> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things

Assuming 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.

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.

I 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...

Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.

Surely 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.

This is what local models are for! On your own hardware, whose filesystem you can erase, shred, or physically destroy later.

LLMs have democratized espionage!

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 :).

And not do this from your spouse's account.

Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.

That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.

Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)