That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.
> That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!
Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"
Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."
Yes, I think it's absolutely wild that there's a story here about someone spotting a suspicious sewer cleaning van and somebody who had personal experience writing code for that sewer cleaning van chimed in. Seriously, how do you not love this site?
Generally these are done in coordination with a sewer cleaning truck at the next manhole in the pipe. Very common for them to stay on the phone with each other
door bell rings .... five men in dark suits standing outside ... hair on the back of my neck stands on end. I open the door, hands shaking with that burning feeling in my guts "Yea, how can I help you gentlemen" The tallest one, intimidating, gruff, ex marine perhaps, shoves a badge in my face: "N S A, National Sewer Agency" they push me aside and push inside my hosue .. a violation but what do I say?!? They look around ... circling me like a pack of wolves .. then, another pulls a bag from under his arm and produces a plastic jar in a biohazard bag... looks like ice cream and garbage inside, then grufly states "Sir, do you recognize these napkins?" "napkins?" I squeak out ... it hit me.... FUCK! .... the other night .... I was drunk, out of TP, desperate... paper towels staring me in the face - dare I? It was a moment of weakness, desperation and drunkeness rolled into one ... and here I am, staring the consequences in the face.... "Sir, your going to have to come with us" And no one ever heard from me again. Please take heed, only flush TP!
This is fairly close to reality, if you think about it
Medicaid here in Arizona is called "AHCCCS" which is pronounced "access" so imagine the fun homophonic confusion in a conversation about "do you have access?" "well I got access but then I lost it..."
Many conservative Christians have termed homosexuality as "Same-Sex Attraction" or SSA, so they often speak of "suffering from SSA" or being afflicted with it. When I applied to the Social Security Administration for disability, I couldn't help but notice, and their disability program is called "SSDI" which has nothing to do with Reagan's "Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative"
Nor do my dealings with the F.A.A. in the past several years have anything to do with a pilot's license or flight clearances; the Family Assistance Administration here doles out funds for food stamps ("SNAP", another good homophone, lets you purchase plenty of alphabet soup for the fam) and other basic needs.
I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.
Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this
This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.
Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on
Unmarked vans drive around all the time. They don't typically park out front of a whistleblower's house. There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be required.
An unmarked van could park in front of any arbitrary public neighborhood house with street parking for a few hours and nobody would care. As long as people aren’t visible in it.
Multiple days would be suspicious but that would be true of even the “sewer inspection” cover van
An unmarked white van (without windows) parked a house or two down the street hacking your wifi might not be that noticeable. One across the street with a radio dish spinning around and a parabolic mic sticking out the window and a few people entering and exiting it with donuts and coffee multiple times probably would be.
I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.
My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.
With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling of hyperbole for effect.
Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.
But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.
A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van.
You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.
> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley
So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?
I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.
That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.
It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.
From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...
Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing
I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.
You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer inspection van and hope you trick every single person who notices it into second-guessing themselves along the lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than that..."
Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced enough to facilitate this option.
I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully pull off low key 100% of the time while actively monitoring someone from the street in front of their house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.
Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.
haha well dont assume
spies are some godmode infallable people. spies also are humans and can have varying degrees of freedom to express their stupidity in their work..
in our country some spies got caught drivin around with wifi pineapple in plain sight circling govt and ngo sites.
in my mind thats next level dumb stuff, but maybe they arent really hackers and think its not conspicuous, or even the opposite, they know exactly what it is but think 'oh normal people wont stop to think about this, they dont recognise such equipment'.
if you werent there, didnt know the guys in the van etc. etc. - its all just guesswork.
even public record of a sewer inspection right then and there at that time (which i kinda doubt exists) wouldnt confirm or deny what that van was really doing there.
that being said, i would _assume_ its a sewer inspection van. but thats an assumption, not a known fact.
Reminds me of the joke where students prove by induction that the teacher is not actually planning a surprise test, and are surprised when there's a test the next day
I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!
Now I'm starting to wonder if that guy habitually leaves the door open because he got sick of people winking at him with a wry smile every time he had to go to a job.
Sometime there’s vehicle from at least three businesses and two government agencies gathered round an inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that’s costing.
You're thinking like a normal person. You need to think like an institution that has the entire weight of government behind them and who nobody wants to be on the wrong side of.
They either find someone who has suitable vans they can threaten with prosecution. That person then agrees to be an "informant" because that's better than losing your life to the feds and then their handler asks to borrow a van. They like this because no money needs to get spent specifically on it so it doesn't tend to get scrutinized. If they're going full above the table they register a business with the state complete with valid HVAC license or whatever and then rent a van from some company the FBI owns/runs that rents white vans and have some decals printed up. (For those inclined to do further reading, the OSINT hobbyists have done a lot to expose this workflow as it relates to aircraft so probably start there.)
Same. I can totally buy the joystick and the robot as I've seen this done in my area, but the rack mounted PCs and the headphones makes it seem awfully like he's telling Tom Cruise which wire to cut.
