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Comment by PaulWaldman | Hacker News Reader

>he wouldn't specifically say who owned them

That sounds a little concerning. Was the implication that it was a government agency at some level?

It's quite likely they had no idea. Easy to imagine a scenario where there is a company owning the building, one owning the cameras and maintenance, one owning the data/recording, all wrapped up in management partners mergers shells etc.

With government, unless it's an organization mature enough to do something deliberately covert, it's more likely theres so much bureaucracy to deal with that everybody knows who they are working for.

The NYPD does do deliberately covert things including counterintelligence. No information one way or another whether that’s true in this case.

there are a lot of rich foreign nationals in NYC, so its no surprise

The NYPD has covert operations not only all over the country but in many foreign countries so I'd say they're operating at a pretty high level of sophistication in that sense.

I was curious about this so I did some Googling. Apparently it's called the International Liaison Program, a subdivision of the Department Intelligence Bureau. More info here. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...

Apparently referring to the “International Liaison Program” run by the “NYPD Intelligence Bureau“ which has only executive oversight and is funded by the “New York City Police Foundation” instead of the city itself.

Are NYPD personnel sent outside their jurisdiction to fulfill these roles? Or do they contract it out?

> Through its International Liaison Program, the Intelligence Bureau posts officers in law enforcement agencies in major cities around the world.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/investigative/intellig...

Shouldn't the NYPD be in charge of local stuff and leave this to the FBI?

It really is Gotham, isn’t it?

Cut the 'server hard line' and see who shows up!

Exactly. Why would you let a random person into your building if there was no answer who they worked for? Was it because they claimed to work for business and you blindly trusted they were doing what they said or did you have some heads up from your boss saying let them in? There must be more to this story or maybe op just didn’t care about random people entering and accessing equipment.

It wasn't their building, it was clearly a building they rented a suite in. And, at a guess, the tech was let in because the landlord called and asked them to let the tech in.

More likely the person telling the story isn't the person who authorised their access, and just happened to witness it / have a conversation about it.

The parent comment did not claim to have let the person into the building themselves.

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