[HN Gopher] That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
___________________________________________________________________
That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
Previously: _Cache of devices capable of crashing cell network is
found in NYC_ - https: //news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514 -
Sept 2025 (283 comments)
Author : sixhobbits
Score : 971 points
Date : 2025-09-24 08:24 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cybersect.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cybersect.substack.com)
| JdeBP wrote:
| The https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514 discussion has
| indeed raised all of the same points.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| phh wrote:
| 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)
| mrb wrote:
| 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.
| privatelypublic wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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?
| ale42 wrote:
| You'd probably need thousands of residential IP addresses
| to pass under the radar with so many SIM cards.
| preisschild wrote:
| There are bot nets that specifically offer such services
| asah wrote:
| ...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.
| privatelypublic wrote:
| Somehow, if you have to use residential proxies, its
| going to he a TOS break.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| 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).
| rs186 wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| << 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...
| drummojg wrote:
| 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.
| hdjdndndba wrote:
| What's with substackers these days putting hideous ai images on
| every other article?
| ale42 wrote:
| Great to see that I'm not the only one thinking that the
| espionage story is totally bogus.
| PLenz wrote:
| 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.
| JdeBP wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| If only there was a larger context in which all of this was
| happening. Like unfurling banners of Dear President around
| the capital, using the armed forces to invade American
| cities, and threatening media into silence and complicit.
|
| And now the SS foiling attacks against the UN! Wow, omg! But
| also, I mean, why do we even care, all they gave us was a
| broken escalator and teleprompter, amiright?
| WmWsjA6B29B4nfk wrote:
| 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
| ryoshu wrote:
| Possibly https://www.secretservice.gov/investigations/cyber
| JdeBP wrote:
| 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.
| choutos wrote:
| First thing that came to my mind was SimFarm
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimFarm). And I was really
| confused.
| shaunpud wrote:
| Reticulating splines
| bilekas wrote:
| > 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.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| 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.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| `site:nytimes.com "anonymity to discuss an ongoing
| investigation"` shows more than one hit.
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| 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.
| eagleal wrote:
| Usually it's not allowed for people involved in an ongoing
| investigation to talk about said investigation. Maybe the
| US is different.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| 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)
| stevage wrote:
| The wording I often see is along the lines of "a source who
| was not authorised to discuss the case publicly".
| stevage wrote:
| >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.
| BlackFly wrote:
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Wouldn't there be repercussions for discussing an ongoing
| investigation with a journalist?
| Mtinie wrote:
| 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.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| 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.
| hk1337 wrote:
| 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?
| robomc wrote:
| You're right, it could be the sensible most likely thing AND
| the far-fetched thing.
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Is this a bot? This reply has been essentially pasted into
| several places now in this article.
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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 :)
| ajross wrote:
| 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.
| crystaln wrote:
| I believe if you connect directly to the tower a phone is
| connected to you can bypass central spam filters.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Why?
| pkaeding wrote:
| 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.
| op00to wrote:
| 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.
| op00to wrote:
| No, that's not a thing.
| crote wrote:
| 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?
| thehappypm wrote:
| This farm isn't anywhere near the UN, though--35 miles away.
| Which could put it in westchester, connecticut, new jersey,
| long island..
| bhouston wrote:
| > 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.
| op00to wrote:
| You do not need to be within 35km of someone to send them a
| spammy text message.
| JdeBP wrote:
| 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.
| nikcub wrote:
| 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
| ghxst wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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?
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| That time was always
| lxgr wrote:
| You know that, I know that, but the only thing that matters
| is decision makers at big corporations also knowing it.
| bArray wrote:
| 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.
| cenamus wrote:
| Close being 35km.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think it's 35 _miles_ (X 1.6).
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Also "most of them" within 35 miles (~50 km).
| nelox wrote:
| The World Trade Center is/was closer to UNHQ ;)
|
| Edit:ascii emoji fail
| lovich wrote:
| 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/
| oofbey wrote:
| 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.
| fidotron wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The answer to that may be "no one". The more likely scenario is
| they exaggerated a mundane crime into an exciting one.
| fidotron wrote:
| They have all year to do that. The giveaway there is
| something odd about this is the timing.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The timing is the President went to the UN and this makes
| leadership look like they stopped a big threat for some
| attaboys.
| dzdt wrote:
| 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.
| op00to wrote:
| You have a mind for government work!
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| stefan_ wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No one's suggesting giving their stuff back. The Secret Service
| bullshitting the public is still an issue.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| 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.
| ilyazub wrote:
| Wow, government-led mobile proxy network. Did they attempt to
| build a search index? :-)
| SilverBirch wrote:
| >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.
