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by dundarious 1074 days ago
Related but off topic (so I could understand being flagged, etc.), but in all likelihood, these capabilities could say a lot about what happened surrounding the Nord Stream pipeline explosions. I think it's a reasonable assumption that the US has these detectors beyond the borders of the US -- I've seen others claim as much: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nord-stream-pipeline...
2 comments
01100011 1074 days ago
That area of the ocean is probably one of the most heavily surveilled areas in the world. Intelligence agencies absolutely know the ships involved.

I still maintain it could have been anyone with about $300k. Work class ROVs capable of planting the explosives at that depth are commonplace in underwater construction and maintenance.

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Dah00n 1074 days ago
The German intelligence services has the ship involved and found explosive residue. As far as I remember it was linked to a Ukrainian business some time back but it could have been anyone of course.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-tells-un-nord-s...

Edit: I didn't read the link posted above but I see it states the same as me. Nothing to see here.

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FirmwareBurner 1074 days ago
300k ROVs still need a mother ship and pretty sure navies and intelligence agencies know which ships go where and when.
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01100011 1074 days ago
That's what I'm saying. That's the point of the first paragraph.
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bee_rider 1074 days ago
Sonar would tell you that there was a boat down there, but not necessarily who was driving it, right?
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wongarsu 1074 days ago
You can also track the path of the boat, to figure out which port it came from and where it went afterwards. You can also correlate it with AIS, a mandatory tracking signal for ships (used for collision avoidance etc). Of course the ship could have turned it off, but if I owned a bunch of spy satellites I would pay very special attention to any ship that appears on satellite images but doesn't have a corresponding AIS beacon.

Of course unless you are tracking a submarine back to a submarine base all of this won't tell you exactly who it was. Any state actor can just rent a fishing ship and deploy a remote controlled submarine from it. That's where more traditional information gathering comes in.

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kayodelycaon 1074 days ago
If the ship is small enough, it wouldn't be required to have an AIS beacon. From an article someone else posted, the suspected ship is a 50-foot recreational sailboat.
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dundarious 1074 days ago
> A major concern in naval intelligence is the collection of up-to-date acoustic signatures for contemporary vessels so that IUSS can correctly identify them.

Doesn’t identify the occupants but could perhaps identify the vessel, depending on how extensive these databases are. Of course that’s a massive open question and I don’t want to claim it extends to small rental vessels, but I also don’t want to claim it doesn’t!

The main thing to note is that OSINT types are working with poor quality manipulable data compared to what’s available to US/NATO, even if we focus only on larger vessels with AIS. Which is not to say US/NATO should be trusted in their public statements.

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