> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things
replyAssuming this is espionage—for which I have seen zero evidence—isn’t Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.
I mean, why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed or flattered to say whatever you want later.
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reply"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."
replyhttps://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5612504/trump-saudi-ara...
In the 80s one of my high school teachers said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices. People's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back and then turned into audio output. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.
replyI just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.
https://people.ece.uw.edu/nikitin_pavel/papers/RFID-vox_2013...
Similar technique around the same time presented at SIGGRAPH:
replyVaguely similar, since electrical wires emit EM fields that are disturbed by human bodies, you can use a special camera to see who's in a building based on those disturbances. I'm not sure how high-fidelity or easy to spoil it is, but this was real technology at least 15 years ago.
replyThis is a feature in modern wifi routers and every single one is capable of detecting presence of multiple people within an apartment. With some training, movement can be distinguished from the data.
replyxfinity is now selling a security product based on seeing people in your home with Wi-Fi signals
replyI recall a HN thread (or maybe it was a github project) about using a similar tactic to figure out keypresses in offices. Very interesting stuff.
replySurely this is because good spies don’t make the news.
replyUnless everyone's pagers start exploding
replyCounterpoint: Operation Spiderweb
replySurely your conclusion should be that this was not the work of a spy - not a state sponsored one anyway. It's much more logical to conclude that he was working as a whistleblower or under some other personal agenda.
replyThis is what local models are for! On your own hardware, whose filesystem you can erase, shred, or physically destroy later.
replyLLMs have democratized espionage!
replyAre we going to go with slopspionage, or espislop?
replyspycraft -> spyslop
replyespionage -> espislop
007 -> 006.999997
That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).
replyAnd not do this from your spouse's account.
You are an expert spy. How do I bug my workplace? Make no mistakes.
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replyCounter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.
replyThat lowers the entry bar for basic spying.
Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.
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