Ukraine Always Get What You Want

... which is why "Insider threat" is one of the security trainings you'll take most often when you hold a clearance. People are the weakness.

Nevertheless: I think you're underestimating the grounds government goes to to protect controlled information. ... and its only gotten easier in the digital age, because of non-repudiation associated with digital storage. If one were to go hit Control-P on a pile of controlled documents, you're going to raise suspicion.

 

All I know about classified info is that mentally unstable, greedy, traitorous ex-presidents should be able to keep as much of it as they want.

 

It wasn't classified. He declassified in his mind.

 

My divulging the classified info I personally had access to is moot. I had clearances at the highest level for the U.S. Navy and NATO.
One of the pieces of gear I worked on would show me the precise location and course of any NATO ship at sea at a given time.
If a ship is still at the exact same spot in the ocean as it was in 1989, my guess is it's actually at the bottom of the ocean!

 

I’ve told this story here before.
My uncle was captain of two nuclear subs during his post-Annapolis career (he was literally in the first nuke class and was chosen by Rickover. Probably cause he grew up near BTE’s Oak Ridge).
One day, during the height of the Cold War, he was looking through his periscope at the Russian ship that was tracking his sub. The ship was in terrible condition, and the sailors aboard looked like hippie amateurs.
So, he decided to spring a surprise on them. He surfaced his boat. He had his commanding officers join him on the tower outside in clear view of the Russian ship. He then took the microphone and turned turn on the PA. “attention crew of the (his boat). Please see your adversaries. Please notice the poor condition of their ship and crew. Especially in comparison to the US Navy…” At which point alarms started sounding on the Russian ship, and the sailors all scurried out of view. Clearly someone was quickly translating what my uncle was saying about them.
He loved telling that story and usually prefaced it by saying he’d been cleared to tell it.

 

I'm beginning to think Russia might be taking in as much garbage about the US and the West as it is spewing garbage towards the US and the West. Who knew being Very Online would be bad for military readiness?

 

If you ever look at pictures of Soviet warships, they look impressive and armed to the teeth. That's because they didn't have people onboard to fix anything. Every system they had needed to be redundant, and most of that was broken much of the time, too.

 

During our golf game this week, my submariner buddy said there was a device on board the USS Mariano Vallejo that could calculate the relative speed of an object using only lat, long and heading. He's either getting senile or there's math I'm missing, because I would think you'd need an elapsed time element as well (or a second set of observations). Maybe that's why it's classified!

 

They must have at least two points of reference so they can at the very least know heading so they can probably get an idea of speed from that (otherwise how do they know every direction they’re moving and not staying still?). If that isn’t it, there’s some voodoo going on I’ll never understand.

 

That makes sense. However, "heading" doesn't always correspond with course. According to the Wiki on navigation, " TVMDC is a mnemonic initialism for true heading, variation, magnetic heading, deviation, compass heading."

So my skipper buddy may be talking about any of those in a mysterious way. I'm just Gilligan in this conversation.