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| Could you maybe write a normal sentence explaining the point
| you're trying to make?
| alansammarone wrote:
| ...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.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| >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.
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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.
| eagleal wrote:
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| 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.
| ruszki wrote:
| 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.
| mfro wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| 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
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| those are absurd interpretations, "nation-state threat
| actors and individuals that are known to federal law" =
| some foreign country? give me a break
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Compare with this statement from July about a
| counterintelligence operation: https://xcancel.com/FBIDDB
| ongino/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.
| rpdillon wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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".
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| "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?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| 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.
| brk wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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."
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| > 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.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Unfortunately that's part of the reason sim farms exist.
| klausa wrote:
| > 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| kcplate wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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.
| frankharv wrote:
| 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.
| kcplate wrote:
| 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.
| disiplus wrote:
| 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...
| xtiansimon wrote:
| "...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.
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| 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.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > 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.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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).
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| 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.
| 55555 wrote:
| 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.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| 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.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| 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.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| 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.
| bunnie wrote:
| 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...
| Havoc wrote:
| Interesting. When I read the story I was wondering how banks of
| sims allow for eavesdropping
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| testfrequency wrote:
| The story is bogus, the evidence isn't*
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| kuschkufan wrote:
| 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.
| iszomer wrote:
| 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_..
| kuschkufan wrote:
| there is literally no point discussing further here. you've
| made up your mind already and will defend that no matter
| what.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > 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?
| kotaKat wrote:
| 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Ah I see, "grey routes" makes more sense
| metalman wrote:
| 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
| rob_c wrote:
| "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.
| topspin wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| > 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).
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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!)
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| SIM farms are probably against the ToS for most carriers, but
| otherwise they're not fundamentally problematic just massively
| inefficient
| roody15 wrote:
| 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.
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| fidotron wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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).
| whatsupdog wrote:
| > 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?
| ptaffs wrote:
| 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.
| retsibsi wrote:
| > 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.)
| pixl97 wrote:
| Is the BBC highly skewed to the left, or is reality?
| tolerance wrote:
| I don't think this is the flex you think it is.
| lazyant wrote:
| their treatment of Israel-Palestine
| rithdmc wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > 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.
| anukin wrote:
| 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.
| semanticist wrote:
| 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.
| abletonlive wrote:
| > 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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"
| zenmac wrote:
| >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.
| ynniv wrote:
| [flagged]
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| 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
| T-A wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299539
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| and here I was just going to say that math requires
| numbers, and numbers are often made up
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| 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?
| stogot wrote:
| relativism is indeed wrong, but thinking that because
| knowing the truth is somehow "hard", that you should throw
| out objectivism is also wrong.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| 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/c
| omm...
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| 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.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| There are many academics who disagree with his
| characterisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_ge
| nocide_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.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| 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_de
| bate_
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| 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/
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| For example, Stalin probably killed a lot more
| communists.
| pphysch wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| 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."
| pphysch wrote:
| 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?
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> 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.
| gedy wrote:
| > drew scholarly criticism for being seen as suggesting a
| moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi
| Holocaust.
|
| That's a propagandist?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| 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.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| That is actually orwellian as fuck.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Known as the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
| lt_snuffles wrote:
| This wikipedia article needs some work.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Firehose_of_fa
| lse...
| free_bip wrote:
| Be the change you wish to see in the world
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I'd also put Gish Gallop in there somewhere as well. Or
| "unfalsifiable" is also certainly in the neighborhood.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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?
| zubiaur wrote:
| 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.
| oofbey wrote:
| 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.
| eighthourblink wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Sure, the damage is done, but that doesn't make it
| _propaganda_.
| yndoendo wrote:
| 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
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| dcow wrote:
| Why not? Two reasonable people can disagree about the
| cause of some complex issue even without the media.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| there is more scientific doubt about the true
| effectiveness of COVID vaccines than you think.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| 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?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| >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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| In a free country, people can publish whatever nonsense
| they want.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| In a healthy society the professional media shouldn't be
| composed of lying crackpots.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Is there any "healthy society" that prohibits lying in
| the media?
| dumbfounder wrote:
| 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.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| > 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.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| 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.
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| > 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.
| terminalshort wrote:
| 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Fantastic quote. Spot on. Thanks for sharing it!
