That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

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.

this is called relativism, and while accepting relativism is seen to be defeatist, thinking that you know the truth is usually naive.

except math. math is true

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

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.

Does it matter if you can speak if the system is designed do that you can't be heard?

Freedom of speech to be a nazi. But a Senator speaking up gets detained.

And yet people are getting fired over making comments about Charlie Kirk on social media.

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??

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

I 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.

...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.

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

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

Edit:ascii emoji fail

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

I cannot conceive of a reason why that would occur

https://xkcd.com/1138/

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

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

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

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)

That time was always

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.

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_..