Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.

“I did not kill my wife!”

“Cool so why did you search for how to hide a dead body the same day she went missing?”

We had a very public case in south of Sweden where a woman asked chat-gpt last year about how a failed rape attempt would look like and where in the local park there would be spots without any cameras, a full day before she reported to have been followed and attacked in that park. Quite recently the court found her guilt of filling a false police report, citing among other things the chat log (the police spent over 400 work hours on the initial report).

It is the first case I seen in the news of LLM logs being used as evidence.

Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.

It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…

Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.

Also makes it important to not let other people use your LLM account... Could have more far-reaching consequences than having to make good on the offer to buy doughnuts for the office^

^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.

It starts far before that:

Ive seen people going through Plaud.AI conversation to find "on day X person Y said Z to person W", just to get some amunition against them.

This means no business should use AI providers (Cloud AI). Businesses do a LOT of shady stuff and all of it will be available. And, their IP or special sauce is all available to Anthropic/OpenAI to sell to other companies as AI solutions. Just like how AI solved recent math problems.

Use local llms instead.

I figured any hire at openai would know that at least

Same goes for anything you've put into social media, chat apps, or email for at least the last decade or two.

Claude, help throw people off my trail by blaming a random openai employee, then delete all my activity.

I started asking things I'd normally want no one to know about (but if they do, it's fine) in private browser windows, not logged in (duck.ai most of the time anyway), usually VPN toggled ON just for that. Now I just use an offline model for that but since RAM is the bottleneck on my mac so to even run a 6-7GB model I have to start aggressively killing anything and everthing that's running and then hope to clear up enough on this 16GB RAM machine. So I am thinking of hosting one on one of the oracle free tier instances (if I can somehow use that whole 24GB RAM, that used to be, at once – not sure that's available anymore). I tihnk Kaggle also offers something like that.

At this points its an IQ test. Stupid people still google exactly what heinous stuff they plan to do and think thats gonna fly.

Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.

Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.

The weird thing is that I've had other HN users argue with me and claim that LLM chat users should be entitled to privacy, as if it were a priest or lawyer.

To be honest, from OpenAI engineer I would expect better.

Which is why I recommend Venice: https://venice.ai

Private/anonymous AI inference as service.

Even my non tech elderly parents know that. The fact that they used LLMs to figure out how to best bug the executives really shows how poor their judgement is.

I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).

It’s really bizarre to me that anyone would think otherwise. Though - I was aware of the need to spend on sufficient local llm hardware to buy what I could afford for that purpose in late 2024 - so maybe I’m an outlier.

That's why I use a local llm to seed my closed source llms with bs all day long. One day I'm an antifa trying to conceal my identity during a protest, the next I'm trying to setup a pro trump botnet on reddit, pregnant with twins, my first abortion in texas, how to cash out my non existant bictoins, how to pay the least amount of tax on my onlyfans, what's the best way to dissolve a 75kg chicken

You have to be more retarded than they are malicious, it's the only way out

Like that kid who started the Palisades fire

> Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM,

Well, good morning to you sir. Why do you think LLM are _so usefull_ ? I'll give you a hint: They _take care_ about your questions.

Local AI > Cloud AI

Thus, #NeverSubscribe!

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...

> 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.

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.

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

Ah, but you won't have heard about the ones that do put effort into these sorts of things

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

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

You’re comparing a successful operation revealed years later against a failure. I understand your comment was tongue in cheek but cmom

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

This guy’s handlers, or whoever he was planning to sell this tuff to probably put in some effort. They’re less likely to be caught, and more likely to have gained something.

LLMs have democratized espionage!

Knowledge Collapse in action right here. Our civilisation is like a dying creature desperately trying to conceive a successor, not realising the act itself is speeding our deaths.

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

Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.

That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.

See also: ‘the thing’ (listening device) that some soviet kids gifted to the US ambassador.

The first passive device device of it’s kind (эндовибраторы), it operated only when powered by an external RF source, meaning OpenAI wouldn’t have found the bug. Just like US intelligence didn’t with ‘the thing’

He should’ve watched to Gamer Nexus video on LG tv’s, and how many TV’s are remote exploitable often without user intervention.

