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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

Maybe stupid question but how would Iran do it? They don’t have any ships in the area and also don’t have any satellites that could take pictures, right?

Or does getting told by Russia count?

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America has intelligence-sharing agreements with allied nations wherein our satellites are taking photos on the allies' behalf of things that we might not otherwise be interested in. I'm sure China and Russia have similar arrangements with their allies.

Iran does with Russia. It's been in the news a lot lately. I have no doubt they do with China as well.

China is absolutely sharing intel with Iran. They cannot believe their luck. The US is getting itself into a Ukraine, draining all their advanced weapon stocks, delivering tons of real war data for China to work with.

It's like Christmas. Real practice tracking US assets and wargaming against them is such a break for them.

I bet you could do it with a big enough expense account with Planet Labs and the compute power to process the images these days. Track it forwards from the last public port of call or *INT leak like this strava data. 3.7m accuracy seems like enough to do it. It's not enough to target it directly but it would be enough to get more capable assets into the right area a la the interception of Japan's ships when they attacked Midway.

Iran, like most countries, does not a blue water navy with assets in the Mediterranean sea to perform realtime surveillance.

They had a handful of frigates mostly but those could go out as far as the Med pretty easily. One of their ships was sunk near Sri Lanka.

It was sunk there because it attended an on-off event in India before that. Iran's ships don't get on regular trips far from home.

They don't but it shows they could.

I mean, a personal yacht can sail around the world, that's not really demonstrating whether the vessel is useful in combat operations anywhere in the world.

Look at marinetraffic.com and then try to map a course across the Mediterranean that won't be seen by dozens of ships. It's impossible.

Yes, Russia helps Iran target our troops and (likely) sailors.

But don't you dare suggest that hanging a portrait of Putin in the White House is inappropriate, or a Republican might get mad.

Russia and China help them.

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