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Comment by arcfour | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying it's the most professional choice, but if I were about to burgle a courthouse as part of my work, I'd like a beer or two to calm my nerves beforehand.

Regarding force, this article says:

> The rules of engagement for this exercise explicitly permitted “physical attacks,” including “lockpicking,” against judicial branch buildings so long as they didn’t cause significant damage.

And later that they entered through an unlocked door, which they (it sounds like) kept unlatched by inserting something between the latch and the doorjamb. Not unreasonable.

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> I'm not saying it's the most professional choice, but if I were about to burgle a courthouse as part of my work, I'd like a beer or two to calm my nerves beforehand.

This is a job where having impaired judgment is a terrible idea.

If someone needs alcohol to do a job that involves taking the role of a criminal and summoning the police, drinking alcohol before it is a terrible choice no matter how you look at it. If they can't do the job without alcohol, they shouldn't be doing the job at all. Maintaining unimpaired judgment is a baseline expectation for a job like this.

I doubt judgement is heavily impaired at 0.05 BAC. That is at or below the legal limit to drive a car.

And it really is more of a red herring since they were obviously not visibly intoxicated and they didn't actually do anything illegal. Their BAC is more of an issue between them and their employer, and has no bearing on their false arrest.

> I doubt judgement is heavily impaired at 0.05 BAC. That is at or below the legal limit to drive a car.

0.05% BAC will result in a DUI in many countries. Regardless, any impairment on a job where you're doing things guaranteed to summon the cops is a very bad idea.

BAC also declines linearly over time. I doubt (hope?) they weren't drinking on the job, but a 0.05% BAC measured after their arrest means their BAC would have been higher when they started breaking into the building earlier in the night.

Only Utah has a 0.05 standard. (I think drinking before a nighttime physical pentest is a bad idea).

Washington might be moving to 0.05 too. (A bill just narrowly passed the state Senate; still has to clear the state house)

Is USA the outliner here? In (most of) canada 0.05 will get your license suspended (but you dont go to jail unless its 0.08).

Australia, scotland and france are also 0.05.

There are quite a few countries where the limit is less than that.

Maybe? Virtually everywhere in the US is 0.08. I don't think it's a good idea for physical pentesters to drink anything before a gig, for whatever that's worth, so hopefully we're just shooting the shit about different countries rules.

The "legal limit" is terribly misunderstood, but 0.08% is just legal threshold where the state doesn't need to prove impairment and the offense is upgraded to an automatic criminal DUI. A driver in an accident with a BAC of 0.03% could still be charged with a DUI if impairment can be proven but most prosecutors' offices have more important things to work on.

Sure, I don't disagree.

It's also terribly misunderstood by pedants since you can be charged with a DUI with a 0.00 BAC by doing drugs. The point isn't that it's a definitive line in the sand between impairment and not, but if people are trusted to drive a car (generally or broadly speaking, not pedantically speaking), being above or below said limit is a reasonable litmus test for "visibly/obviously impaired" or not.

> I doubt judgement is heavily impaired at 0.05 BAC

Physical coordination becomes an issue. 70% of subjects tested struggled to maintain lane position at 0.02%.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC102344

I don't see how that relates to, say, software engineering or physical pentesting though. And 1/3 people is still a fairly significant number that do not suffer ill effects. I also said heavily impaired—not that they were categorically not suffering from any effect of the alcohol.

My point is not that they definitely should have done it. It is simply that, in this context, it's really not a big deal & is not really germane to the discussion at all. They did nothing wrong, stone cold sober or not.

That’s not what your link says; impairment at 0.02 BAC is measurable, but a fraction of standard day-to-day variation for a person. It’s roughly equivalent to missing coffee at breakfast.

Is this something that has been rigorously studied? Like multiple follow-ups?

This article is from 2002 - twenty years ago. It cites several other studies, which seem not great overall.

One studied a driving simulator, the others looked at deaths in the single year after lowering blood alcohol.

The one about minors in Maryland seemed especially strange, as minors are usually required to have 0% BAC.

It sounds like cherry picking.

> heavily impaired

The level of impairment doesn't matter. They are impaired. There is no standard or testing which reveals the minimum level of impairment that one can safely do the job. So, you don't do it impaired, at any level, period.

> and has no bearing on their false arrest.

Two people that have obviously been drinking, hiding from police, and then making up fantastic sounding stories as to why they're in a tax payer owned facility outside of working hours. The police had good reason to effect an arrest so it can't be "false arrest."

Is drinking common for physical pentesters? I just do boring software stuff but I’m pretty sure drinking on the job would be a fireable offense for me.

And even if their BAC was technically under the legal limit, their ability to e.g. drive was impaired. So it seems unprofessional.

Their ability to drive being impaired is somewhat dubious since they are under the legal limit in all of the states I have heard of.

W/r/t drinking and working, I personally dislike the puritanical zero tolerance for alcohol approach that people here in the US seem to take by default. Most people can have one or two drinks and work just fine, with obvious exceptions.

I don't think we should judge people who have to travel to a boring small town in Iowa and have to go to work in the middle of the night for having a drink or two.

If you can't have just a drink or two, or have to do it every day, that's a bigger issue that goes beyond work vs. simply having a drink and doing work on occasion.

Agreed about the puritanical stance here in the US.

People drive on prescription drugs like it's nothing. But a beer? Haha.

For context, I've been sober for a decade. I don't mind if people have a beer. I get it.

> I just do boring software stuff but I’m pretty sure drinking on the job would be a fireable offense for me.

What?? For real?

> Is drinking common for physical pentesters?

Absolutely not.

Physical pentest scenarios are highly likely to end with an alarm tripping and the police arriving, except in cases where the alarm wasn't armed, didn't have connectivity, or was broken.

An encounter with the police was virtually guaranteed in this case. Drinking before the job was highly unusual and irresponsible.

> I just do boring software stuff but I’m pretty sure drinking on the job would be a fireable offense for me.

I've never worked a software job where I wasn't provided free alcohol at work.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/323/

Note that Monroe's number for the peak (0.13%) is significantly higher than legal limit for driving, and than these guys recorded here.

> I'm not saying it's the most professional choice, but if I were about to burgle a courthouse as part of my work, I'd like a beer or two to calm my nerves beforehand.

I feel like if you do something for a living, you shouldn't need to calm your nerves for it.

I'll note 0.05 means you can't legally drive in Australia and would be issued a DUI.

I'd have more "eager" than "anxious" nerves, and I wouldn't need a beer for that. The fun thing about pentesting is that it doesn't matter if you get caught, although it's more fun if you don't.

Hard agree about "forcing", though. The very word implies, you know, non-trivial amounts of force. Like technically walking toward a door in a normal human room at standard temperature and pressure means you're applying non-zero amounts of force to it, so arguments like "they applied any force at all" can be ignored as goofy.

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