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Inside eBay’s bizarre campaign against a blog critic
- coldcode 6y agoCan't read it due to paywall.
- tgv 6y agoThis reply has a non-paywalled version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23629916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23629916. Don't know if it's identical, but the gist seems to be the same.
- wyldfire 6y agohttp://archive.is/f7HSw http://archive.is/f7HSw
- rideontime 6y agoWhat amazed me most from the FBI affidavit[0] was the sheer arrogance of these people. Baugh seriously thought he could make up some story on the spot to explain eBay employees being on the opposite side of the country and the police would just drop it. [0] https://www.scribd.com/document/465728291/FBI-Affidavit-against-eBay-employees-for-harassment https://www.scribd.com/document/465728291/FBI-Affidavit-agai...
- sct202 6y agoAlso the gall to make up Samoans to frame as cover for their sloppy operations.
- selimthegrim 6y agoThey read too much Hunter S Thompson
- sizzle 6y agoNot familiar with the reference, can you please elaborate this is fascinating to say the least.
- stickfigure 6y agoRaoul Duke: I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is my attorney. He's not just some dingbat I found on the strip, man. He's a foreigner. I think he's probably Samoan. But that doesn't matter, though, does it? Are you prejudiced? Hitchhiker: Hell no. Raoul Duke: I didn't think so. Because in spite of his race, this man is very valuable to me. Oh, shit. I forgot about the beer. You want one? Hitchhiker: No. Raoul Duke: How 'bout some ether? Hitchhiker: What? Raoul Duke: Never mind. -- Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas
- selimthegrim 6y agohttps://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-05-ca-56718-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-05-ca-56718...
- gwd 6y agoOn April 20, 2019, discussing the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Executive 1, Executive 1 texted to Executive 2, "F[xxx] them. The journal is next on the list after [Victim 1]." Uhh...
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoWe don't often get to peek behind the courtain, but it is hard not to feel repelled by this.
- ghaff 6y agoThe arrogance is pretty amazing. That they didn't cut and run at the first whiff of the victims and police being on to them takes a special kind of delusional chutzpah. One thing I was curious about was how the feds got the data from Apple. I'm guessing because they were eBay-owned phones and eBay gave permission but I don't think it actually says anywhere. [To say nothing of the fact that, for supposed security people, their operational security was... not good. Just more arrogance I guess.]
- haram_masala 6y agoI was struck by that too. Somehow the feds obtained WhatsApp messages from Apple. Maybe WhatsApp was getting backed up to iCloud, and that message store isn’t part of the e2e encryption.
- ghaff 6y agoIt looks from some of the images that the feds had access to the unlocked phone(s). But, yeah, in my admittedly fairly quick read of the affidavit, it wasn't particularly clear--perhaps deliberately--how exactly the feds gained access to all the messages they're using as evidence. (Assuming the defendants challenge how the FBI obtained that info, IANAL but it may make sense to give as few details as possible at this stage.)
- techpop10 6y agoIf I read the affidavit right, there were confidential witnesses who may have shared their WhatsApp screens with investigators.
- mirimir 6y agoI was wondering whether Target Subjects whose names aren't capitalized in the FBI complaint had cooperated. But then, the complaint states that most of them are defendants in the Massachusetts case.
- sizzle 6y ago
- anon892143 6y agoAnother insider threat program gone rogue... How many insider threat programs at various firms are really being used to implement systemic discrimination? I thought it was becoming common knowledge many Silicon Valley campuses and other corporations use an IMSI catcher/Stringray to capture personal cellular communications of its employees... https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-tesla-employee-claims-theft-drugs-and-surveillance-at-gigafactory-2018-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-tesla-employee-claims-the... https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16408724/waymo-uber-lewandowski-travis-kalanick https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16408724/waymo-uber-lewan... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-nuvia-lawsuit/apple-lawsuit-tests-if-an-employee-can-plan-rival-startup-while-on-payroll-idUSKBN1ZK16R https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-nuvia-lawsuit/apple... I am pretty sure none of these people used their corporate issued cell phones... I would not be surprised if ebay hired a firm to park an IMSI catcher machine close enough to the home of these people. The reason they felt secure enough to deny these accusations implies they have all done this before.
- ajzinsbwbs 6y agoLots of my coworkers use their corporate phone as their personal phone. There’s a process for porting your phone number over when you get the corp phone. People do it because it’s simpler to have one phone, or just to save money. I would never do this but I understand why someone with a different background and worldview would.
