points by dpark 3 days ago | 0 comments
A lot of people work at the White House. Many of them doubtless work a night shift. The set of candidates here is actually quite large.
[–] mrandish 3 days ago
[–] HaZeust 3 days ago
"and the big office building that's directly connected to it by basement walkways"
I ask in good faith, but why didn't you just say the Treasury Building?
[–] praxulus 3 days ago
Most people don't know that the Treasury Building is a big office building directly connected to the White House by basement walkways.
[–] Wistar 3 days ago
I didn’t.
[–] HaZeust 3 days ago
Fair point!
[–] KptMarchewa 3 days ago
Because it's about Eisenhower Executive Office Building
[–] 14u2c 3 days ago
Why is this omission of any note? I know the building and I can tell you that it is not particularly remarkable.
[–] sailfast 3 days ago
Because it's not the treasury building lol. There are multiple buildings near the White House that are under this umbrella, and I wouldn't think Treasury is one of them since they need their own office space.
[–] devindotcom 3 days ago
the show that came out recently, The Residence, while obviously fiction, made me think about the white house as a semi-public event venue in near constant use by dozens if not hundreds of people. It made for an interesting setting for a whodunit.
[–] CGMthrowaway 3 days ago
Of course it is. It's "The People's House." Look up the Great Cheese Levy of 1837, Lincoln's Office Hours, Coolidge's reception on New Years 1927 or Jackie Kennedy literally giving an "MTV Cribs" on TV in 1962. Or consider, if you can remember, the outcry when they permanently closed Pennslvania Avenue in 1995. Or when they closed Lafayette Square in 2020.
[–] samudrijan 3 days ago
There used to be around the clock anti-nuclear vigils in Peace Park, with soup kitchens feeding folks who lived at their signs.
[–] ethbr1 3 days ago
It's amazing thinking about Teddy Roosevelt following the New Year's Day tradition of shaking every single person's hand who showed up at the White House.
Which in the 1907 case meant 8,513 people's hands.
[–] eloisius 3 days ago
But if you’re the cleaning staff at the White House do you just get on the WiFi?
[–] nomel 3 days ago
Do you believe the availability of wifi for staff/guests is somehow unreasonable? Or, is there a belief that no internet (wifi or cellular) connected devices are allowed on premises? Is them using cellular data, rather than a guest network, somehow more secure?
[–] RobotToaster 3 days ago
I'd hope the guest network is completly separate.
[–] rightnutwingjob 3 days ago
I don’t understand. Is it not?
[–] nomel 3 days ago
Maybe I'm confused.
Guest networks are configured to disallow intranet connectivity, so the "security" risk would be from the device having access to the internet, on a guest network IP. But a guest network exists for the purpose of giving untrusted devices access to the internet, without compromising the security of the intranet. My local library, the local airport, Home Depot, the movie theater, etc all have public wifi, yet nobody would claim they were directly compromised. I understand the connection could be used for receiving and sending packets over the internet, like a DDoS (which would trigger rate limits, even at Home Depot), but framing a guest network, giving an untrusted device access to the internet, as some security issue seems very odd. The isolation is the mitigation.
[–] asdff 3 days ago
The difference is the home depot does not have spies applying for custodial roles. I’d expect nonessential staff to put their phone in a box at the security check. We also live in a world where israel can remotely explode telecom devices they rig in supply chain intercepts.
[–] nomel 2 days ago
Again, why is it worse than a device with cellular access? Again, is the belief here that there are no internet connected devices on premises? We know this isn't true, from the twitter feeds of guests!
[–] cozzyd 3 days ago
it is easy to correlate with known public travel...
[–] OtherShrezzing 3 days ago
I can't imagine you'd need very many days of traffic to narrow it down to a very small group of people though. If a device is coming into and out of the campus, that should be fairly easy to reconcile with visitor records. Given that this is one of the most secure locations in the world, I'm reasonably sure a comprehensive list of "who is and isn't on campus" at any given time is available.
[–] maccard 3 days ago
My prosumer ubiquiti gear will give me the MAC address and AP that the device is connected to, along with signal strength. WiFiman and a 5 minute walk will give me the mapping of where had that signal strength from that AP and at that point I could find the device with a physical search. There is no way that this device can’t be found in a few hours by anyone who is even vaguely paying attention.
[–] deskamess 3 days ago
But countable.
[–] rob74 3 days ago
Even if many sometimes work at night, you would expect them to also regularly work in the morning, which isn't the case here? So the fact that almost none of the traffic is in the early morning is a further clue pointing to a certain resident whose office hours start around 11 AM...
[–] wtch98 3 days ago
Cleaner that comes in after normal office hours, with a phone which connects to guest wifi, which is segregated on the LAN side, but has public IPs from the Whitehouse AS
[–] __MatrixMan__ 3 days ago
Not if you exclude the ones who behave as if the rules apply to them.
[–] gwbas1c 3 days ago
To know that, you'd have to know the pattern of days that it's active.
If it's someone who lives there, it would be different than a shift worker.
[–] wtch98 3 days ago
Most people working shifts will work varied shifts, sometimes nights, sometimes days, sometimes they'll be missing for days or weeks on end
[–] EA-3167 3 days ago
If it keeps happening I think that at least suggests the source is someone or some people who are “above the rules” most people would be bound by. You can tell the cleaning crew to get off the damned WiFi, others not so much.
[–] therein 3 days ago
Could even be cleaning or security.
[–] dpark 3 days ago
As someone elsewhere in the thread noted, this could well be the press. Could also be that this isn’t the White House network at all despite that attribution.
[–] xp84 3 days ago
Right, we know the White House owns that public IP, but this could be as bad as an unsecured, unmanaged device that is joined to a private network that is supposed to be secured, OR, on the “all the way good” side, that IP could be the exit for a completely throwaway, untrusted, isolated LAN segment meant only for some iOT device and which has no route to any other peer on the LAN side, and some civilian who has access to that for work brought in his laptop with a “free VPN!” Plugin and joined it to that network because it’s all he had credentials for.
[–] duskwuff 3 days ago
One would expect network activity related to the press to be concentrated during daytime hours, not between 5 PM and midnight.
I'm no expert but even I've read that "Works at the White House" is bigger than the executive residence and oval office, including the West Wing and the big office building that's directly connected to it by basement walkways. The National Security Council maintains 24-hour watch operations in the Situation Room (which is more a 'complex' than 'room'), while regional desk officers routinely work late evenings to overlap with morning business hours in Europe and Asia.
I asked Gemini if my recollection was correct and got: "The EOP network (managed by the EOP Office of Administration in coordination with Presidential Information Technology Community entities like the White House Communications Agency) operates as a single campus enterprise network. Its high-speed backbone links the West Wing, the EEOB, the East Wing, and nearby administrative facilities such as the New Executive Office Building (NEOB) on 17th Street."
So, definitely an issue that there's a device with some rogue malware installed but the total workforce across all shifts at the White House Complex is roughly between 2,500 and 4,000.