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Comment by jt2190 | Hacker News Reader

Suppose you’re a nation-state and have gathered wind that an enemy state has developed an eavesdropping technology that uses directed energy. Do you:

A) allow the enemy state to use it, letting them think you don’t know it exists

B) publicly accuse the enemy of having the technology, thus jeopardizing the intelligence assets who revealed its existence to you as the enemy goes on the hunt for the spies who leaked the info

C) make up a story about how a bunch diplomatic personnel got sick in a way that’s consistent with some kind of directed high energy source, causing your enemy to stop using the device and recheck everything because they thought it would not be detected, but apparently it was. They don’t suspect an internal “leak”, which keeps your spies safer.

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Suppose you’re a nation-state and have obtained a large strategic advantage over an enemy state. Do you:

A) exploit the advantage

B) squander the advantage

C) also squander the advantage, but in a much weirder and more convoluted way

What in the world would be the strategic advantages of C? This would be like loudly shitting your pants so you have an excuse to leave a party early without making the host feel bad. With over 1000 people involved, this whole Havana syndrome thing has disrupted the United States diplomatic efforts on an international scale, the constant rotation of embassy diplomats over this has had real world impact, even if non-obvious. While elaborate conspiracies are nothing new to the intelligence community, I think this would go beyond elaborate and into the realm of insane.

> What in the world would be the strategic advantages of [making your adversary think their undetectable device was, in fact, detectable?]

It can cause your adversary to react in ways that causes them to reveal more information to you. For example, they might move known specialists to locations that you’ve never associated with the kind of work those specialists do, possibly revealing secret sites.

You might cause your enemy to pause their program while they review, buying time for you to learn how to defend yourself better.

or, like the enigma code breaker, you hide the fact that you know of it, and exploit it buy feeding false or disadvantagous information which you can take advantage of.

"This would be like loudly shitting your pants so you have an excuse to leave a party early without making the host feel bad"

I did not read the rest of the post by way of laughing. But your are right here, I feel it in my gut.

You might think it strange the US warned the houthis they were going to bomb the weapons storages. However this does two things, causes the houthis to try to move things out of the way and causes the civilians to evacuate areas they know contain weapons. Both of which the US watch for to expand their list of targets.

None of the above, it's not really like the Chinese or Russians are any smarter than Americans. No one is going to invent some magical eavesdrop machine that operates on some principle that hasn't at least been thought about by the other side. If the Americans did learn about some new machine the other side invented from an insider, it would be trivial to drop the knowledge on the desk of the most relevant researcher, tell them to publish a public paper on it, and then use that as justification as to why new countermeasures need to be added to the embassy SCIFs. You protect your insider by making it look like the tech is now common knowledge and protect embassy operations.

All of the secret conversations and messages that occur in an embassy happen in a SCIF. If the other side can eavesdrop into those, you've got nowhere else to discuss these things so the only option is to build countermeasures. There are no juicy bits of intel floating around outside the SCIF that the other side couldn't gather themselves. If they can't eavesdrop into the SCIFs, then there's no immediate need to react. The other side isn't stupid, any false or misleading info you intentionally leak will eventually be figured out and then they'll know that you know they are listening (not good for your insider). The best course of action is to appear that you are acting independently of what the other side is actually doing, play dumb but don't be dumb.

And indeed there is historical precedent for A (e.g. enigma). Is there any precedent for choosing C?

It's not C.

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