I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw (The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)

I went to the Carylon website to find a list of their companies and got

> Block Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons.

My area is Australia.

https://caryloncorp.com/find-a-company/

It’s not uncommon for site firewalls to be configured this way for business that do not do work internationally.

Yes, but calling it „security“ is a bit of a stretch…

it is security... block most of the world is also block most attacks to your infra...

It's just one slice in the swiss cheese model.

Please obtain one of each, and do a teardown to confirm ;-)

That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.

Gotta love this site.

"Never gonna delete this app!"

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

I think they were being serious. In the sense that it’s cool that there’s always someone with personal experience chiming in here.

Yes, I think it's absolutely wild that there's a story here about someone spotting a suspicious sewer cleaning van and somebody who had personal experience writing code for that sewer cleaning van chimed in. Seriously, how do you not love this site?

Makes for a treasure trove of impromptu QA's in the comments

"Did you win the Putnam?"

Sorry u/sanj & hat-tip to u/cperciva ;)

I'm really curious then.

Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter against his ear? What kind of sounds need to be processed by a human for sewer inspection?

To their benefit, if it was sus, they would have kept the door shut.

Generally these are done in coordination with a sewer cleaning truck at the next manhole in the pipe. Very common for them to stay on the phone with each other

That makes sense that they would use higher quality headphones on a radio to collaborate. Thanks for the insight!

> Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter against his ear?

“Hey boss, we just finished up the job. Everything is good here, what site do you want us to go to next?”

hangs up phone

Holding the headphones tighter is never suspicious

I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.

Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.

I think it was a sewer inspection van.

Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.

But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.

A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van.

You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.

From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...

That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.

It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.

Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing

Or, you know, they're inspecting the sewers.

I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.

There is no hack. The system sends data to NSA by design.

> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley

So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?

I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.

I see it like this:

You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer inspection van and hope you trick every single person who notices it into second-guessing themselves along the lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than that..."

Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced enough to facilitate this option.

I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully pull off low key 100% of the time while actively monitoring someone from the street in front of their house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.

That, and it would be an FBI van, not an NSA van. But the point holds.

Sometime there’s vehicle from at least three businesses and two government agencies gathered round an inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that’s costing.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Can I interest you in some fresh alien urine? Still plenty satured with Zephyron. I'll give you Dale Gribble's price! :)

I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!

There’s an HVAC company like this also, I’ll bet.

Corporate ventilation. A wonderful thing. Everyone needs it. No one suspects it.

Or maybe it’s the aquarium guy.

No, those are the guys making meth.

Gotta love paranoia.

Crypto AG confirmed this sort of thing to be possible.

Gotta be paranoid. :D

> There’s an HVAC company like this also, I’ll bet.

IIRC a hacked HVAC vendor was how credit card skimming software was infiltrated into Target and credit card data was exfiltrated a decade or so ago.

Edit, source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/target-hackers-broke-in-...

> Or maybe it’s the aquarium guy.

Shhhhh!

> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this

This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.

In Russia people "fall out the window" all the time. It is intentional. We need to adjust.

Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on

Unmarked vans drive around all the time. They don't typically park out front of a whistleblower's house. There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be required.

An unmarked white van (without windows) parked a house or two down the street hacking your wifi might not be that noticeable. One across the street with a radio dish spinning around and a parabolic mic sticking out the window and a few people entering and exiting it with donuts and coffee multiple times probably would be.

An unmarked van could park in front of any arbitrary public neighborhood house with street parking for a few hours and nobody would care. As long as people aren’t visible in it.

Multiple days would be suspicious but that would be true of even the “sewer inspection” cover van

I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.

My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.

With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling of hyperbole for effect.

Legacy of Ashes is a great book about the CIA on this, on how they basically stumbled into some of their biggest accomplishments.

Wouldn't it be the perfect plot to LOOK like you are a goofy badly run agency to hide the reality?

Now I'm starting to wonder if that guy habitually leaves the door open because he got sick of people winking at him with a wry smile every time he had to go to a job.

