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Comment by rjsw | Hacker News Reader

Why make it easier for an enemy to plan an attack on them.

Reading comments like yours makes me wonder what kind of mental model of the world some people are working with. Russia does not need HN comments to tell them where train stations are.

Of course they know where the stations are. But they don’t necessarily know the precise local of all the underground tunnels, exits, mechanical rooms, equipment, etc. The underground network is far more complex than what the consumer map hanging on the wall in the station shows.

During the Cold War, Russia managed to map huge parts of the world, sometimes with higher quality and more accurate measurements than the countries themselves! Especially noteworthy considering that some of those countries (like the UK) were trying their hardest to prevent those sort of maps being made in the first place, yet the Russians ended up with better maps of the UK than UK themselves.

Considering that that happened decades ago, I'm guessing their (and others) capability of doing those sort of things have only improved, not gotten worse. But that's just me guessing.

I'd like to remind you that Russia is not the USSR. Surely the technology has significantly improved since, but some capabilities are definitely lost. One example is them not being able to build more strategic bombers.

It’s highly likely that Russia already has detailed models of every stations in Ukraine. If they didn’t before the war, they do now. Mapping public infrastructure doesn’t require a lot of spying.

But you have to understand that information control during war requires a shift of mindset. It’s better to start controlling everything which could be used by the enemy even if they probably already have it than try to establish complex rules. It gives good habits to people.

Most, if not all, of the stations were build during Soviet times. Russia have the original maps of most of them.

Surely they already have detailed schematics? The USSR had a mapping project of hilarious scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ

This is why agencies don’t published detailed plans (only schematics) of train stations and airports. I learned this when working on a project for the New York subway in the early 2000s.

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