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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I've thought for a while that there's a potential opportunity in paying people to sit in popular coffeeshops around business districts recording all the sound on a laptop, and then using a few audio tools to separate out individual conversations to mine for information about what businesses are doing. People are often completely unaware of the value of things that they're discussing in public.

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Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time. (Snow Crash, Chapter 15)

Or the info they have open while working on planes. And some of them are not diligent on locking them if they have to go use the toilet. Not to mention taking it up a notch by attaching a bug.

And why stop there? Listening with lasers is easy, even through windows, right? Shouldn't be hard to rent a few places (or just covertly drop off equipment) and monitor tons of offices. Of course this will probably be prosecuted harderthan an unsympathetic crack dealer.

But the individual value of any one compromise is probably low. Unless there was a marketplace where sellers and buyers could list what they have or want. If it was popular enough, then the random "FooCorp: Baz proposal 2015.docx" might be worth something. But that would probably get more heat than Silk Road. And there's an even harder trust issue, since every item is different and proving authenticity is difficult.

I do wonder how much corporate espionage goes on. Do all the big companies we know have a secret division trying to illegally get info on competitors? Do they send employees to go work at competitors to spy or sabotage? (Hey, we'll promote you to VP of DB Engineering for a year, then go get poached by X and convince them an XML-based storage engine is the hottest thing.) Or is it just nation states stealing industrial info for their own companies and a few rogue employees flipping for cash?

Even if you did work at Intel designing the next cool chip, it's not like you can just call up AMD and offer to sell secrets... Right? I'd imagine buyers would be super scared of something so potentially toxic being offered to them.

Corporate leaders already talk to each others. It's not often you have an idea that obviously will succeed and even then it will be hard to convince others to do it.

> Or the info they have open while working on planes. And some of them are not diligent on locking them if they have to go use the toilet.

You'd have to have neighbors that are completely oblivious or asleep to just grab someone's laptop and start working on it while they're in the bathroom.

I sleep through most of many of my flights, and I find my fellow travelers to be oblivious to most things.

Some people at MIT recently came up with a way to record audio from film of things like plastic bags or plants's vibrations:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/4/5968243/mit-turns-recorded-...

Pretty crazy... the one thing about the age of computers is that things like cameras, microphones, internet communication, gps dots and various other sensors are becoming as cheap as a restaurant meal... That's pretty scary to me.

Imagine in 1980 you could hire a private detective for $5 who would give you film, sound and location of an individual for days or months, and it'd be very unlikely that this detective was ever caught and traced back to you, and these detectives were widely available. That's sort of the future we're slowly approaching. We fear and criticise state surveillance, but the potential abuse of non-state actors is probably going to rapidly rise.

I heard rumours that some ibankers were hacking GSM calls around New York to get ahead of activity. I'm sure that people are getting recorded around there, but it's probably pretty targeted.

What about if they do it in private, but in a way that the information still leaks? For example, say they are in a car or in their own room, but you can, standing in a public place, watch vibrations of objects in the same space to determine what is being said (I've seen such technology before, and while it doesn't keep voice well and as such you can't identify who said what, you can generally determine most of the words being said).

sounds like it could be an attractive hobby for some. if you find the right locations you could definitely get some juicy info.

and then what happens when you do? Reminds me very much of the classic 1974 film "The Conversation":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_LJ5ICMbP4

[EDIT: And this interesting analysis as it pertains to the modern world in light of the Snowdon revelations]

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/why...

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