Reminds me of the joke where students prove by induction that the teacher is not actually planning a surprise test, and are surprised when there's a test the next day

haha well dont assume spies are some godmode infallable people. spies also are humans and can have varying degrees of freedom to express their stupidity in their work..

in our country some spies got caught drivin around with wifi pineapple in plain sight circling govt and ngo sites.

in my mind thats next level dumb stuff, but maybe they arent really hackers and think its not conspicuous, or even the opposite, they know exactly what it is but think 'oh normal people wont stop to think about this, they dont recognise such equipment'.

if you werent there, didnt know the guys in the van etc. etc. - its all just guesswork.

even public record of a sewer inspection right then and there at that time (which i kinda doubt exists) wouldnt confirm or deny what that van was really doing there.

that being said, i would _assume_ its a sewer inspection van. but thats an assumption, not a known fact.

Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.

> mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour.

Why bother mimicking a sewer inspection van when you can just buy or commandeer an actual sewer inspection van?

You're thinking like a normal person. You need to think like an institution that has the entire weight of government behind them and who nobody wants to be on the wrong side of.

They either find someone who has suitable vans they can threaten with prosecution. That person then agrees to be an "informant" because that's better than losing your life to the feds and then their handler asks to borrow a van. They like this because no money needs to get spent specifically on it so it doesn't tend to get scrutinized. If they're going full above the table they register a business with the state complete with valid HVAC license or whatever and then rent a van from some company the FBI owns/runs that rents white vans and have some decals printed up. (For those inclined to do further reading, the OSINT hobbyists have done a lot to expose this workflow as it relates to aircraft so probably start there.)

I can't tell if this is honest or sarcasm

Same. I can totally buy the joystick and the robot as I've seen this done in my area, but the rack mounted PCs and the headphones makes it seem awfully like he's telling Tom Cruise which wire to cut.

Do you work for the National Sewerage Agency? :D

Flowers By Irene.

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S03E04/719740

it would be too funny if that was a re sewage company. black vans with small print n.s.a. on it haha xD

door bell rings .... five men in dark suits standing outside ... hair on the back of my neck stands on end. I open the door, hands shaking with that burning feeling in my guts "Yea, how can I help you gentlemen" The tallest one, intimidating, gruff, ex marine perhaps, shoves a badge in my face: "N S A, National Sewer Agency" they push me aside and push inside my hosue .. a violation but what do I say?!? They look around ... circling me like a pack of wolves .. then, another pulls a bag from under his arm and produces a plastic jar in a biohazard bag... looks like ice cream and garbage inside, then grufly states "Sir, do you recognize these napkins?" "napkins?" I squeak out ... it hit me.... FUCK! .... the other night .... I was drunk, out of TP, desperate... paper towels staring me in the face - dare I? It was a moment of weakness, desperation and drunkeness rolled into one ... and here I am, staring the consequences in the face.... "Sir, your going to have to come with us" And no one ever heard from me again. Please take heed, only flush TP!

This is fairly close to reality, if you think about it

Medicaid here in Arizona is called "AHCCCS" which is pronounced "access" so imagine the fun homophonic confusion in a conversation about "do you have access?" "well I got access but then I lost it..."

Many conservative Christians have termed homosexuality as "Same-Sex Attraction" or SSA, so they often speak of "suffering from SSA" or being afflicted with it. When I applied to the Social Security Administration for disability, I couldn't help but notice, and their disability program is called "SSDI" which has nothing to do with Reagan's "Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative"

Nor do my dealings with the F.A.A. in the past several years have anything to do with a pilot's license or flight clearances; the Family Assistance Administration here doles out funds for food stamps ("SNAP", another good homophone, lets you purchase plenty of alphabet soup for the fam) and other basic needs.

https://xkcd.com/932/

Fact: The "Obamaphone" program didn't begin or end with President Obama. Discuss!

Thanks for saying what everyone was thinking.

> That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!

Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"

Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:

"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMFPMqboZc

That's almost definitely just a sewer inspection van; I found videos that company has of "multi-sensor pipeline inspections" with the same van, open, with the same equipment visible, and a bunch of people following a bunch of equipment down into a manhole.

As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and it cost ~$25,000.

I also have an older home and we had to repair our sewer line. It was clay pipe which had broken in a few spots and had major root intrusion. Thankfully there's some newer technology that makes it significantly cheaper in the right circumstances -- instead of digging up your street connection and laying in new pipe they can blow an epoxy-soaked liner into your existing pipe, then run a curing light through it. It ended up being less than 40% of the cost of replacement and works just as well.

