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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

>While the workings of the SOSUS and IUSS systems may be declassified, the deployments and capabilities (mostly range and computation related) of such systems most likely are not. And there is always the possibility that there is yet another system the author simply isn't aware of.

But they confirmed it 4 days later - which would be admitting to its capabilities. The entire talk track of: "they kept it secret because of conspiracy theory X" makes no sense when they didn't actually keep it secret, they simply didn't make it public until AFTER the team was there to search - for the fairly obvious reasons the author stated. Mainly it creates unnecessary publicity that is hurtful to the relatives of the folks that are at the bottom of the ocean, and political pressure to "not spend money on the search" which was already coming from some circles even without the Navy's information.

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And those are all valid reasons to delay release. My point is that they are not mutually exclusive with declassification, or verification that the information is OK to release publicly from a security standpoint. I'm not sure why secrecy automatically means "conspiracy theory".

>I'm not sure why secrecy automatically means "conspiracy theory".

It doesn't automatically, but literally everyone claiming the Navy was "hiding something" was going down the conspiracy theory route. I'm not talking about generalities, I'm talking about the specific situation in question which is the Titan sub.

>the information is OK to release publicly from a security standpoint.

What information are you referring to? It's already public that the navy has the system in question. It's already public that it is analyzing data realtime. Nothing about the system would have been compromised by publicly announcing they had detected an anomaly the day of the event vs 4 days later. The logical conclusion is that all of the aforementioned reasons are why they waited 4 days. You don't need clearance to get to the conclusion.

Releasing the information 4 days later implies it took 4 days to properly process and categorize. It probably did take some time to properly process and categorize it, because anomalous sounds happen underwater all the time, and unless it's a subsea nuclear detonation or a Russian propeller screw then it's going to go into the "figure it out later" bucket.

So what we know is it took no more then 4 days to categorize it. We don't know whether or not the system flagged it immediately, or flagged it as part of background process, or how long that took.

Joe Internet-Commentator looks at that and says "oh it was totally instant, probably".

Bill Submarine-Commander for a Hostile Power on the other hand is very interested in exactly how quick any particular detection was, to what resolution, and what implied noise-cutoffs of the network. What sort of sonic events are handled in real time vs. handled in later analysis. Because for Bill the question is "how long before I'm detected and surface ships start dropping buoys, depth charges and torpedos to kill me".

>Joe Internet-Commentator looks at that and says "oh it was totally instant, probably".

Kind of, yeah. There is a good timeline on when the ship was in water, when an event would have occurred, plus a very narrow geographical search area. That is significantly more information than is ever available when chasing ghost submarines.

It is difficult for me to imagine some bored analyst did not pop open a graph of activity within a 30 minute window of suspected loss of contact time for the area. If detectable, a ship implosion is likely a pretty aberrant signal in the data.

But why precisely does the sloppy sub operator or the mass media audience deserve the information their tax dollars are paying an analyst staff to harvest? Your idea still seems to me like potential question-begging; the fact that the habit would be of interest to people and save lives at some point is not surprising, but lifesaving is not the nature of the pointed interest of most OceanGater polemics in the first place...

I never said it had to be shared. Just that I think it incredibly likely that if a Naval sensor did detect the event, it would have been identified in short order. Potentially not definitively as an implosion, but that the Navy could have rapidly pinpointed the event in the data.

I am not qualified to state what was the appropriate timeline to give a public response nor it if should have been made.

That's fair. I apologize for my tone.

Sure, but literally everything they're looking at is classified capability or may include classified capability. They don't have permission to just post a hot-take on Twitter, and definitely don't have permission to unilaterally release supporting data.

All of that has to run through the chain of command and declassification process.

Adding another thing of interest for Bill the Hostile Power Submarine Commander - do the Navy sonar analysts stick to protocol, or are they neglectful of their duty to the point of posting hot takes on Twitter "just because" it's a civilian matter that's trending on social media?

On that note, I wonder if they have the "loose tweets sink fleets" poster put up somewhere. Apparently, Royal Navy did this officially[0] (I may be wrong, but I thought this was an Internet meme before the official poster).

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/royal-navy-updates-loose-lip...

This seems most plausible. The whole thing has an air of being carefully stage managed. Lots of showing off of general capability without much detail. Lots of international cooperation noise. Etc etc. It feels like the audience was not the general public, but I'm sure a bit of general distraction from other stuff happening didn't hurt.

> Nothing about the system would have been compromised by publicly announcing they had detected an anomaly the day of the event vs 4 days later.

Have you worked on classified detection systems? Actions and conclusions don't always appear to follow logic when your priors are wrong.

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