Even the newer spy novels are lacklusture. We should have preserved Le Carré's and Greene's brains and make them keep writing. Or maybe I will just ask an LLM to do a Le Carré for me :)

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.

I couldn’t say whether this was state sponsored espionage or something else. I don’t see any indicators pointing one way or the other.

I see a lot of people mentioning financial motivation, and that decisions made in the room “moves markets”. Ugh, perhaps true…and I have something to tell ya guys - economic espionage is a thing.

It sounds like he didn’t have great placement and access. I mean sort of, but not really. Janitors are much better.

Assuming he was, he could of course gone rogue to impress his handler. If directed by his handler, they aren’t very skilled. Any of that could be true.

I’m reminded of the idiot DIA officer that mishandled his own phone while being questioned and dumped incriminating evidence to them right on camera in the interrogation room. Geniuses.

AI agent would never mess up so bad

That handler still could have picked up smarter people to work with.

The bar @ OAI is surprisingly low (watch a few minutes of their video presentations) - I've concluded it has something to do w how their recruiters define 'AI Native' (who assign their own meaning to meaninglessness of it), resulting in higher aggregate brain atrophy (hard to ignore once you notice it)

Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed

> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

What, we’re supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?

> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.

I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...

Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.

If it were _used_ toilet paper, nobody would have touched it.

The fact that he used ChatGPT to plan and implement this wasn't how he got caught, though. He got caught because he put a physical device in a conference room, and they found it and subsequently put a camera in the room, etc. His career was already over at that point. I think wonking out over how he could have better opsec or whatever is misplaced - it wasn't that a red light blinked at OpenAI, "employee's wife is having suspicious chats!" - they just thought, after having caught him red handed, to have a look at his ChatGPT account and linked accounts.

Prisons have a lower-than-general-population-iq for a reason.

I was thinking about this, how all the secret societies and crazy conspiracies we know about are just the ones that failed to keep the lid on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

"The successful criminal brain is always superior. It has to be."

-- Dr. No

He was a lead engineer for their AI agent platform.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfozan

>Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.

throwing a prompt at an agent is often faster than cracking out man, lsusb, lsblk and friends, doesn't mean he can't do it without.

if I send a prompt to make an assortment of alpha numeric directories or whatever other braindead-to-automate-with-wildcards-and-ranges thing it doesn't mean I don't know how to do it, it means i'd rather think in English than regex and bourne shell and the extra few seconds and the token spend is worth the luxury of avoiding them for me, at that time, for that task.

Must be a frontend dev

OpenAI is both a company that manages a lot of money and a lot of political power, that the target was an "executive conference room" gives no indication as to whether the motives were financial or political.

What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.

SWIM wants to bug my company's boardroom...

Recall that multiple of the Chinese LLM providers got caught sending at least some of their queries to Claude. That would be a pretty funny way to get caught in turn doing something by the US government.

Or, at the very, very least, use incognito mode on a computer you don't otherwise touch, such as at a library.

The future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.

Right?!

It could have just been a regular black usb stick an I bet nobody would have questioned it.

Instead "why is there something in toilet paper behind the TV?"

Did you not read the article? He did that also!

I think there's also a self selecting element to this where being the sort of person who either feels like they're too clever to get caught, or have the sort of risk-seeking gambler mentality that makes you much more willing to tolerate say 10% chance of life ruining consequences for X payout, makes you more likely to do this sort of thing in the first place.

That same impulsivity or arrogance probably lends itself well to brazenly chatting up your crime plans with your secret friend the computer, who would never snitch, because how would he, he lives in your pocket.

> If there's one thing I've learnt about criminals (and spies), it's that a large percentage of them are incredibly careless and arrogant, often bordering on idiotic.

What's even more amazing is how long they can go in this fashion without being caught.

This dude or OpenAI generally?

A certain level of amateurishness helps with plausible deniability. No-one would believe the Saudi government wasn’t involved if it was professional.

I'm out of the loop, what bone saw are we talking?