- ghaff 6y agoMyself and probably most of my coworkers just use our personal phones as company phones. Not sure if you see that as different. Also don't do activities on them that are... criminal.
- ajzinsbwbs 6y agoSuppose I buy an iPhone from Apple, and load up a work profile on it. I need to trust that Apple doesn’t give my personal data to the employer profile, and my employer doesn’t have a zero-day to circumvent those controls. I also need to trust that the phone company (or my VPN) provider doesn’t give my browsing history to my employer. I’m pretty comfortable with all of those assumptions. Now instead suppose my employer gives me an iPhone with a cell plan they are paying for. Now there are more questions - is this a vanilla iPhone or is some kind of tracking software installed on it? Perhaps the phone company will freely give up my browsing history to my employer? I’m a lot less comfortable with this. It feels like my employer has legal authority and technical capability to see a lot of what I’m doing on the phone. Edit: > Also don't do activities on them that are... criminal. I’d not worried that employer would get me in trouble with the government for criminal activity. My behavior is a little more constrained by worries that somebody at company could be analyzing my browsing history for violations of company policy, which in a worst-case scenario could get me terminated or cause me to face civil litigation, especially if I were to do a startup.
- nullc 6y agoWhat I extracted from that is that corporate security people investigating random members of the public isn't considered weird.
- vorpalhex 6y agoIt's not that uncommon. You have people making crazy threats (which they probably don't intend to carry out, but it only takes one..) all the time, and the police won't do anything but take a report because frankly, that's all they can do. So you end up at a certain scale having to investigate some of these things yourself.. by hiring probably somewhat sketchy ex-military types.
- packetslave 6y agoYeah, having a threat intelligence and investigations team is very common for big companies. If nothing else, it's probably safe to assume that someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page regularly get emails or other messages saying things like "im gunna go to ur house nd kill ur dog and ur hot wife" Law enforcement doesn't have the resources to investigate every one of these, absent a credible threat of it actually happening, so corporate security / executive protection exists to, well, investigate.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pyuser583 6y agoHave you read about Zuckerberg’s personal security? It’s nuts. He’s probably second only to the president in terms of security. Considering the necessary exposure the president has, he might be even more secure.
- packetslave 6y agoI"ve seen Mark's security when he's out and about on campus. They're reasonably discrete about their jobs, given that on any given (pre-Covid) day there were probably hundreds of business and personal visitors on campus. Personal security for CEOs (never mind billionaire CEOs) is hardly anything new. If I were Mark, received the amount of hate/threat messages he does, and had a young daughter, I'd do everything short of hiring the 82nd Airborne to follow me around. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-silicon-valley-ceos-spend-on-security-and-protection-2019-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-silicon-valley-ceos... Taylor Swift once said "I don't have security to look cool. I have security because people want to take me home and chain me to a pipe in their basement." TSwift isn't even a billionaire.
- oh_sigh 6y agoWow, that was a thrilling read into the mind of a group of psychopaths who all happened to find each other. I wonder how many times similar things like this have happened (maybe even by the same people) but they covered their tracks successfully. One final note - I'm very impressed with the professionalism and skill of the NPD(the local police department of the victims).
- mirimir 6y agoWow. Sheer arrogance, and absolute stupidity. Or at least, horrible OPSEC. I'm reminded of that 1993 cartoon by Peter Steiner in The New Yorker: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....
- walrus01 6y agoThe character "Hoover" in HBO's silicon valley is not extremely far off the mark, as a parody of ex-law-enforcement/intelligence types who end up working for big corporate america. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY2A3c3-lUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY2A3c3-lUY
- davidcollantes 6y agoThis doesn't work.
- dang 5y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23629488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23629488.
- stormdennis 6y agoWorked for me
- llacb47 6y agoWhat specifically doesn't work?
- runarb 6y agoSame for me. I do get an DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN in Chrome, but other archive domains like https://archive.vn/f7HSw https://archive.vn/f7HSw works.
- gwd 6y agoHere's a non-paywalled version: https://liber.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2020/06/15/eBay-employees-cyberstalking-charges-threats-Devin-Wenig-spiders-cockroaches-pig-mask-Massachusetts/stories/202006150100 https://liber.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2020/06/15/eBay-e... Just insane.
