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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little bit curious why the operator wanted his contact info, and repeatedly asked for it, knowing full well that it was a ridiculous call. It makes me wonder if taxpayer dollars would have actually been spent investigating him.

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There is an easy answer - the operator is trained to ask for names and contact information on every call; all tech support, operators and customer service representatives do. If she doesn't there is a chance her call will be monitored and points will be destructed from her call score, affecting her employment. No, QA might be cool and ignore this obviously prank cool, but do you think QA at the NSA will be cool, laid-back people when it comes to procedure?

I can't believe how many mistakes I made in this comment. Sleep deprivation isn't healthy, folks! And thanks for upvoting.

It goes in a contact log. If we assume that the contact log is in a database, then it goes on the pile with the rest of the stuff. Pen-testers and social engineering hackers' calls may also appear to be ridiculous calls.

edit: In addition to tracking incoming calls in a call log for NSA reasons. An NSA employee needs to keep that log to be able to explain their activities if they are ever audited.

The DoD and I'm sure other organizations are instructed to try and get as much info from the person as possible if it's a suspicious phone call like this. People call up and use all sorts of techniques to get information from these organizations, which it seemed like what was trying to be done here.

He called using SKYPE which belongs to Microsoft. We know of both companies to partner with the NSA.

So they have at least

- all chats and most certainly

- all calls converted to text

at their disposal.

So it looks like an intimidation attempt.

Sometimes those of us so ingrained in the world of HackerNews forget what life of people in other fields of work is like.

I highly doubt this was a jedi-level intimidation tactic from the handbook they provide to the switchboard operator after training them to respond in sophisticated ways to people calling in.

Rather, I'm more convinced this was the train-of-thought: Someone's calling, the call is weird, lets get their name.

I'd like to believe that a phone operator at that level would not have clearance to see that type of information on a whim. I'm not saying its impossible, but if it were that available the Snowden revelations would have occurred much sooner.

how would the call centre operator know it was Skype? I only knew when I heard the particular disconnect sound, and she wouldn't even have heard that.

I wondered the same thing - my conclusion is that it's an intimidation tactic.

More likely the poor operator couldn't answer his question, so she was going to pass the details up to a supervisor and have the supervisor deal with it.

Later when the supervisor got on the phone, she just hung up on him.

Alternatively, phone operators are instructed as a matter of course to record details about the phone calls they receive...

You came to that conclusion because you knew that the operators don't ask contact info for every caller as standard procedure?

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