Russian 'doomsday' plane's radio equipment stolen by thieves | Hacker News Reader

Russian 'doomsday' plane's radio equipment stolen by thieves

bbc.com

54 pointsgscott23 comments

Examining the stolen equipment might yield insights into encryption used by the Russian military, perhaps even recoverable keys. This of course leads to all kinds of further information potentially becoming recoverable from prior intercepted communications. Or it will just be sold for scrap.

Given the way Russia works, i expect it to be sold to scrap dealers in exchange for a couple of bottles of fake Dagestanian "vodka" :D

At a border inspection a wagon full of wodka is opened. It turns out to be empty. The customs officers inspect wagon after wagon. All of them are empty. When they come to the last there is a very drunk railroad official lying on some straw sleeping off a fairly obvious round of heavy drinking. They sober him up and interrogate him. "Where is all the wodka?" "I sold it!". "Then where is all the money?" "I drank it!".

never underestimate the lengths American Intelligence will go to (for a couple of bottles).

How do the economics of such a theft work?

Would an item like that be worth much on the black market? Enough to risk being shot by the soldiers guarding the airfield? Presumably having an insider would greatly reduce that risk.

Step 1: Send your CIA agents to steal it.

Step 2: Make it look like common thieves did it.

Step 3: Profit?

You joke but there's a historical precedent - the story of Lunik[1], soviet spacecraft that was intercepted, examined, dismantled (!) and then put back together and moved forward, by CIA operatives.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

Some other examples.

Russia stole a sidewinder from the US.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19042850

Brits stole a towed acoustic array from the Russians https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a28794/...

These items have copious amounts of gold plated contacts and platinum/palladium capacitors. Many hundreds dollars of scrap value.

EDIT: to people downvoting, selling stolen equipment for scrap value is extremely common in former USSR.

There is only a very small group of people with the skills, resources and motivations to do something like this and I am positive none of them happen to be random freelancing criminals.

Yeah, they're not criminals, they were framed! They're definitely not random, and while they're technically freelancing, they don't take any money in the end. You're also talking about the A-Team, right? :)

Jokes aside, what do you know about the circumstances of this theft to make such a judgement? For all we know, security might have been quite lacking for reasons to do with incompetence and/or corruption.

Well. At least Ivan hasn’t lost _another_ submarine!

The strategic importance of what was specifically stolen and where it came from paint the most textbook picture of an intelligence operation that you are likely to see in a news headline.

This isn’t at all like the collapse of the Soviet Union when shit of this scale would just randomly go missing. I assure you that Russia would have a lot invested in preventing this from happening and the level of planning and inside knowledge is going to instantly rule out anyone except a very small group of actors.

> How do the economics of such a theft work?

Depends on the purchase price of copper at the local scrap dealer.

This is very simple. It does not matter how expensive the stuff is as long as it can be sold for anything. It could even be sold for scrap.

The people who steal stuff are not concerned about the value for the owner, they are only concerned about how much they can recover from it and the risk of being caught.

Good! Country officials should understand they're in the same boat with ordinary citizens and won't be able to escape if they fail to prevent a nuclear attack.

I think they have 4 of those

A Russian friend of mine once told me a joke: aliens have abducted a Russian, gave him two perfect steel balls, put him in a perfect empty room without doors or windows and told him to come up with a trick to entertain them once they return in a week. They threatened to disintegrate him if he fails to amuse them. Once they returned and asked him to perform the trick he invented he told them he's sorry but he has broke a ball and lost the other one.

I know a variant of this about a Romanian but the important thing is the reflexive: "One ball got lost and one got broken" or as a word for word translation: "One ball lost itself, the other one broke itself"

So the end was probably supposed to be "I'm sorry I can't show you anything because one ball broke in no time, and later another one simply disappeared."

In Poland it's Polish, not Russian ;)

Ezra Pound supposedly told Ford Madox Ford that he, Ford, could be placed naked in an empty room and within half an hour reduced it to complete disorder.

Given the wide circulation of quips of this form, there may be some ur-form millenia old.

[edit: corrected "of this source" to "of this form"]

It was a shock. But in the hk Apple daily it said it is possible just for the scrap metal value.

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