- HNthrow22 6y agoThis story is so wild, imagine being this couple and trying to tell the police ebay execs are harassing me because I wrote mean things about them on the internet. This is a widespread thing that's going on in our culture right now, organized bullying and targetted harassment by those in power and it's having devastating consequences on the public discourse. This case is unique because the overconfidence and carelessness of the execs led to them being caught but in most cases people aren't reckless enough to leave easily tracked evidence of their misdeeds. I can think of multiple examples of agriculture/pharma companies and game publishers engaging in this type of retaliatory harassment, most cases they're not careless enough to get caught.
- catalogia 6y agoIt makes me wonder how often things like this might be happening in cases that typically get written off as somebody having paranoid persecution delusions about being "gangstalked." If this couple had told me their story, I have little doubt that I wouldn't have believed them.
- claudeganon 6y agoHappens all the time, it’s just that the bad actors are usually more competent and better at distancing themselves than the people at eBay. A good example is what Chevron is doing right now to Steven Donziger, an attorney who won a settlement against them for their polluting in Ecuador: https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-steven-donziger/ https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-... Also Weinstein’s use of Black Cube: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/30/harvey-weinstein-black-cube-new-york-times https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/30/harvey-weinstei...
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y agoWow that lawyer got completely taken off the board. I wish more people know about donziger's case
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- malwarebytess 6y agoThis is the fear of many people with mental illness: gangstalking.
- solotronics 6y ago"The CEO of EBay has people following me!" it sounds so ridiculous that I would immediately think the person telling me that has paranoid delusions but it was true.
- stx 6y agoThats the thing. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you." - Joseph Heller. Thanks to graton for the correction below.
- graton 6y ago“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.” ― Joseph Heller, Catch-22 Published (1961) before Kurt Cobain (and myself) was born.
- stx 6y agoThanks for the correction. I roughly knew the quote and when I googled it Kurt Cobain came back all over the place.
- Joeboy 6y agoWhile it definitely predates Nirvana, it doesn't appear in Catch-22.
- nkurz 6y agoThat's a bold claim considering how many webpages there are claiming that it comes from Catch 22: https://www.google.com/search?q=heller+catch+22+%22paranoid https://www.google.com/search?q=heller+catch+22+%22paranoid. On the other hand, my attempts to search for the word "paranoid" in the book on Amazon turn up nothing. And there is a semi-authoritative page that makes the same claim that you do, saying that the closest he found is a quote about a "persecution complex": https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/09/paranoid/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/09/paranoid/ Do you have more info?
- hogFeast 6y agoEvery part of this is wrong. What happened to the targets was appalling. But why why why why do people believe the utter fiction that these companies put out after this happened? If you are the Board, what the hell are you doing here? This guy was clearly not on the level, why didn't this come up? And why is anyone getting paid near $100m to manage EBay into the ground. As an investor, this makes no sense. The issue is that you have this perpetual circle of utter incompetent human beings on Board spending other people's money. And if you are the CEO, it doesn't matter if you knew it about or not. He is quite clearly lying but what is most amazing here is that his lie doesn't even explain the behaviour. If you are the CEO, THIS IS YOUR JOB! Take responsibility. Also, he quite clearly was directly responsible for this. You have to be an utter degenerate to know the police have texts of you saying to take someone down, and then tell the media it was nothing to do with you. This is why I truly despair as an investor though. You are surrounded by people who are utterly and totally incompetent. Boards aren't up to it. Executives aren't up to it. And I am trusting my reputation on them. This is like having to ride a donkey in the Kentucky Derby. (And btw, the EBay Board is apparently "stacked". Omiydar, the ex-CEO of Bain is Chairman, VC/founders, CEO of Lyft, former Chairman of NBC, CEO of Intel...all people who have mostly made their living acting as agents rather than principals...btw, the head of the Compensation Committee was the guy who is known only for driving Gap into the ground...something of an expert in failure then).
- celim307 6y agoI feel at a certain level of leadership in large companies, you just make it into the club and no matter what you do, some other large company will pick you up due to the same mindset of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". The last SVP of my working org dropped the ball so hard our client walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware and infrastructure just to be done with it. He got canned then picked up by a similar company inside two months with the same title.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- achillesheels 6y ago
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- stx 6y agoWhat was this couple writing about Ebay that made the execs so angry that they would risk committing crime? I would imagine a company the size of Ebay has many people writing bad things about it. What was different in this case? I have been searching but cant find anything. I found the news letter was called EcommerceBytes.
