That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

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.

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

So in a meta conversation about news, there was discussion yesterday about social media and speech. One of the main reoccurring threads of conversation was that news should be left to the experts and those vetted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352213 https://substack.com/@cybersect/p-174413355

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"

> 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.

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"

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.

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?

Click bait hating on other click bait

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!

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.

Police propaganda is serious problem. But this seems like the least appropriate thing to dismiss as "just police propaganda". What's bad about police propaganda is it perpetuates a certain politics by maintain atmosphere of fear as well as pushing certain stereotypes of ethnic groups. But when the police are exaggerating the terrorist potential of actual organized criminals, things seem much muddier. I think people should concerned about organized scammers - their victims are usually the poor, notably. It's true their terrorist potential is overstated but only because they are profit-oriented but it's not like their other activities should be ignored.

Like touch fentanyl and you'll drop dead from your heart exploding?

Prosecutors are worse. Cops are going be cops. Our justice system is where the buck stops, or should.

Who else would you have the journalists talk to, in order to get the other side of the story? Criminals?

Copaganda is indeed a good book, recommend.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“…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.

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"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."

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.

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.

"dope on the table"

>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.

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.

Close being 35km.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Reading between the lines, my guess is something like this happened:

cough 35 miles cough.

> 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).

SIM farms are probably against the ToS for most carriers, but otherwise they're not fundamentally problematic just massively inefficient

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.

<< 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...

> 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.

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.

I got the same feeling. If anything a nation state would want to operate under the guise of a "normal criminal."

Why not? That's the standard on film shoots in locations that are absolutely "one-time events". People do that all the time.

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.

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.

You're right, it could be the sensible most likely thing AND the far-fetched thing.

> 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.

You do not need to be within 35km of someone to send them a spammy text message.

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?

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.

The story is bogus, the evidence isn’t*

This is the exact feeling I had.

Reticulating splines

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...

It's literally not, which casts the rest of the author's conclusions into doubt.

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.

Well put. I think both the NYT and this blog post are stretching for conclusions.

>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.

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.

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.

There's a Fox News video of this on Youtube and the comments are literally completely insane. A third of them saying it was Democrats, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc. Another third saying it was immigrants and it's Democrats' fault for letting them in. Another third saying it was the Chinese. A few saying it's the woke Marxist agenda. Not a shred of sanity in sight.

There wasn't a single "hey maybe it's just some random people trying to earn money", much less a "hang on, this isn't actually a crime".

No one’s suggesting giving their stuff back. The Secret Service bullshitting the public is still an issue.

Not only that, but the Wall Street Journal ran the same story. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/un-secret-ser...

>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

The rest of the article is interesting and doesn't depend on the validity of that statement.

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.

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.

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.

I believed the original story. Now I don’t. So it helped me.

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.

The answer to that may be “no one”. The more likely scenario is they exaggerated a mundane crime into an exciting one.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This sounds like "nobody drives in NYC because the traffic is so bad".

>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.

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.

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.

Look up Manufacturing Consent - good read!

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.

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.

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

That's fine but it's also the end of self-rule and agency

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.

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? :)

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.

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 :)

...and let someone else pay the price in the end for letting these things happen unchecked. Perhaps your children :)

So you are saying that experts on CNN are paid by the government?

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.

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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.

unfortunately we are trending toward that direction, trust in media is hitting all time lows in the US.

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.

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.

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.

The good news is, the only people who watch cable news in the US anymore are either boomers or in an airport.

Amen !

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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.

The author is describing the typical pattern of these things (SIM farms, email spam hosts, Proxy Networks, etc.) which don't typically get VC money or large investments, but grow organically.

It's not actually a contrarian view. Hacker News, the comments section of The Register, and other places where one might expect a larger proportion of the readership to know how telecommunications actually works, are all covering these same points.

The involvement of the politicians was someone that was using this kit almost certainly for some minor side-line, as one does not need expensive kit capable of transmitting thousands of simultaneous messages from sites in three states in order to send hoax police reports.

Indeed, the people whose operations (most probably high volume scamming, or some kind of dodgy telecommunications carrier) were primarily the purpose of this kit are probably rather cross with whoever it was who saw this kit as an opportunity for pursuing their own ends. It's the old found-major-criminal-through-a-broken-tail-light story.

Was it? What does “near the UN” really mean?

My guess is they did some sort of sweep in advance of the president’s visit and the secret service decided, probably rashly, to do something about it instead of ignore it.

The NY Post, dipshits that they are, broke the story and were the headliner on Drudge Report. They spun/blew up the story as being potentially the biggest telecom disruption since 9/11.

Bullshit experts weighed in that only the Chinese, Russians or Israelis could possibly buy SIM cards. That’s how you know it’s bullshit, as outcomes of counterintelligence investigations that make the security services look dumb don’t get headline billing.

The other news outlets went with a slightly less unhinged variant of the story.