. That's entirely normal isn't it? We haven't (yet) made it to the level of flock cameras on gravel logging roads.

There are some on hiking trails :)

Flock brand?

Yup. Gen1 unit with the standard square Flock panel and black pole they always use.

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1tofx8e/...

As horrifying as that image first appears, it turns out that's actually located adjacent to a road between two subdivisions in Mission Viejo CA. The picture conveniently had all of that cropped out though. It would appear that someone rotated the camera so it no longer faces the road.

Wow, it's really quite the panopticon you have there in the US. "Land of the free"...

Trail cams are set by individuals, hunters, and wildlife observers.

They’re used all over the world. It’s not “USA bad”. The government doesn’t have a network of trail cameras to monitor people on trails.

and what sovereign nation's regulations are you subjected to?

A despicable one. The pit of moral depravity, ethno-religious-supremacism and jingoism. 21st century genocide ground zero. You can probably guess.

(But it doesn't have trail cams.)

Let's not give them any ideas, please.

If there are deer or elk in the region, it is reasonable to believe that there will be "trail cameras" in the region. Many of them are camouflaged to look exactly like tree bark. In the event that you are considering burying treasure in that plot of land, it would behoove you to carefully inspect:

1. the fences to see where people have been cutting them or splicing them to allow for easier access.

2. All the trees within eyesight of your proposed Pirate Loot site for camo'd trail cameras. Install some of your own to ensure no one is a frequent flier in your turf. Ginseng poachers are a problem in wooded lands in the Eastern part of the US. With legal weed (in many states), growing pot on someone else's land has died down a lot (the owner of the land ends up in legal trouble).

In the end, it might be easier to dig up part of your basement to bury it there. And to obtain a large gun safe to appear to be where valuables are stored. If someone wonders why the cement floor has cut/repair marks, just shudder and mumble plumbing work on the main drain line due to tree roots.

> They would see you driving out into the sticks to go camping for a few days. That's entirely normal isn't it?

If someone has a history of taking a lot of solo camping trips it might not raise suspicions.

A common way criminals get caught is by suddenly doing something out of the ordinary. If the 50 year old guy who sits behind a desk and spends weekends at home with his family suddenly takes up a hobby of camping alone in one specific remote location and his trips coincide with each a acquisition of gold bars, the investigators monitoring him are going to be all over that.

I think everyone in this sub thread is imagining that he got all of the gold bars at once and could have made a single move to hide them all. He gathered these over many requests. Taking a solo camping trip every time you acquire something new is red flags all over the place.

All of the comments in this thread assume he was being investigated for his acquisition of comically large amounts of cash and commodities that he presumably left the building with in big bags with a dollar sign on them. They ignore the open secret that the CIA is cartoonishly out of control has been little more than a massive organised crime syndicate that happens to be on the government payroll for 20 years.

In all likelihood, his taking more than forty million dollars wasn't the suspicious behaviour that set him to being investigated. It's right there in the charge sheet. He was being investigated because payroll noticed he was fraudulently claiming leave that he wasn't entitled to. There's no routine oversight on who they're bribing with actual gold. There's still routine oversight on their payroll and HR practices. That led to them actually checking his resume properly, and when that was shown to be bullshit, only then did they actually look at what this guy was doing.

See you do what? Nobody's suggesting you go bury gold in front of a Flock camera.

> A small plot of forested rural land without utility service...

True. OTOH, (1) it's both unusual and public record that you own it, (2) it's seriously unsecured, and (3) the locals both know the turf far better than you and may feel little respect for the undeveloped land of an "outsider".

Bigger picture - Mr. Rush's obsession with collecting very tangible wealth seems to have completely overridden his abilities for rational thought and long-term planning.

EDIT:

> Also if you drive out to a remote part of the US who is going to see you?

The post-Snowden Surveillance State. Between license plate readers, the cell modem in your car, your cell phone, and the difficulty of faking your usual activity patterns "back home" while driving to/from some remote location radio silent (which itself is probably a red flag)...yeah, NO.

> A small plot of forested rural land without utility service doesn't cost much at all. Go car camping at your new private getaway for a few days. This isn't rocket science.

Once someone is under investigation for something like this, they will look at everything.

If the person suddenly bought a small plot of rural land with no utility service that’s going to raise red flags.

As a secondary problem, once the investigators start asking you about it you have to lie to them, which opens you to more charges.