- notahacker 6y agoYeah, it's odd. You can understand security types with no ethics or considerations of negative publicity might feel inclined to harass people they think are giving away corporate secrets or exposing misdeeds or wrecking their acquisition plans, but a massive b2c platform company with the inevitable amount of criticism going after trade bloggers for some uncomplimentary articles some of their sellers might read is just bizarre. It doesn't look like their coverage of ebay is particularly negative, and it's not like there's a lack of actual scammers for bored security types to pursue.
- SquishyPanda23 6y agoI checked EcommerceBytes close to when the story broke. There were some stories about eBay selling off business units, and some speculation they may sell more of their core business. Pure speculation on my part: EcommerceBytes stories were hitting too close to home. Ebay isn't doing well and they decided EcommerceBytes was a front for another company (maybe Amazon) that was trying to hurt eBay's chance of survival.
- cs702 6y agoInexcusable. Sad. Horrible. The two questions in my mind are: First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company? I mean, eBay is not some rinky-dinky business run by fly-by-night operators in a shady part of town. We're talking about a well-known publicly traded company that is a component of the S&P 500 with a market capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars. Auntie Tilly would be delighted to hear her niece got a job offer at eBay after college. Second, is this kind of horrendous antisocial behavior ("we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity") representative of behavioral patterns at the higher levels of large, prominent, powerful companies? Or is eBay just an exception, the proverbial bad apple in a basket of mostly good apples? I would hope it's the latter.
- sunstone 6y agoCorporations are psychopathic by nature, with few exceptions.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agohad to vouch for this. there is a lot of truth here in what looks at first sight hyperbolic or inflammatory which isn't maybe immediately obvious. corporations are legally treated like a person. the problem here is (over and over again) that a person might do insane or criminal things that they are then held accountable for, while a company (not a "natural" person) acts as a collective and hence can be as psychopathic in its acts (on behalf of multiple people who get together for that act). e.g. imagine an individual acting as a company: they would always be considered a psychopath (or at least if not criminally insane would be suffering from a mental illness). it's the group that is allowed to hide behind the singular entity that allows problematic behavior almost by design.
- arpa 6y agoSad? Horrible? How about batshit insane! C-suits going after nobodies is, well... this. I mean, that must have been some crazy amounts of coke and bad judgements all around, to get SIX seriously unhinged individuals to the top of eBay of all the places. How does it even happen? I mean i've seen some amoral corporate bullshit, and shady shit, strays into "not strictly legal" and "how can legal cover our ass?", but this, this is crazy in literal sense.
- jwilber 6y agoDisgusting. Never shopping from eBay again, though I can’t remember the last time I did if I’m being honest. How do current employees feel about this?
- TheRealPomax 6y agotitle is missing [paywall]
- floatingatoll 6y agoThe footer Guidelines do not specify that usage, and arbitrary tags other than [video] [pdf] (year) are historically unacceptable to the mods here. If you think that this should be added to the guidelines, consider emailing the site mods using the footer Contact link.
- dang 6y ago[audio] and [slides] are also ok! I forget if there are others.
- floatingatoll 6y agoExcellent! You should add those to the guidelines :)
- danso 6y agoEasily one of the most bizarre stories of corporate malfeasance I've ever heard about. The blog/newsletter in question is likely the top in its niche, but it wasn't even in the top 200,000 of sites ranked by SimilarWeb – the WSJ, which according to the affidavit the executive mused as being the next of their targets – is ranked in the top 900. In fact, most of this blog's coverage was linking to and discussing eBay-related stories from mainstream press like the WSJ. The pure malice of the alleged actions is unfathomable, but how did these senior managers and contractors have the time to even give a shit?
- thatlongthrow1 6y agoThey are paid too much for the supposed labor they give out, so they have the finances and time to ruin the lives of people they deem to be below them. Which just happens to be everyone who is paid less than them. The solution is to gut executive pay several thousand percent so it is back in line with the rest of the world.
- jacobush 6y agoAgree with you 100%. Funny how we have the thread next door here on HN full of people explaining how billionaires worked hard to get their money and deserve to create their little dynasties with it.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago99% of executives are not billionaires. Conflating the 2 shows little understanding of the issue at hand. The same logic would put Bush and Obama as statesmen, at the same level of Washington and Adams. Yet, the former 2 are examples of people that didnt risk much in order to attain power and achieve their ambitions. The latter 2 put everything on the line, risking their own loved ones by going against the single most powerful empire in the world. Let that sink in. This is why founding fathers, like Ford, MLK, and even Trump, have a cult-like following despite their personal failings. Thats why billionaires are inspirational (the ones that didnt make their fortune from using govt, or its handout) . They have scars of battle, like real warriors. Executives are only good at 1 thing. Climbing the ladder... at others expense. Pushing buttons...to kill people. Like cowards. Dont put executives and billionaires in the same bucket. Cowards don't belong in the same group as warriors.