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > 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.
| fasbiner wrote:
| 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.
| RamRodification wrote:
| ...and let someone else pay the price in the end for letting
| these things happen unchecked. Perhaps your children :)
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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_.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| > 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.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| 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.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| 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.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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
| pookha wrote:
| 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).
| bongodongobob wrote:
| And yet people are getting fired over making comments about
| Charlie Kirk on social media.
| jonnybgood wrote:
| By the government?
| pjc50 wrote:
| No, but by Party supporters running campaigns against
| their employers. Or by the use of the administrative
| state to pressure the employers.
| ioasuncvinvaer wrote:
| Government officials are specifically calling for it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| In some cases, yes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplinary_actions_for_co
| mme...
|
| > 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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| 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.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| _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.
| theossuary wrote:
| 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.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| > Dixie Chicks
|
| This is not an example of cancel culture. This is an
| example of an artist pissing off their fan base so badly
| that that fan base does not continue to want to spend
| money on them
|
| Contrast that with the left canceling normal people for
| innocuous things. During the Rittenhouse trial, a police
| officer was fired for anonymously donating $25 to a legal
| fund after being uncloaked by the left. That's real
| cancel culture
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "When we do it, it doesn't count."
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| "If you personally don't keep spending money on someone,
| that's cancel culture"
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yes, that's been widely asserted by the Right.
|
| Like, say, Ted Cruz being pissy over Harry Potter
| boycotts.
| https://x.com/tedcruz/status/1588271789247197186
|
| Or Musk suing advertisers for not buying ads.
| https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-
| lawsu...
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
|
| Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies#Tinky_Wi
| nky_contro...
|
| Punch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_comment
| s_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%27Conn
| or_on_Satu...
|
| But sure, the left invented it.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| imcritic wrote:
| Even if gov isn't involved directly - it could very
| easily press some corps for such firings.
| baggachipz wrote:
| As we've already seen.
| robmccoll wrote:
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| >"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"
| robmccoll wrote:
| Fair. That does seem to be happening unfortunately.
| castis wrote:
| "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
| empiko wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| 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."
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Excellent point. Love the Popper quote.
|
| We can't be suicidally principled.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| > 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.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| He said that school deaths are worth it to uphold our 2nd
| amendment rights. So the irony is extremely thick here.
| philwelch wrote:
| 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?
| snozolli wrote:
| _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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway-11-1 wrote:
| Would you fire someone who said they don't want to fly in
| planes with black pilots? That say the civil rights act
| was a mistake?
|
| Would you fire someone who said "normalize Indian hate"?
|
| Would you fire someone who said they like to grab women
| by the pussy?
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| It's clear you've never even watched the very videos you
| claim to be citing.
|
| 1a. He's referencing DEI, citing how it debases people.
| He literally says, _in the video_, "I don't want to have
| these thoughts, but that's what DEI does." I know you
| won't go watch it, but you're just parroting a false
| statement that Charlie Kirk never made.
|
| 1b. He never said that. He said that Black families had
| better standards of living before the Civil Rights Act,
| referencing both household incomes, rates of
| fatherlessness, and crime rates. All objective facts that
| are true. It's hardly racist to point out how America is
| not getting better for black Americans.
|
| 2. I've not heard this one. Feel free to cite a source
| and I'll take a look.
|
| 3. I've also not heard this one. Once again, I'll go look
| if you'd like to provide sources.
| thorncorona wrote:
| As the joke goes, in soviet Russia you are also free to
| criticize America.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.)
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| > "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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| manoDev wrote:
| Freedom of speech to be a nazi. But a Senator speaking up
| gets detained.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 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.
| snozolli wrote:
| 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".
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 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.
| manoDev wrote:
| Alright, here's another example: try speaking up against
| Israel policies.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| What about it?
| imcritic wrote:
| That might've been used to be so, but isn't so anymore. U.S.
| has nothing to do with freedoms or, say, democracy anymore.
| It used to have been praised for those things for decades by
| quite a lot of people from all around the world. I don't
| really know if it was actually so (I'm a foreigner and I only
| perceived it to be so, but could be quite easily have been
| wrong all that time about that), but now the curtain is down
| and U.S. gov doesn't even pretend anymore to not be evil
| towards people (both inside and outside U.S.).
|
| As for your comment about Chinese gulags - is this like
| American Guantanamo??
| agsqwe wrote:
| Everything is relative. I'm an immigrant from a post-USSR
| country and the US is still orders of magnitude more
| democratic and free
| mathfailure wrote:
| 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!)