> They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)

I agree he may have been thinking that, but it's another sign this guy was not the sharpest tool in the shed. I'm not an expert myself but was once stranded in an airport with an F500 CFO who definitely was. That's when I learned it's surprisingly difficult to make millions of dollars trading on insider information. While you can definitely make the trades, the hard parts are:

1. Getting away with it. Making a lot of money quickly requires being right when almost everyone else was wrong, which is easy for watchdog algorithms to spot. And if you work for a company involved in the transaction you're already on a watch list, so you have to enlist someone else you really trust as your accomplice to make the trades in their name - and it really helps if they're someone who has an existing history of making this size and kind of trade. Otherwise, your accomplice's name will automatically start at the top of the suspect list for investigation.

2. You need the right kind of actionable opportunity to come along. Transactions for which insider info could let you double or triple your money in one deal are pretty rare. More than that usually requires leveraging yourself up or having a lot of cash to put at risk. Unfortunately, the nature of insider info is it's about transactions which can end up being delayed or not happening at all at the very last minute for random reasons. So 'going big' with cash or leverage usually comes with a >~10% chance you could lose that cash or whatever assets you borrowed against.

Yes, it's potentially possible for an expert to find or engineer exactly the right kind of oppty, already have the resources required, and to have already prepared the mechanisms needed to get away with it undetected. But if you're that person, you already know all this. This CFO had been at the nexus of insider info for 14 years and could only think of one instance where he might have made big money trading on info he had, and that one blew up 6 hours before the announcement when the CEO of the acquisition target was randomly arrested in a prostitution sting (partying too early I suppose).

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On the other hand, he gets to go to prison now for sure, which was only slightly likely if he just kept working there as an employee.

I've worked in a few places that had ultra-privileged analysis tools, would it really be a surprise to learn their security team has an MCP that queries a full text index of all user inputs. It would almost be more surprising to learn they don't, seems the kind of thing that would be invaluable for model research too

This is a very weird take to me. They're demonstrating they're able to in-house this cybersecurity investigation, leading to the alleged perpetrator's arrest, and you think that makes them look "desperate and cheap?"

random() ?

Or it was a voice recorder plugged into a USB port on the back of the TV for power.

Looking at the photo of the device, it looks like an XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense with the camera removed but the camera board still installed along with its microphone. The wifi/Bluetooth antenna is installed but it also supports microSD cards.

If I was building this, I'd just set it up so I'd never have to recover it. Have the wifi AP come on for a few minutes at various times during business hours under a MAC and SSID that resembles a smartphone hotspot. Vary the time based on the current day of month week to produce pseudorandomness. Walk by that conference room at some of those times, but not every time, and use a burner to connect and download the latest recordings. Once a recording has been transfered, it's deleted and overwritten to prevent someone from establishing a timeline. If recordings sit for more than a few days, they are wiped. If you can encrypt the SD card, keep the key in RAM so there's nothing useful to recover if someone pulls it out.

You'd never have to recover the device because all data is transfered covertly. Even if security finds it, they'll likely inadvertently wipe it when it's removed.

Yes, the classic marketing ploy of making false reports to the FBI.

that face is amazing

Why a recording device? Why not a device that streams audio to a remote server where it's recorded?

The chain of evidence has always been attackable and necessary for evidence to be admissible in court. It was actually designed to allow reasonable doubt for tampering and other such things.

Photoshop has been around a lot longer than AI. And people have attempted to doctor all kinds of evidence in court since courts began

How did they get Wonder up the benchmarks so fast? Llama was a mess

Bonesaw has far better things to do than micromanage a single software engineer like that.

Fall in line, be a good little citizen and you have nothing to worry about.

another Sam in play here who can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.

How does someone this dumb get hired at openai?

It's so bad, it seems fake. He gets a little fine or something, along with a large backchannel payment, all to keep attention off of something else...

But that's crazy talk

mmmm! Brain-aaS!

  >submitted prompts... including its custom header and unique MAC

Not the smartest engineer ever, that use case perfectly align with using a Chinese model! And anyway I have no idea how he was hoping not to be caught in the case the device would be discovered.

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in addition to the whole crime thing, an 'openai engineer', apparently engineering lead according to his linkedin, having to ask chatgpt to tell him how to set up a recorder or how to encrypt a sd card is something. Truly the cream of the engineering crop at those top AI labs

Federal prosecutors work for OpenAI?

