Comment by alansammarone
5 months ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Article's subheading is "it's just an ordinary crime". It seem comparable to a situation where you have a gang with a huge weapon cache that gets found and the press says "enough fire power to outgun the police" and someone says "dude, they weren't aiming for the police, just their rivals".
Sure, the press may put a "threat to the nation" spin on things that might be a bit sensational. But the "you're making something out of nothing" claims seem to do the opposite. Criminals with the ability to cause widespread chaos seem worrying even if their may motivation is maintaining their income stream.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately that's part of the reason sim farms exist.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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We need to be especially careful about labeling things a terror threat during the current inflamed security and political situation.
"Freddy No-Lips is burning down Suzy's Bakery because she didn't pay protection money" is not the Reichstag fire and should not be weaponized like it was.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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Please don't comment like this on HN. These guidelines in particular, ask us to avoid commenting like this:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Please don't post shallow dismissals...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cute that another (days+ old) comment of mine was down-modded and flagged at the exact same time you wrote this. You know, the one that stated literal facts and nothing else.
I legitimately read the comment twice and couldn't parse it when I wrote this. I wasn't trying to be rude, I genuinely didn't understand. But pretty sure you don't care. But sure, point taken.
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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.
>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.
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