Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Given the elusiveness, I wonder if it's something else, military in nature, merely disguised as a harmless-sounding whale...

View on HN

Most probably not. If civilians heard it, you’d expect half a dozen of semi-competent militaries would have done so as well. And some of those militaries have objectives that don’t neatly align or have less than stellar opsec.

Also, it’s very difficult to keep secret a project that involves more than 10 people, especially if it involves building things.

> Also, it’s very difficult to keep secret a project that involves more than 10 people, especially if it involves building things.

But not impossible, and there are a lot of examples of things being built (or destroyed for that matter) in perfect secrecy involving groups larger than 10 people.

Again, there are operators in that space that don’t have any incentive to keep your program secret. And I am not talking about complete transparency.

People retire or fall out, documents get lost, someone slips somewhere. It does not take much for the existence of a project to become public knowledge. It’s the other side of the OPSEC coin: a single mistake and some information gets available.

Still, I am not saying this is impossible, merely improbable. Which, combined with the other factors, makes the story being a secret military project implausible.

Sometimes the best way to hide something is in plain sight.

What would that even be? Sonar would be most likely, but there is very little reason for secrecy there, since all the innovation is in the signal analysis not the signal itself.

Could be communication but why would you use a medium as terrible and lossy as sound in water?

Applying the troll's razor: Maybe it's just large scale trolling, nothing less, nothing more.

Why couldn't there be innovation in the signal?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com