I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first. I would think that could violate their own terms if done sloppily. Maybe different if an employee or maybe they had to invite the government to ask for them or something? In any case, the mechanism aside, the state would have asked anyway (say if he used another company's chatbot) so the fact that it's the "same company" is rather irrelevant. The evidence would have ended up in the state's hands one way or the other, and I would think a search warrant in this case would have been rather routine. Search warrants are infamously not a high bar to climb in most jurisdictions, as often the presiding judges tend to default to deferring to the state.

I used to joke that the nsa should offer a paid service for no-setup backups. You just tell them what files you've lost, and they can send you a copy for a fee.

Considering the engineer in question, after a multi-year career at Meta and now OpenAI, needed the model to encrypt an SD card, seems to not be far from the truth...

Not only do they give access to their home directory, but they tell it to organize and delete unneeded files without any specifiers. A friend, who is just a power user, had Claude Co-work deleting his downloads to "help make space" and it was deleting important files that there were no other copies of.

We are going to be dealing with this kind of thing for a very long time at this rate.

Microsoft (Research) beat you to it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/

Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.

I'm imagining a certified scuba diver rubbing their wetsuitted hands gleefully as they dictated that comment

This technique currently works because the architecture of the model is generally published and well known. But, that isn't necessarily going to be the case in the future. For example, if some new model type which is not a LLM is discovered which gets closer to AGI, just training an LLM on its outputs will not necessarily give you a competitive model

You expect the fbi to give him an opportunity to update his LinkedIn after arresting him?

Free startup idea: Anti-espionage cameras for corporate offices. Put it behind TVs and plants etc. and it will notify the security team if it detects new objects.

That does make more sense. But if any company were to take surprising security measures, it should be the frontier labs.

They just asked a chatbot to identify the device and its origins, apparently. His log was used as evidence after the fact as well.

SeedStudio is super nice - a lot of their gear is also popular in the MeshCore community (LoRa radios combined with ESP32 or NRF MCUs).

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Well, The Thing [0] could potentially show up on a probing sweep if you're careful.

Unless you mean, it happened to be actively transmitting during a(n investigative) sweep.

Still, raises some fun concepts. The sort of things where in this current level of technology you'd almost need to supercool a room for a sweep, blast various RF/sound/etc and look for anything that even remotely warms up, to detect (1) whether something detected something worth recording for later as well as (2) something that might be on the right wavelength/etc to trigger a send.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Someone probably walked by or went to plug in an HDMI and noticed the stark contrast of white toilet paper against a black TV shell, it would be difficult not to notice.

Yeah it’s possible, and this explains why he throws the bag there.

The text says "concealed in toilet paper" and the pic looks like a mostly empty toilet roll to me.

But maybe he didn't put a case on the device? I think if he'd 3D printed something or wrapped it in black tape it would have been a lot less visible.

I wonder if it was found when someone was trying to plug a cable into the TV?

Assuming the guy is minimally competent, its not for concealment but probably for audio capturing reasons. Concealment like that makes no sense, the device it self would look more like a remote screen plugin without the paper.

Sealed indictment, co-conspirator, etc

Depend on policy, you could copy the file to ext storage.

The correct amount of spies found at a company is non-zero

He may be a spy, but he’s not a competent spy. Absence of evidence (of spies) is not evidence of absence (of spies). He just set the bar so low that even OpenAI noticed his activities.

Interesting that they have a camera behind the TV, I suppose for this exact purpose.

1. It's very close to HDMI port (hint: backside of a TV isn't an area in hectares and kilometers)

2. Are we next going to discuss whether one of us has used the HDMI port or not? :)

And to answer you question: I used to insert a pendrive quite often to inspect Linux ISOs before I had FireTV on which I was able to install a general Linux ISO inspector app.

Where I worked, USB ports on TVs/monitors were used for wireless mouse receivers.

If I had to go poking around back there, the toilet paper would have at least piqued my interest.

Without the toilet paper, I would have simply assumed whatever was plugged in there was officially sanctioned.

I mean, Nixon bugged himself, right?

no I figured it out, he's doing it for free. blackmail of some sort.

It's a joke riffing off the Anthropic letter that was posted yesterday.