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Comment by keepamovin | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny that classified imaging platforms would definitely have tracked this reentry, but they’re gonna hold off on providing their data and maybe not going to provide it at all because it needs to be parallel constructed through non-classified capabilities.

so it’s sort of like that submarine implosion incident where US Navy knew what happened immediately. They may have even notified people at that time.

but I’m sure that US space force already exactly knows the trajectory of this object and probably the Russian corresponding agency does as well. but like the public has to wait for “open science” to reverse engineer where it might’ve been.

It’s a funny Highlighting of the gap between public state-of-the-art and deployed capabilities that are not public.

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I'm still convinced that Luigi's capture happened via similar parallel construction. I suspect they knew where he was as soon as the crime occurred (or shortly thereafter).

It also reminds me of the fact that the Titanic was only discovered because Robert Ballard funded the submersible robots via the US Navy looking for specific wrecks.

https://spyscape.com/article/how-the-titanic-was-discovered-...

> "The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity," Ballard told National Geographic. "But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/titanic-w...

> Ballard met with the Navy in 1982 to request funding to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed to find the Titanic.

Yes and in general I think it's a good thing. It's a shame and a moral obscenity (and moral injury for the people staffing those systems) when they can see crimes or abuses but are unable to do anything due to "national security" (when such withholding seems to undermine it!).

Good connecting of the dots with the Titanic! Interesting. Did not know that :)

One might think that “moral obscenity” happens when “people staffing those systems” get their jobs and pretend that their responsibility is now delegated to some imaginary authority from the contemporary tales (which is not carved from wood or stone in our enlightened times).

In other words, such dramas are fake, and smokescreen the unclean consciousness. Remember the story about digital spying clerks from US complaining about being lent to Saudi Arabia, not because it was against their principles or laws, but because they were not paid “well enough”?

I don't think these issues can be easily resolved. Intelligence isn't just about what you know, but also about the other side knowing what you know. What if exposing that capability to public will allow enemies to circumvent it, thus leading more lives lost? This isn't something confined to questions of military intelligence.

That being said. There was series, Person of Interest, exactly about this problem.

> but also about the other side knowing what you know

The israelis used the Spike missile for DECADES (they even had mock tanks launching it) and kept it quiet.

The ukrainians immediately uploaded videos of them using FPVs, I was sure at that time that the russians will in no time catch up and surpass ukraine in their FPV drone usage.

It's the intersection of morality, and power. In the game of power morality is often suspended, or vastly differs. In the realm of ordinary human affairs, where people are not endless in competition, morality reigns supreme and governs ideals for interactions, such as interpersonally. Both morality, and game of power, are necessary and important, I guess. But it's not easy because I think there's a fundamental tension between morality and power always.

That's why people in intelligence (fundamentally a power game) need moral flexibility. This can go right, or sometimes it goes wrong. But having to make such high stakes decisions all the time would at the least be fatiguing I imagine. And overtime, with the inevitable bad decisions, or implementing decisions made by others, the moral injury sets in.

Sort of related but a lot of the bigdrone pilots have serious PTSD and suicide: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2GFcNynl9qY

Regarding Luigi, he took no steps to alter his very prominent facial features before or after the crime.

Wondering what capability you think their might have been that caught Luigi? And do you think the fast food workers and local cops were in the know, or just that he was being tracked waiting on an organic tip?

Advanced facial recognition for one. College students recently did an experiment where they could scan a face and find a lot of publicly available information about people. Imagine the stores of data the gov has they don’t talk about.

This my own conspiracy theory, but I theorize the anti-mask movement was started specifically to prevent masking from ever becoming normalized.

No need to scrap the internet for photos

Just get a large chunk of your population to take part in a "two pictures ten years apart" meme every couple of years, they can provide their own evidence.

Maybe Facebook could be convinced to front such a program?

Cosmos 482's orbital data and reentry predictions were publicly available from the US Space Force via USSPACECOM's space-track.org service.

It was tracked for decades as object number "NORAD 6073" and anyone with a sufficiently-capable observation apparatus could have imaged its reentry.

Provided they were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, of course.

It will be difficult to get an exact final position because the space surveillance network points up, not down, and it was behind the horizon from the GEODSS at Diego Garcia anyways, and ballistic missile radar coverage does not extend to the Indian Ocean.

This is a great analysis! Glad to see they must be using OS/2 Warp on some of those old radar computers hehe - j/k.

At the time MA370 went down I thought the same thing… yet in 2025 that info still hasn’t “leaked”.

To be honest, I’m blow away that organisations like NORAD a know where MA370 was

I’m struggling with the terminology here. what do you mean by "imaging platforms"?

I think it's just a general term for things like satellites, space vehicles, ground-based radar or other grounded imaging, drones, etc without being specific as to whether it's optical, IR, radar, etc, and also disregarding its mounting and domain of operation. Sort of in the same sense that "spectroscopy" in science can refer to a wide variety of instrumentation! :)

spy satellites

Dude everybody knew what happened to that sub. At that pressure differential there was never going to be a failure mode wherein the sub is unable to surface or communicate yet still has an intact pressure vessel.

There is a lot of difference about random Twitter posters sharing cynical opinions and multi-billion military systems actually sensing the collapse of a sub thousands of miles away from a secret location.

It feels weird having to explain the different definitions of the verb “knowing”, but such is the case in a post-truth world.

Nah man, the US Navy knew too, they're generally pretty knowledgeable about boats and stuff, although I guess that's not such a widely known fact in this post truth world of yours.

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