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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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...
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.
For context if you want to go down the rabbit hole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030106
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.
That was all pre 9-11, It's a closed base now.
So for approximately the cost of a fully loaded laptop you, too, can set off the "pizza meter" and get people talking.
Dead Comment
It was posted to this board as recently as 23 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805067
Here's an archive https://archive.is/9ouXy
This archive explicitly mentions:
>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 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.
I'm sure they do. But I'm also sure it's not Papa Johns. That garlic sauce is worth a national security incident IMO.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/iCZBTiWQUKSKU1LS9
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.