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > Doubt. What are post-USSR countries (except for
| Ukraine) where government detains lots of people who
| hasn't committed any crimes?
|
| You mean the illegal immigrants, who by their very
| definition already commit a crime?
|
| > 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.
|
| Source?
|
| > 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.
|
| Trump won the popular vote too, and look up the purpose
| of the electoral college if you can't understand it.
| Other countries have similarly "strange" provisions to
| outsiders.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Does it matter if you can speak if the system is designed do
| that you can't be heard?
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| A more serious problem: do people want to listen? Do they
| want difficult truths or comforting lies?
| m-s-y wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| Suggest googling "compelled speech"
| thisisit wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| that's capitalism baby, look at sinclair broadcast group
| for example
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| rjdj377dhabsn wrote:
| 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?
| eddywebs wrote:
| Could be, I think the main point missing here is the
| independence of media from the state, wherever the place.
| np- wrote:
| 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.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| For now.
| walleeee wrote:
| Wolin is insightful in this regard
| squidproquo wrote:
| 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.
| SmirkingRevenge wrote:
| 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.
| stetrain wrote:
| 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.
| herval wrote:
| 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.
| UpsideDownRide wrote:
| 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.
| herval wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >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.
| herval wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >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.
| herval wrote:
| > 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...
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| alexpit wrote:
| 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.
| narrator wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| moron4hire wrote:
| This sounds like "nobody drives in NYC because the traffic is
| so bad".
| K0balt wrote:
| 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.
| ghm2199 wrote:
| 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.
| eddywebs wrote:
| Amen !
| CrulesAll wrote:
| 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.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| 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.
| throaway5445454 wrote:
| also was the outcome fostered by the USSR
| pixl97 wrote:
| > 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.
| istjohn wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| 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?
| SmirkingRevenge wrote:
| 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.
| thisisit wrote:
| 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.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| 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.
| istjohn wrote:
| 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.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > 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?
| throaway5445454 wrote:
| 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.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| This extreme naivete is exactly what the parent comment's
| story is addressing.
| throaway5445454 wrote:
| 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.
| yatopifo wrote:
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| So you are saying that experts on CNN are paid by the
| government?
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| The good news is, the only people who watch cable news in the
| US anymore are either boomers or in an airport.
| spaceisballer wrote:
| 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.
| SmirkingRevenge wrote:
| 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.
| Rover222 wrote:
| 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.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| The fact that you think NYT is "far left" is a great example
| of how incredibly far the overton window has shifted.
| Rover222 wrote:
| 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.
| SmirkingRevenge wrote:
| 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
| Rover222 wrote:
| 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.
| SmirkingRevenge wrote:
| 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.
| Rover222 wrote:
| I need the check out The Dispatch, thanks.
| dionian wrote:
| unfortunately we are trending toward that direction, trust in
| media is hitting all time lows in the US.
| sjw987 wrote:
| 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.
| JTbane wrote:
| 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.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| 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.
| starky wrote:
| >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.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| 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
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| iphone_elegance wrote:
| That's fine but it's also the end of self-rule and agency
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| 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
| turkishdelight wrote:
| 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.
| chrononaut wrote:
| 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 :)
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| 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.
| mjparrott wrote:
| 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.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 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.
| dmbche wrote:
| Look up Manufacturing Consent - good read!
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| 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.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| 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.
| geeunits wrote:
| 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? :)
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| t1234s wrote:
| 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.
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| Why not? That's the standard on film shoots in locations that
| are absolutely "one-time events". People do that all the time.
| t1234s wrote:
| Criminals don't file for workman's comp.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 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.
| rs186 wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Why spend the effort to refute this? No one who is going to
| believe the original story is going to believe this.
| jsw97 wrote:
| I believed the original story. Now I don't. So it helped me.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| nailer wrote:
| 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
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Ok, that's not the Sim Farm I expected.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| gootz wrote:
| So, I should get fewer texts from random numbers asking 'hi,
| wanna grab coffee? I'm definitely not here to steal your kidney'
| /s
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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.
| boston_clone wrote:
| 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?
| sbarre wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| "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."
| mewse-hn wrote:
| 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.
| Neil44 wrote:
| "dope on the table"
| psim1 wrote:
| 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.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| 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?
| mcswell wrote:
| Speaking to the Secret Service agent who found this: "These
| aren't the SIMs you're looking for."
| krunger wrote:
| 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?
| aedocw wrote:
| 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.
| louwrentius wrote:
| Copaganda is indeed a good book, recommend.
| AdamN wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter 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.
|
| 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.
| chrononaut wrote:
| > 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| 2THFairy wrote:
| 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.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >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.
| breppp wrote:
| How well has that worked for East Europe?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Really well, thanks for asking
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| istjohn wrote:
| > The incredible vast majority of people in the world are
| acting in good faith.
