I assume that every major secret service must have webcams pointed at any road in direction of a CIA / NSA facility (and vice versa). With a bit of face recognition you must have fairly valuable data.
I mean, maybe. But both CIA and NSA no doubt are very aware of this possibility and I'm sure keeps very close tabs on anything like this.
But if you are an state actor, I'm sure there are plenty of ways to identify the personnel who work for these agencies. Usually just hanging around at the local lunch places is a good place to start.
The Dutch investigative reporters collective "De Correspondent" did a piece on using publicly shared tracking info from sports app to identify high-ranking defence and intel personnel. Link here (in Dutch unfortunately..): https://decorrespondent.nl/8477/zo-haalden-we-binnen-2-minut...
I remember that from the time -- The Dominos near the White House IIRC.
I was a pizza delivery guy around then, and I remember delivering pizzas to the local base. Mostly barracks, sometimes the Officers' quarters. One time, we had an order that went to a more secured location -- Got buzzed through the fence, around the side, up to the door, and into the man-trap inside the building.
That was past a bunch of signs saying I wasn't supposed to be there. The drivers always joked about 'Top Secret, Pizza Delivery clearance'. We had maps of the base, all the building numbers and everything.
If you ever want to get a pulse of how busy certain caucuses are on the Hill, I'd recommend monitoring the rush at Bullfeathers (for GOP) and Tune Inn (for DNC)
Right. And this signal was late compared to twitter (where folks figured out from the images the attack sequence and when the missiles/drones would land)
>Shortly after Meeks' comments were released, government offices no longer ordered from Domino's branches in Washington, opting to buy pizza at separate times or at different pizza joints.
Indicating that the Pentagon is well aware of monitoring of pizza shops as a way to infer the level of their activity. I therefore posit that this going viral is a hidden form of explicit communication, a signal they are intentionally sending, akin to the Iranians raising a black flag several months ago.
The Pentagon is bounded on all sides by busy public highways! Oh, and giant parking lots for Pentagon employees.
Any interested party can simply drive past and count the number of cars in the parking lots. Not a lot of mystery there! I assume countless foreign countries and news organizations do exactly that.
The "Pizza Meter" is a fun... thing. It's a nice lesson on how data can "leak" even if nobody is actually actively disclosing information directly. But the idea of a foreign nation taking the "Pizza Meter" seriously (or, of the USA using it as a signal that might be taken seriously by our adversaries) is not a credible idea.
I've seen people reporting these and others a lot lately, mostly using the Google "how busy is it" graph as this does. Does that really account for the amount of deliveries? I've always assumed when that says it's "busier than usual" it's just using location tracking for people actually being there.
Yeah. Probably some combination of lookups and/or clickthrus.
I had always assumed it was location tracking data, same as they (mostly?) use for realtime traffic data.
But, now that you mention it, Dominoes is a delivery business. So you'd have to estimate their current volume some other way - a spike in demand won't correlate with an increase of people physically visiting the storefront.
True, but is that what google maps is even saying? I have always understood it to be "phones in this area per hour" or whatever, I have never thought or got the impression it would tell you how busy a delivery place is based off of delivery load. Does anyone have a source that says one way or another? I could see it either way.
We'll probably never get it, though? Seems like one of those algorithmic things Google holds close to its chest.
I would think, though, that if it's going to be meaningful whatsoever for a delivery business... it couldn't rely solely on "phones in this area per hour." But I'm just a random yahoo speculating.
I dont think it would be open after 5pm. It's not the valley, where they have the money to pay for a chef to stay late and have dinner. "Working late" is probably a massive anomaly for your average government employee, cause the pay is shit.
I don't know how accurate Google Maps' information is here, but it seems like all of the shops inside the Pentagon do indeed close early. 5PM for restaurants, and 1:30PM (???) for CVS.
From everything I've seen, though, it seems like there are 20+ shops inside the Pentagon and GMaps only lists a few, so I don't know how accurate that information is.
