Thread by @ErrataRob

I continue to see this story in my twitter feed. It's meaningless. The text is so garbled that we have really no clue as to what happened.
miamiherald.com/news/politics-…

2/ My guess this isn't a story of bumbling agents accidentally infecting themselves. Instead, I think it's agents specifically looking for a reason to arrest the suspect, employing confirmation bias in order to treat everything as a virus.

3/ For example, the story reports 9 USB drives. What happens if it were actually only 8 drives, the 9th device being some other device, like a two-factor authentication key. Plugging that in will start the process of driver installation.

4/ At that point, the agents pull the key and report to the judge that it tried to install software, with the implication being malware, and the judge locks her up.

5/ Had this been some sort of Chinese nation-state malware that installs automatically from a USB flash drive, then the agents WOULDN'T see friendly dialog boxes informing them of this, it would happen invisibly.

6/ My point is that we have a story that's so obviously and hopelessly garbled we really have no idea what actually happened. Our primary source of information is the agents themselves who twist the information to maximize their claim that she's a Chinese secret agent.