|
| We have fundamentally different priors.
| chrononaut wrote:
| Which areas or circumstances are you observing otherwise?
| pauldelany wrote:
| 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
| dml2135 wrote:
| 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| When the good guy riots it's called "unrest".
| oezi wrote:
| 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.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Who else would you have the journalists talk to, in order to
| get the other side of the story? Criminals?
| kmoser wrote:
| Who better to talk to about crimes than those who commit
| those very crimes?
| immibis wrote:
| Yes? Journalists in the past talked to criminals.
| dylan604 wrote:
| of course, a criminal would have no reason to lie.
| samtp wrote:
| of course, a cop would have no reason to lie.
| serf wrote:
| 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.
| notmyjob wrote:
| Prosecutors are worse. Cops are going be cops. Our justice
| system is where the buck stops, or should.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Like touch fentanyl and you'll drop dead from your heart
| exploding?
| BillTthree wrote:
| 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?
| pstation wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| nailer wrote:
| > using radio "triangulation" (sic)
|
| Why is triangulation an error?
| Empact wrote:
| It's literally not, which casts the rest of the author's
| conclusions into doubt.
| nailer wrote:
| 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...
| pkphilip wrote:
| 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.
| klysm wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >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.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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.
| gaoshan wrote:
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| 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.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > 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.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| 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.
| rpdillon wrote:
| 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.
| johncessna wrote:
| Click bait hating on other click bait
| levocardia wrote:
| 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!
| f33d5173 wrote:
| 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.
| moscoe wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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.
| zer00eyz 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.
| rpdillon wrote:
| 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.
| istjohn wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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.
| deelowe wrote:
| 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."
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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
| deelowe wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| abirch wrote:
| When has the NYTimes made shit up?
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| tourge wrote:
| 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)
| throwaway74628 wrote:
| Judith Miller re: Saddam's WMDs
| michael1999 wrote:
| Judith Miller reported total fabrications and helped lead
| the entire country into a disastrous invasion of Iraq.
| elzbardico wrote:
| > 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?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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"
| deelowe wrote:
| > 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.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "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"
| rpdillon wrote:
| 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.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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.
| JoblessWonder wrote:
| > 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| themafia wrote:
| > 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.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| 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).
| themafia wrote:
| 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.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| 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).
| themafia wrote:
| 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.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| 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.
| Uehreka wrote:
| 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?
| themafia wrote:
| >> 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?"
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > 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.
| typpilol wrote:
| Same. If Charlie was a Nazi then half of America is.
|
| It's quite annoying
| libraryatnight wrote:
| 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.
| michael1999 wrote:
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| 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.
| michael1999 wrote:
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| Fair point!
| snickerbockers wrote:
| >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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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?
| robertgraham wrote:
| 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.
| smachiz wrote:
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| 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"
| chairmansteve wrote:
| 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.
| NedF wrote:
| 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.
| throwmeaway222 wrote:
| Can we perma-block nytimes since we discovered it's gov
| propoganda:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| 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.
| labrador wrote:
| The Trump Secret Service is not a trustworthy institution based
| on the fact that they "accidentally" erased all their comms from
| Jan 6th 2021
| ck2 wrote:
| btw the escalator and teleprompter story being sabotage was also
| bogus
|
| https://newrepublic.com/post/200833/trump-team-messed-up-un-...
| toader wrote:
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| Not only that, but the Wall Street Journal ran the same story.
| https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/un-secret-ser...
| serf wrote:
| >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
| daft_pink wrote:
| 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.
| leosussan wrote:
| This is the exact feeling I had.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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".
| picafrost wrote:
| 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.
| poemxo wrote:
| I got the same feeling. If anything a nation state would want
| to operate under the guise of a "normal criminal."
| gsibble wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| Well put. I think both the NYT and this blog post are
| stretching for conclusions.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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...
| aryan14 wrote:
| 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
| rooftopzen wrote:
| 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)
| joecool1029 wrote:
| 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?
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| 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.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Where's the list and where's the prosecution of the people on
| that list?
| avazhi wrote:
| > 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.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| The rest of the article is interesting and doesn't depend on
| the validity of that statement.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| 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?
| hulitu wrote:
| > Reading between the lines, my guess is something like this
| happened:
|
| _cough_ 35 miles _cough_.
| pt9567 wrote:
| 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.
| mnemotronic wrote:
| 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?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| Animats wrote:
| 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...
| cakealert wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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)
| Johnny555 wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-09-24 23:00 UTC)