- soniman 6y agoThere have been other cases like this, right? I can't think of them right now but powerful people get obsessed with anonymous message board commenters and then go on a rampage. Musk has called people at home and where they work. Back in the day Yahoo message board posters used to drive companies crazy. It's a weird phenomenon because literally the only people who care are the executives themselves. Nobody else, not even their spouses or competitors, cares. I'll call it Fishbowl Syndrome because the executives think they're in a fishbowl under constant scrutiny and literally nobody else cares what's going on with the fish.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoI just finished reading and all I can say is kudos to NPD ( polite, professional and effective ). It still speaks volumes about the arrogance od the executives since it is clear that they thought it could have easily become ' we dont know; we cant track em'.
- sizzle 6y agoAnyone know how they got deleted and decrypted WhatsApp chat messages between the individual?? I thought WhatsApp was end to end encrypted? iCloud backups?
- jacekm 6y agoFBI got access to the phones in question. And you can do quite a lot with physical access to a device, including restoring messages from local cache. I don't know the technical details, but googling for "forensics whats app deletes messages" yields several interesting articles.
- anythinggoesbay 6y agoAm I the only one who thinks those ebay guys might be je*king off to this right now? I mean to the comments here.
- amznthrowaway5 6y agoLike they care. The CEO got a golden parachute with 57MM even after this.
- pmlnr 6y agoTangential-ish to the story, but if in reaction someone wanst tp boycott ebay, where would one sell small, one-off lots? Old hardware, used books, etc? Facebook is a no-go. Gumtree is owned by ebay. Amazon is also a nasty company. I'm in the uk, so no craigslist.
- jwiley 6y agoIs there any non-paywalled variant of this story at another news site?
- adrianmonk 6y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.vn/f7HSw https://archive.vn/f7HSw
- iJohnDoe 6y agoIs there still any overlap between PayPal and eBay? We often hear stories about PayPal’s toxic behavior. Maybe PayPal’s and eBay’s toxic culture is shared.
- saltedonion 6y agoStories like this makes me wonder if episodes such as this one are much more prevalent than we hear.
- brown9-2 6y ago“director of global resiliency” is one heck of an interesting job title
- abraxos 6y agoI got into a dispute with some influential people who owned a condo. Their response was to have their chief of security call 7 people at a company I was affiliated with. He intimidated them for having the condo’s address on the website. He told them I was a drug dealer and that I had threatened someone. He was a US Attorney and a Homeland Security official so he seemed impressive. A few times he frantically called my best friend and would say ridiculous things. He didn’t realize we were messing with him but it got out of hand. Soon, another federal prosecutor joined the party, who is a partner in a famous law firm. They sent private investigators who went to every place I was known to go and told people I was wanted. Their boss is the type of person who spends tens of millions secretly to get Supreme Court Justices confirmed. Luckily, I was able to record a public conversation that implicated and embarrassed the lawyers involved. But it came at a very high price. I should had avoided the conflict but it was over rich creepy men targeting young girls. The federal prosecutors protected him.
- pyuser583 6y agoI’m reminding of the “stay-behind” teams from the Cold War. NATO was afraid of a Soviet invasion. They knew in a ground war, the Soviets would take several countries. So countries created “stay-behind” teams to coordinate resistance in the aftermath of an occupation. The problem is these teams had nothing to do. So they “made themselves busy” by bothering domestic groups they thought were pro-communist. It was a big problem in Italy. These guys have titles like “Director of Global Resilience.” Their job is to keep operations up and running in a catastrophe. But there was no catastrophe (yet). So they kept themselves busy.
- lowdose 6y agoFrom the bottom up in an organization you only see the Peter Principle at work. From top down you realize this is just a matter of perspective because from the top you witness an additional layer of narcissism and then piramide is called the Gervais principle. This is actually the default mode many companies end up in. https://blas.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://blas.com/the-gervais-principle/
- solotronics 6y agoYeah this whole thing is playing out really strange.