We had ours done when we moved in a couple years ago and it was a cool snakey camera thing; they only got us out to the service line; past that would have been a lot more elaborate. Also: that video feed? Pretty gross.

As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance) that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs in residential areas.

A lot of people might also be surprised how frequently traffic engineers will OK unnecessary and less safe four way stops in order to get the annoying citizen pestering them to just leave them alone.

The neighborhood that I have to drive through to get from where I live to where I work hates that their precious little neighborhood is used as a commuter route by a lot of people, so they stuck stop signs EVERY. SINGLE. BLOCK.

I make sure to come to a complete fucking stop at every one of those signs. Partially because I hate the feeling of rolling through stop signs, but partially out of spite lol.

how far is that sewer line run, 6 miles? they usually just bore it out and put a PVC sleeve inside. This is done with the cast iron sewer lines, because if they're not properly taken care of, they will rust into nothing and then you just have a suggestion of a hole through the dirt to the sewer line.

my lines are 4" PVC, if we somehow clog those, someone call me an ambulance.

The old shitty clay lines are what you find in most rentals in SoCal. Then one day none of your toilets flushes and the landlord says you flush too many wipes down the toilet. You argue and they make you pay for a plumber who's like "yea they all do that DONT USE WIPES!!!!!One!!!" And then finally after getting to know every other plumber in town, one offers to run a camera for free and shows you that the main line is fucking falling apart and that's why it keeps plugging up.

TBH sewer main inspections should be required any time someone wants to rent a house out.

eh, clay, cast iron. I had to dig a few trenches of greasy earth in socal.

I'm always amazed by regional differences in pricing.

I had a company(wrongly) tell me I needed a new septic tank and drainfield installed, and quoted me out at 7800.

Which is way, way more work and parts than a sewer line.

It probably was! But given the batch of circumstances, I think it's at least plausible that it was more than that.

I don't think it's very plausible. The subtext of the photo is "that looks comically unlike what you'd inspect from a sewer inspection van". Well, I can tell you pretty much for sure: thats' what the inside of a sewer inspection van from that company looks like.

It took just a couple minutes (less than 5) to go look this up and find the video, for what it's worth.

Maybe it's an NSA wet team! Wet, because they do sewer inspection work. :)

If we are going down the conspiracy rabbit hole, i assume spies can purchase real sewer vans with the logo of real sewer companies on it.

I agree though that it seems more plausible to just be a real sewer van.

I think if they're buying a fake sewer inspection van they're probably smart enough to find one that doesn't look to people on the Internet like it's a prop out of the movie Enemy of the State.

I hope the owner of the company doesn't read this. They probably like their designs! :)

I just went to Google maps to the address written on the van's passenger door and lo and behold, Google did drive down the alley behind and while this is a larger vehicle and not just a van, that's their look (they also have black versions if you look around): https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7851188,-118.211276,3a,67.3y...

Is no one cleaning the streets? Damn.

I don't think I've ever seen the inside of an actual undercover van before. Crazy picture. Do we know anything else about them?

I feel like a real undercover van would have a policy about not opening the side door during a mission too...

I would not jump to conclusions so soon.

A) I would question why they would do the effort of still doing surveillance on him

B) if they do, they are usually so smart to keep the door closed

C) like others have mentioned, sewer cleaning comes with a lot of tech (I assume remote controlled machines)

I would think that anyone working in a sewer inspection van would keep the door open because it is highly likely that sewer inspection vans smell like, well, sewer.

If the van is loaded with equipment, or even if it isn’t, theft and robbery are common in most of the US. You can’t leave a van door open and not be extremely vigilant.

One thing for certain: that is absolutely NOT a sewer inspection van. Seriously, you ever worked trades? It is way too clean on the interior and not fitted for working dirty jobs, to say nothing of the visible surveillance workstation.

yes, and that looks pretty much just like some of the vans I've been in the back of for CCTV sewer inspections.

While I can honestly believe both (it was a surveillance van vs it was a sewer maintenance company), do you think that the intimidation and surveillance of Snowden or Assange won’t last until the end of their lives?

Flowers By Irene

The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate networks of pipes?

Interestingly, it seems the 'real' sewer cleaning company uses a bunch of tech to do their inspections, etc.:

https://specializedmaintenance.com/services/digital-tv-inspe...

