[HN Gopher] How Not to Redact a Warhead
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How Not to Redact a Warhead
Author : benbreen
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-06-01 22:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nuclearsecrecy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nuclearsecrecy.com)
| Veedrac wrote:
| This is a wild take, that this military intelligence isn't useful
| to opposing militaries, and that hydrogen bombs aren't a pretty
| damn dangerous thing to risk leaking. I'd much rather people be
| overcautious with respect to nukes than undercautious. Hasn't
| 2020 taught us to respect tail risks a bit better than that?
| atatatat wrote:
| lol, society extrapolating. Nope.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I had the same reaction. Of course society is not going to
| take the lessons "learned" from a global pandemic and apply
| them to other fields. As soon as things go back to "normal",
| people will forget and repeat the same processes that got
| them into the situations that the pandemic "revealed".
| PEJOE wrote:
| I had the exact same thought. And why make it easy for an
| adversary? The game is about staying ahead, and part of that is
| making sure they don't know exactly what you're working on.
| lumost wrote:
| An under-appreciated aspect of most traditional engineering
| disciplines is how many unknowns there are from materials
| science, physics, quality control, and manufacturing precision.
|
| You could know the shape, mechanics, yield, make-up, and
| components of the Fat-Man device while still being thousands of
| experiments and a multi-billion dollar industrial
| infrastructure away from being able to build one.
| saboot wrote:
| > a multi-billion dollar industrial infrastructure away from
| being able to build one.
|
| This is true! And the biggest reason why despite AQ Kahn
| selling a "make your own fat man" kit only a few countries
| were successful with it.
|
| However, additive manufacturing poses a big nuclear
| proliferation risk. Being able to manufacture accurate parts
| for cheap, without advanced export controlled equipment,
| poses serious issues.
| xxpor wrote:
| We got very lucky that it so happens that the fissible
| isotope of uranium is the rare one. Although I forget if
| there's a relationship with half life, so it might be
| inevitable?
| water8 wrote:
| Natural Uranium is not very radioactive. For example, it
| would take Uranium 4.5 billion years to release the same
| amount of radiation that Francium does in 22 minutes.
| smoldesu wrote:
| As the other commenter said, showing people how to get eggs and
| flour is not the same as baking them a cake. The vast majority
| of the information is a by-product of treating our nation like
| a business: we now have shareholders to account for, and their
| collective vested interests are preventing the rest of the
| world from using this information to update reactors in France
| or advance experimentation at CERN.
| MatthewWilkes wrote:
| Someone I went to uni with got a job at an engineering firm. One
| of his projects was unmounting nuclear reactors for
| decomissioning, which were sufficiently secret that he was told
| to treat them as a black box. He was given a procedure, including
| specific drill and cut locations which would safely detach the
| reactor, but no detail about what was inside the shell.
|
| One day he was on holiday in France and went to a museum that had
| displays about nuclear technology. One of the information boards
| was an exploded view of the same reactor technologies he was
| working with.
|
| Who knows if there were subtle differences, but it's fascinating
| how different decisions about redaction are made given knowledge
| that the information is public.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Its possible it was just the fact that a slightly different
| design was rated at a different secrecy level because of
| specific improvements.
|
| For example, rockets and turbofans all use the same basic
| mechanics to function, the but differentiators are still under
| ITAR
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| Sometimes the secret is the fact of using a specific
| technology, not the technology itself.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Gotchas, tools, jigs, and tricks of design, manufacturing,
| maintenance, and support, as well as the very rare materials,
| are the most crucial bits to guard.
|
| IIRC, the manufacturing of a low-yield, simple fission device
| based on an old design isn't complicated; it's the fissile
| materials that are the show-stoppers, hence nonproliferation
| of centrifuges, dual-use components, and yellowcake/ore.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Reminds me of a factory tour I went on where a big fancy
| robot was assembling car parts. I was told not to take
| photos -- not because the robot was secretive (and in fact
| the same one was used in several factories), but because
| the computer screen beside it showed details about the
| specific configuration of that robot. There were hundreds
| of different settings that could be tweaked and _that_ was
| the competitive advantage.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Makes sense. I toured the Dell factory in Round Rock, and
| it was the same deal. I think all businesses attempt to
| limit information disclosure as a standard practice, even
| if there aren't obvious trade secrets, because there
| maybe unrecognized intelligence in them.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sometimes the secret is just bullshit, though.
|
| https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-i-have-nothing-say-about-nsa-
| le...
|
| > Emails from reporters started coming in last night. Could I
| comment on the leaked National Security Agency (NSA) report
| on Russian interference in the election?
|
| > The short answer was no. The reason was simple: I couldn't
| read it.
|
| > As one of the 5.5 million Americans who hold a security
| clearance, viewing that document would violate my obligation
| to protect classified information.
| mulmen wrote:
| Sometimes what you don't say reveals as much as what you
| do. This is the origin of the Glomar Response. By never
| providing information it is harder for third parties to
| tell when something is really secret or just public
| knowledge. This keeps the actual secret things that much
| more obscure. If I ask you ten questions and you answer
| four of them I learned something about all ten topics. If
| you refuse to give me useful information on all of them I
| learn nothing.
| lumost wrote:
| I suspect this solution makes sense in the short run. In
| the long-run it makes it so any organizational
| incompetence can be covered up with "it's classified".
| Over 80+ years the organization starts to struggle with
| basic reality.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA is filled with
| Byzantine Bureaucracy, fiefdoms, and departments that
| don't even know what they are supposed to do. In a kafka-
| esque twist I'd bet there are individuals who aren't even
| allowed to know their own job description due to some
| papered over incompetence.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| >And if that's the case... what's the point of all of this
| secrecy, then?
|
| Because any one thing isn't enough to reconstruct the full
| picture, but many pieces combined can provide the bigger picture.
|
| And the problem is way more complex than "let's use a series of
| blurry pictures to reverse engineer a nuke"--there are more goals
| than this, like for instance figuring out the U.S. nuke arsenal
| capabilities, seeing if an adversary has figured out a technology
| we possess, etc etc
|
| Come on now, this is basic OPSEC.
|
| edit: Like for instance, look at the Snowden leaks. There were
| some stuff in the Snowden leaks that had very little to do with
| US public interest, but were accidentally leaked by stupid
| journos who don't know how to use a computer. And this did lead
| to actionable intelligence from our adversaries.
| philovivero wrote:
| In your edit, you probably mean Assange, not Snowden.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I thought the classic in poor redactions was adding black boxes
| to pdf but not deleting the information underneath the black box.
| tyingq wrote:
| Also, using a reversible algorithm for blurring.
| c2xlZXB5Cg wrote:
| Placebo redactions. Win-Win
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