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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

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 1y ago
[flagged]
- alansammarone 1y ago
  ...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 1y ago
    >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 1y ago
      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.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - eagleal 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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.
- tomhow 1y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - nixosbestos 1y ago
    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.
    - tomhow 1y ago
      I didn't touch any "days+ old" comments. I did flag another comment of yours from about the same time as the one I replied to, but several other community members had already downvoted and flagged it, so I'm not taking any unilateral action here. I'm only seeing your comments because so many community members are flagging them. > You know, the one that stated literal facts and nothing else I don't know what comment you're referring to, but it's common for people to claim that they were "just stating facts", whilst sidestepping the fact that the choice of "facts", the context in which they are invoked and the words used to state them can very easily be inflammatory. > I wasn't trying to be rude, I genuinely didn't understand It's common for people to underestimate how harshly their words come across by the time they hit the page for others to read. We've had to warn you before, and you're still frequently making comments that are breaking the guidelines and being flagged by many fellow community members. You need to try harder to keep within the guidelines if you want to participate here. This is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to keep the standards up. We need to see you making an effort to be one of the ones to raise the standards, rather than repeatedly dragging them down. > But pretty sure you don't care My job is to uphold the guidelines and do what I can to keep this place from burning to the ground. That's all I care about when I'm posting comments like these. > But sure, point taken I hope so!
WastedCucumber 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ruszki 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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.
notatoad 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    Unfortunately that's part of the reason sim farms exist.
- klausa 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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.
xtiansimon 1y ago
“…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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    > 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.
55555 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.

nixosbestos 1y ago

[flagged]

alansammarone 1y ago
...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 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
    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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - eagleal 1y ago
    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 1y ago
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.
tomhow 1y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nixosbestos 1y ago
  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.
  - tomhow 1y ago
    I didn't touch any "days+ old" comments. I did flag another comment of yours from about the same time as the one I replied to, but several other community members had already downvoted and flagged it, so I'm not taking any unilateral action here. I'm only seeing your comments because so many community members are flagging them. > You know, the one that stated literal facts and nothing else I don't know what comment you're referring to, but it's common for people to claim that they were "just stating facts", whilst sidestepping the fact that the choice of "facts", the context in which they are invoked and the words used to state them can very easily be inflammatory. > I wasn't trying to be rude, I genuinely didn't understand It's common for people to underestimate how harshly their words come across by the time they hit the page for others to read. We've had to warn you before, and you're still frequently making comments that are breaking the guidelines and being flagged by many fellow community members. You need to try harder to keep within the guidelines if you want to participate here. This is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to keep the standards up. We need to see you making an effort to be one of the ones to raise the standards, rather than repeatedly dragging them down. > But pretty sure you don't care My job is to uphold the guidelines and do what I can to keep this place from burning to the ground. That's all I care about when I'm posting comments like these. > But sure, point taken I hope so!

WastedCucumber 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ruszki 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.

notatoad 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  Unfortunately that's part of the reason sim farms exist.
klausa 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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.

xtiansimon 1y ago

“…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 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  > 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.

55555 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.