Hacker News Reader

Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

> probably failed

That's silly. The fact that you don't know who somebody is says nothing about what some "state-backed actor" knows. If anything, I'm fairly confident that some people in NSA/CIA know who he is for a decade at least, and "probably" have it written in some documents that will long outlive you. Of course, this is as proofless statement as you saying that they "probably failed" to figure it out, but what you are saying basically amounts to "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it's such a miracle it probably happened!" A more reasonable thing to say would be "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it probably didn't happen".

View on HN

It took ten years to find Osama Bin Laden, which we can fairly assume had a lot more resources directed at it.

You seem to falling into this common trap of intel agency omnipotence when we have plenty of examples to the contrary.

yep, they absolutely use propaganda’s to achieve a scarecrow effect. Remember all the info they fed journalists about bin Laden hiding in networks of underground caves? Then it turns out he is hiding at a family members house with all his relatives?

You seem to be falling into this common trap of confusing "finding a human's body hiding offline in mountains of Pakistan" and "figuring out the name of a guy thinking he is shitposting anonymously on the internet" (and that if we assume that the "shitposting guy" was just that, and not some remarkable researcher with some very specific skill-set, and also not affiliated with any 3-letter agency in the first place — which is hell of an assumption as well).

(Also, doesn't matter, but just for the record, I don't recognize your assumption as "fair". It's not like a I deny it, it's just way too many assumptions for a discussion involving more unknowns than any real factual information at all.)

There are limits on secrets lifetime that's highly dependent on number of people in it. Someone even tried to calculate a formula

In democratic societies it's very hard to keep a thing secret that involved 10+ people for 20+ years.

If that calculation was completely wrong, how would anyone know? We never get a perfect snapshot of the world to compare with.

What that stat really says is any conspiracy involving 10+ people, if the details manages to stay secret for 20 years, will likely never come to light.

With the US at least, it can probably be loosely tested by comparing declassified records (50 years on) with program size at the time.

Well, the Manhattan project is a good example of something that remained secret from the public for far longer than any formula would predict, given the gigantic amount of people involved (though of course other state actors knew about it long before).

I guess it depends on your definition of "remained secret from the public". For example, Kodak figured it out pretty quickly after the first tests because the radiation particles in the atmosphere were carried from the Southwest US to their factories in Rochester, NY, and affected their film production.

This is Grimes' "On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs" (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147905).

Bummer I was excited for a scholarly paper by Claire Boucher.

The details of the Teller-Ulam design are still quite secret despite being known to several hundred people for 50+ years.