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Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

There is some value in this but it’s buried beneath a ton of stupid vigilantism.

Questions need to be asked about how the data was obtained in order to obtain more data, like how do you get to mass email classmates? Take the July 2014 Malaysia Airlines attack, who knew Putin had flown over the area in a near identical near looking aircraft before hand? Was the missile attack supposed to take Putin out?

Remember there are always at least two sides to every story and to question everything because everyone has an agenda.

Sure, but sometimes that agenda is simply to uncover facts. Worrying about the agenda can obscure things more than it clarifies. It isn't always about the agenda.

On emailing classmates, that's probably trivial. Lots of school classes have Facebook pages or WhatsApp groups, or mail groups or such. These can be trivially easy to join.

These people are Russian military officers, they traveled to Salisbury, they did these things, they went back to Russia. They lied about who they are and why they went there. It doesn't really matter what the agenda of the people uncovering this is, as long as the information is valid. The question is, what should be done about it?

Do you think the military, any military, would require employees to remove their social media profiles? I think so otherwise it seems to be poor planning considering the UK military used to get their squaddies to DoD wipe their hard drives before bringing any computer equipment back from Germany to the UK in the 80's/90's.

I wonder if the Russia rhetoric is just a Cold War 2.0 rhetoric designed to stimulate economic activity and innovation, whilst testing relevant bodies in the UK. Its nearly ten years since the SEC was caught watching porn before the financial crisis kicked off. Familiarity breeds contempt etc etc.

>Do you think the military, any military, would require employees to remove their social media profiles?

Oh come on, someone recently compiled detailed information on US military bases from the publicly available fitbit data of all the soldiers running round them. you can even figure out deployment patterns from it. Most militaries, even the big ones, are desperately naive about this stuff.

>Oh come on, someone recently compiled detailed information on US military bases from the publicly available fitbit data of all the soldiers running round them. you can even figure out deployment patterns from it. Most militaries, even the big ones, are desperately naive about this stuff.

I know and so we have to trust them to make the right decisions when taking a country into war. Jeeze we really are run by amateurs!

> is just a Cold War 2.0 rhetoric

During Cold War Russia hadn't annexed parts of European countries or left the radioactive trails all across town after assassinating their 'enemy of the state'.

Military in Russia today are simply at the service of their mafia bosses, so mafia's methods is something they are used to as well.

I didn't know about that rumor regarding Putin. Can you give me a link to read?

That one was quashed pretty quickly, as it became clear that the missile was fired by Russians not Ukrainians, oh and actually Putin didn't fly over Ukraine anyway...

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/malaysia-airlines-p...

I realized how ridiculous it was after a few articles. Gives further credence to the disinformation accusations.

> July 2014 Malaysia Airlines attack, who knew Putin had flown over the area in a near identical near looking aircraft before hand?

"near identical looking"? Because, you know, either AA missiles are based on visual recognition AI or they're manned by special breed of operators who can distinguish fine details on planes 10 kilometers up in the sky.

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