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That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

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Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#361

Post by tsimionescu »

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #322
wat10000 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the most obvious example, it's not the sole piece of evidence. Let's pick through the official statement. "In addition to carrying out anonymous telephonic threats, these devices could be used to conduct a wide range of telecommunications attacks. This includes disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and…

those are absurd interpretations, "nation-state threat actors and individuals that are known to federal law" = some foreign country? give me a break

You seem to not understand how propaganda puff pieces work. You are taking the anonymous sources and the SS agents' words at face value as if they are good faith normal language. But given the clear propagandistic nature of the piece, you should instead immediately suspect every statement as being the most weasely possible "technically true" statement that could have been made. When someone is willing to call 35 miles away from NYC as "close to the UN", you should absolutely expect that they would be willing to call "a known fraudster and a corrupt official from Kazakstan" as "nation-state threat actors and individuals known to federal law", which they technically are.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#362

Post by calandoa »

roody15 wrote: post #98

Once a Chinese grad student explained to me a difference he noted between Chinese and American citizens. He said in China no really reads or watches 24/7 major news outlets in China. They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life. He said Americans seem to get really emotional over content in the press and seem to really struggle with the idea of propaganda / journalism in the news. I…

[dead]

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#363

Post by _DeadFred_ »

roody15 wrote: post #98

Once a Chinese grad student explained to me a difference he noted between Chinese and American citizens. He said in China no really reads or watches 24/7 major news outlets in China. They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life. He said Americans seem to get really emotional over content in the press and seem to really struggle with the idea of propaganda / journalism in the news. I…

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.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#364

Post by nostrademons »

whatamidoingyo wrote: post #208
alansammarone wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This reminded me of a YouTube clip I watched years ago. It was basically a retired KGB agent explaining how the media purposely puts out conflicting stories. This breaks the brain of the citizens, and they're unable to know what is true. We indeed see this here in the US. I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively. I can choose what I want to believe is true, though.

> I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively.

The parenthetical is doing a lot of work. The only real truth is that which you experience with your own senses. For everything else, you are choosing to believe somebody else's truth. It's worth remembering that whenever you consume media.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#365

Post by _DeadFred_ »

dcow wrote: post #337
marcosdumay wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should not be conflicting narratives on the press about things like if the COVID vaccines work or not, or if the disease kills people or not. Or if the world is warming.

Why not? Two reasonable people can disagree about the cause of some complex issue even without the media.

When one side has to ignore all of science, that has build Western society and allowed it to live in unnaturally dense populations with unnatural life spans, that is not disagreeing on cause. That has driften to theological/emotional belief in something. Keep those out of news.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#366

Post by johncessna »

gaoshan wrote: post #262

There is so much to address in this post but I want to look at just this part: "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. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official…

Click bait hating on other click bait

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#367

Post by fuzzfactor »

dumbfounder wrote: post #331
whatamidoingyo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminded me of a YouTube clip I watched years ago. It was basically a retired KGB agent explaining how the media purposely puts out conflicting stories. This breaks the brain of the citizens, and they're unable to know what is true. We indeed see this here in the US. I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively. I can choose what I want to believe is true, though.

I don’t think it’s some master scheme. They are trying to make money more than anything else. So they distort the truth to what sells the most. That just happens to be one of two major ideologies that hate each other. The effect is the same, but the motivations, and thus how you counteract, are different.

>They are trying to make money more than anything else.

Who knows what some people will do these days, just for that.

Well, we actually have a pretty good idea, without all the gory details.

But I know what you mean, it's not too easy for multiple sources to be on the same page even when they really try sometimes.

However, only the few most popular are what most people listen to, and those biggies are usually well aware of each others' stance. On an ongoing basis. And if a combined effort were to take place nothing else would have a chance.

Sometimes even sharing personnel, concurrently and/or sequentially, which can also lay the groundwork for approaches that seem competitive but are really complementary. As designed with a single, possibly obscured agenda designed from the ground up to deceive.

Things like this might be why "trust but verify" may have to be deprecated, and reversed to "verify and still be skeptical" if the propaganda keeps getting worse.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#368

Post by DangitBobby »

kcplate wrote: post #139
notatoad wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 f…

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.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#369

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

spaceisballer wrote: post #254
roody15 wrote: post #98

Once a Chinese grad student explained to me a difference he noted between Chinese and American citizens. He said in China no really reads or watches 24/7 major news outlets in China. They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life. He said Americans seem to get really emotional over content in the press and seem to really struggle with the idea of propaganda / journalism in the news. I…

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 in…

Fox (and the right-wing media more broadly) act as boosters for the right and negative partisanship generators for the left. They protect republicans from accountability. They manufacture scandals about the opposition.

And it's so effective we couldn't even collectively manage to banish from public life the guy who nearly murdered congress and his veep on television. Truly scary.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#370

Post by tsimionescu »

palmotea wrote: post #211
r3trohack3r wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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…

> 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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