(Which would make it an excellent van for the 3-letter spooks to copy, so not really persuasive either way)

That’s just a display monitor and a small computer. Grandpaarent’s photo had two half racks of data center grade AV equipment.

I wanted to point out that when visiting those sites from Germany (nationalplant.com and the specializedmaintenance.com website) it shows the same unavailable geoblocked message. I wouldn't have recognized it but after opening both links in new tabs on my phone I thought I forgot to open one of the links in this thread and I double-checked it.

Are those fake companies both hosted on wordfence or something? What are the odds, huh?

Upon clicking the link above, I get:

Your access to this site has been limited by the site owner

Your access to this service has been limited. (HTTP response code 503)

I'd like to believe it was an inspection van: https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/

I'd like to believe that, but I don't.

I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more? Easy enough to get “national security” reasons why all of his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have visible GMen watching him for life.

For some reason this reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. In the later parts of his life, he began to believe he was being followed and tracked by the FBI, and these delusions eventually gave way to various other issues. Or perhaps it could be the other way around, but there is a catch here.

In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.

The interesting thing is that the FBI was following and tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played out.

That very well could be what it was. If it had been anything other than:

1. Spotless.

2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my) house.

3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I took the picture and drove off less than a minute later without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.

then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover NSA van.

And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.

Somebody give the number on the van a call and post results

If it would be a spy van, it would be a real number (likely for the real company). Otherwise way too easy to spot.

I called and asked them if they were NSA. Very nice lady explained "No, trust me, we're definitely just NPS" (j/k).

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/national-plant-services-inc_e...

We have a manhole outside our house and it was inspected like this. I work with GIS for electric and gas companies. I used to keep small ear protectors in the Burley so me and the kids could go up and ask "diggermen" about holes in the road.

Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line. There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify where the crossings are.)

People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability" role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was working for a bit, making copies of the videos and tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer causes explosions the settlements are in the millions.

The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down completely with high pressure water from the truck once it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and the fact that the van guys don't go in the sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like $2k and you can rent them.

Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other crews.

With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.

They told me the door stays open even in winter because the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.

The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were just looking at one service main, if they were able to leave they must have been winding up already.

The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole where they parked?

If we can surveil people with drones from miles away, what technology are the FBI using that requires guys physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to park outside, why would you use a method that usually blocks the street?

I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head" part. The crew used the controls to move the head around until it was looking at my kids and they could see themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the door.) The kids thought it was cool: https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png

Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal directional drilling piercing a gas main:

https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/13/us/missouri-gas-explosion/ind...

I can't find any conference papers but the industry term to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:

https://blog.envirosight.com/sewer-school-preventing-cross-b...

Here's the thing, there's never going to be convincing evidence for you to decide that it wasn't what your hunch said it was. That's the nature of suspicion.

You could Google "national plant services van" on image search and find similar vans, and that the company is owned by is the Carylon Corporation, with revenue of $300m/year -- but that couldn't convince you that a government agency (it wouldn't be the NSA unless they're violating the law) didn't borrow it or copy it.

You could read that their services include "Digital CCTV inspection. Laser profiling. Sonar pipeline inspection." but that couldn't convince you that the monitor+joystick and other equipment is needed for sewer inspection, because you already believe it is for surveillance. (The irony being that the kind of mass surveillance Mark Klein exposed, or Snowden exposed, means there's absolutely no need to park a truck outside someone's house. You can track who they're communicating with already, and you can subvert their own devices to listen in, instead of parking a van out front for their neighbors to notice.)

You could look at who has the contract to inspect sewers in your town -- it's public record. But you could still choose to believe that the federal government did the same check, and went out and got an identical truck so as to be less suspicious (although in this thread half the people are saying "that's too clean/fancy/technological to be a sewer inspection van!" so if they did it would have backfired.)

Was he under surveillance? Who knows. Does this truck prove anything either way? No. Everybody is going to leave this thread with whatever hunch they came in with.

Conversely, makes me think my IT truck with all its network cables and racks, needs a toilet.

That is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly wrong).

Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.

The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.

This whole sewer inspection thing must be particularly hilarious to the people performing the inspection. "Yo dude, we're officially spies! hi5"

"sewer cleaning van"... This might be apt. The feds and their many tactics..... Flowers By Irene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HSNMLfhFM

That must have been surreal.. knowing him first as just a neighbor, then realizing the weight of what he did