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Comment by psychphysic | Hacker News Reader

Well heck I just argued with a bunch of people, who said the USN knew but would never tell anyone and me saying it's a baseless claim.

I guess we were both wrong.

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The USN might also say they knew, without actually knowing, just to exaggerate the claims of their capabilities.

I take everything any country says about stuff like this with massive grains of salt - if they're not providing the information in real-time and then it later turns out to be true then coming back later and saying "oh we knew that all along" is kinda hard to take seriously.

That's a good point actually.

Similarly they claim the implosion was detected and triangulated but the banging went undetected until sonar buoys were deployed.

Well, we've had US intelligence, and specifically SOSUS, make its way to the public before, like with [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident

They used SOSUS to detect what happened to the USS Scorpion when it disappeared.

Wasn't disclosed until many, many years later. SOSUS was highly classified until very recently.

SOSUS may have been classified but you could read about it 40+ years ago.

But not it's true purpose: tracking Soviet submarines.

It wasn’t quite 40 years ago, but there’s a line in the film The Hunt for Red October (1990) that explicitly describes SOSUS as a submarine “warning net”. Knowing Tom Clancy, I’d guess there are similar references in the book (1984).

If it was meant to be a secret it wasn’t well-kept.

Script written in 1982. People thought he had access to classified info, but he didn't.[1] He was just using what we now call OSINT. There is a lot more about SOSUS in Red Storm Rising which was only a few years later.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/12/books/author-of-red-octob...

Yes, people knew it's true purpose then. They were wrong about how it was laid out, but people knew about it. It was declassified 30 years ago or so. And much of it was not top secret, just secret. We use entirely different computers and networks for "just" secret vs. unclassified vs. "top" secret.

The exact way they do it now, where they do it, etc. is the secret. The mere existence of a sensitive listening system is not a secret that endangers national security if known; the opposite is true, we want people to know/think they can't move a tennis ball underwater without us hearing it. Knowing enough about it to get past it is such a secret.

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS (article created 2003)

Ouch, things were getting heated.

> I guess we were both wrong.

Optimistic.

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