While possibly an interesting signal, what could make it compelling would be a few more points of data. So this particular location is busier than usual. What about the other Papa John's near by? Are they at the "usual" capacity? Or maybe something like the last weekend before taxes are due has everyone doing their taxes, and deciding just to order pizza, instead of making something, or going out. Is this in a residential area? What is the variance in "usual busyness"? Is this a once a month level of unusual busyness? Once a year? Once a decade? Do we have any correlation between busyness at this location and other geopolitical events (say February 2022). Especially, say compared to other events like the Super Bowl.
However, if the hours on Google Maps can be believed, it seems like all of the Pentagon shops close at 5PM eastern. So if you want food after 5PM, perhaps you're still ordering delivery?
We did this at my work once, with Papa John's, and threw most of it away because it smelled absolutely sickening. We just chose to not eat... Pretty much any other pizza is better. We've done Domino's a few times and it's pretty good, relatively! Though nearly any local pizza will win.
I would hope if you are working at the DOD on cutting edge stuff you are treated better than pizza after little league games tier crap pizza, but I guess I was wrong, downvoted in spades even. I know DC has decent food. Maybe this pappa johns has security clearance....
There would be literally nothing easy about fighting Iran, unless your idea of fighting is just to glass the entire country. Because any kind of conventional warfare with Iran would make Iraq and Afganistan look like kindergarden in comparison. And that's not to say that Iran is some kind of superpower - it's absolutely not. Just that the terrain is extremely difficult, the army is actually decently equipped and trained, and it's a huge and very populous country.
How would they even fight Iran? They don't share a border, and you need an army of at least 500k to even properly man the entire western Iran border(Iran Iraq war was I think 600k on each side when there were actual offensives in the mid 80s, and 200k each side when it was just attrition war).
The only way Israel can have a proper war with Iran is by attacking Hesbollah, but thats a whole different topic.
The understanding I have of the Israeli military (and I could be very wrong, I haven't made a study of this) is that they tend to be surgical in their operations; so Mossad kills a key general or administrator, or knocks out key infra, etc., etc., rather than a full on conventional war.
Nothing about the last several months implies surgical strikes or key infra being targeted, and heavily leans towards glassing the enemy territory.
Certainly they have that capability, and there's plenty of evidence that they do targeted killings, but that doesn't appear to be their MO when invading someone.
Surgical strikes are easy when your enemy has little ability to intercept them. However, Iran definitely has S-300, and quite possibly also some S-400 by now. Can Israel overwhelm them? How many Israeli planes will be shot down in the process? And how will Israel respond to those losses?
That's a succinct way to put it. Does anybody have any suggestions for following up on this line of thinking? I wonder what other, maybe technical scenarios, where this might also be true?
It's better for an error message to explain what the end user likely needs to know, rather than you heroically debugging it for them.
There is already a war or two, just undeclared. Is it really better to let the aggressor keep attacking and killing while you sit and watch it happen thus sending signal to all others how weak you are?
I was of course referring to US. As Ben Hodges put it yesterday:
"We've got to muster the political will, industrial capacity, economic leverage, and military capability to defeat Russia first in order to isolate/deter Iran and deter China from making a terrible miscalculation."
No reaction to Crimea send clear message to Russia. US let Ukraine happen. No reaction to Iranian drones in Ukraine emboldened Iran resulting in 7the and now 14th. Again no response. Who will try next, NKorea or China?
What does it mean for Israel to win a war against Iran? Do you expect Israel to overthrow the Iranian administration, occupy a country with 10x its population, and then impose some sort of long-lasting stability on hostile territory, in a way they haven't been able to do in much smaller pieces of territory they've been occupying for almost 80 years?
I hope the incumbent president don't want to accomplish the impossible feat of losing the coming election. Also, given how cranky the unhole trinity of super powers are right now, it might domino into him being the last one.
The availability of fairly cheap private imagery now enables things like estimating Walmart's quarterly earnings. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/08/19/129298095/with...