Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tosti | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

tosti

> The source IPs were mostly American.

> So I had accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone numbers and timestamps for calls going to military bases.

That's quite a jump to conclusion right there.

View on HN

Where else would they be calling on Diego Garcia apart from the military base?

Are they still dumping Tamils there?

You might be thinking of Nauru. Different island.

No, it's definitely Diego Garcia - UK sometimes uses it as a holding pen for asylum seekers.

Of course Diego Garcia doesn't have the ability to accept or process asylum applications.

It's a very British trap.

The poster knows the phone numbers that were called. It doesn’t seem difficult to check who owns the numbers.

Not really. It's a pretty logical assumption. It sounds as if you might not be familiar with Diego Garcia?

Having looked into the matter, 4000 people live there. It's entirely possible there are subscribers outside the base, so numbers for that area aren't neccesarily terminated at the base. That said, it's likely. Military IT is rumoured to be outdated and awful.

no citizens are allowed on diego garcia and the native population was entirely kicked out. You need a very difficult to aquire permit directly from the millitary to land there.

I'm 99% sure anyone living there is millitary. There were some people fleeing from the sri lankan civil war that landed there and were stuck there for a bunch of years claiming asylum while the millitary tried to figure out what to do with them, but they were sent off the island a while back.

Well, obviously everyone knows that!

Thanks to the Internet, yes, yes they do. Or rather they can in quite short order and then can thoughtfully join a discussion on the topic.

> It's entirely possible there are subscribers outside the base

There are none. The native Chagossians were all expelled in the 1960s-70s.

"Native" is a stretch. It does not mean that they don't have a legitimate claim but the fact of the matter is that the islands were uninhabited prior to the Age of Sail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com