> once the investigators start asking you about it you have to lie to them

You literally don't, that's what the fifth amendment is for

there's a large lack of creativity in these comments. pay for a deer lease, go hunting, don't bring phone, bury gold somewhere random in thousands of acres of land deep enough metal detectors won't find it, kill deer, go home. repeat 3x a year and it's both not suspicious at all but also basically impossible for others to find the gold at that point even if they suspect.

Also, Mr. Goldfinger would like to have a word.

Do you ever debate with intellectual honesty?

Nobody aside from you said “carry”.

There are endless miles of places in the US where you could not be seen. That said as evidence by your perspective, there are plenty of people who have never really been to places where you can not see another human for days or weeks or longer if you don't count seeing simple movement or campfire smoke a mile off.

Because, for someone with any kind of security clearance, suddenly going out to the woods, if you don't normally go out to the woods, would be a major outlier from your highly-scrutinized and documented regular life; and so could easily lead the FBI to finding your buried gold, without having to get any kind of warrant.

The security scrutiny is really so thorough that taking up a new apparent hobby gets flagged? That’s impressive.

The answer is probably "Yes" if you work at CIA

I don't think you know what you are talking about.

How would they know you went out to the woods?

Smartphone will report it.

Just leave it at home.

If FBI see you go without a phone, they will know you're a criminal.

Leave it at home obviously, or carry a burner, or just turn it off and put it in a metal lunch box etc. Solutions galore. This would only be a problem if every CIA employee is under surveillance.

So does your car now, if it’s made after 2018.

For such wealth, basic opsec would be worth it 10000x over, cia folks should know it well. No phone, use old car, pack it with camping gear placed above the gold. Initially go prepare the place, heck even setup a movement-triggered camera there for few weeks. Go where there is lush greenery so you can actually dig 1-2m deep hole in the dirt without dynamite. Learn how to cover place so it looks natural. And learn how to come back to it and find it reliably, day, night, rain, snow doesnt matter. My son could come up with this.

One thing that the Bosnian/Serbian conflict/genocide [0] taught authorities is how to find hidden grave sites. Ground penetrating radar comes in a convenient device that is sized & shaped like a typical American lawnmower.

Soil comes in layers and it would be best to spread ground cloths to capture different soils from different layers and to replace them at the appropriate levels in the ground. While this won't defeat ground penetrating radar, it will make the burial site more closely resemble surrounding soil to make the "signal" harder for the less skilled operators to detect.

Links:

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_War

This really says something about society, can't even imagine leaving your house without a smartphone.

Flock cams

Nonsense the cost of physical surveillance is extremely prohibitive.

Isn't the FBI investigating deaths and disappearances of people with critical access to sensitive material and only found out about it from a newspaper? How much resources do you think are put into monitoring every aspect of the lives of people with access to sensitive info?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deaths-disappearances-scientist...

They are under the impression that the FBI and CIA are still functioning bodies of government

They are functioning, just not for the same country

Those deaths and disappearances is a big non-story if you actually look in to the details of the cases. The media is making a big deal out of it because the headline grabs eyeballs. So since the media is making a big deal about it the FBI now has to say and do something.

The government is already tracking every possible detail they can get their hands about every single citizen. Why wouldn't they expend at least that much effort on the people with sensitive information? The records are collected, the only question left is when/how often they get used.

It's easy to collect and collate logs from electronic systems (banking, purchases, internet browsing habits, ALPR data) and monitor for things that stand out. To track that someone hid something the size of a suitcase "somewhere" you need to turn that event into electronic data. That's constant individual video monitoring. Or else you just have one electronic data point "car parked here, phone in car".

I think you're overselling the security clearance system.

In reality, it'd flag something like "taking out a massive loan for no discernible reason", or "filed for bankruptcy".

I believe a huge part of the big AI push is that the government dragnets have collected so much data, it's nearly impossible to sift through and they're hoping LLMs can finally make sense of it, along the lines of what you're suggesting.

Mr. Rush clearly did not watch Breaking Bad...

But how did the CIA not check on whether or not he had graduated from one of the three different colleges he listed as graduating from the three different times he applied for a job at the CIA?!?!?

> Judges don't generally just issue search warrants for residences willy-nilly

What are you on about, searching homes is the #1 criminal investigation technique once you're able to name a suspect.

It's funny, some people commenting here seem to be a bit lost.

It's also obvious from the article that his home was indeed searched.

The idea that the government would not obtain a warrant if they suspect you of stealing millions...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com