alt Hacker NewsThese are not very smart spies:
> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
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How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.
When the Soviets wanted to spy on the American embassy, they energized the steel rebars to act as antennas. The structure was so wired that the entire building was the bug. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...
Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?
This is the part that feels the most wild to me.
Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.
He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.
I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.
Somehow is an engineer at OpenAI and before that at Meta.
Does not understand how models or data retention works.
Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.
Are their hiring standards that lax?
It’s the criminals that you don’t catch that you have to worry about.
The fact that even this incompetent dude most likely still made off with some secrets means I’m sure some better trained ones got/are continuing to get a few more.
There likely are other, smarter and more careful spies at these AI companies who have not been caught...
These AI companies are likely targets of multiple foreign intelligence agencies, similar to military contractors.
The listening device was concealed with toilet paper behind a tv. Duh, Not smart at all.
Especially since you an just buy one, like Plaud and tape it to the underside of the desk, surreptitiously, instead of suspiciously accessing the back of the TV.
"OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper,"
I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand
Arrogance is a help of a drug
Also from the article:
> An unattended bag found in the company’s offices contained Alfozan’s wallet and identification, as well as a recording device
It’s almost like he wanted to be caught…
I am not sure whether it bodes well for humanity that the advice "If you want to break the law use local abliterated model or at least a Chinese one" actually has to be written down.
I mean they could have at -least- just used a home GPU to plan with complete privacy and no evidence. But using hardware of your employer to plan crimes against them, whp happens to be a surveillance capitalism company, is next level stupid.
Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.
In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.
I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.
To any spies still at OpenAI: do better.
The tech industry has a lot of very capable people with very narrow domain knowledge.
Somehow they think this gives them superpowers when it's built atop a tower of borderline retardation.
Remember the Apple guy a minute ago that arrogantly thought he could bypass their security?
Given that this is being described as an "executive conference room", it's more likely an attempt at insider trading than espionage. Decisions made in those rooms at OpenAI move markets (c.f. DRAM) for sure.
Nope. He probably should've googled it (from a coffee shop, over a VPN.) There is commercial grade spy equipment that can be bought relatively cheaply and looks like every day items.
He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room
these are not spies lol
Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people.