Black Tide in Brazil | Hacker News Reader

Black Tide in Brazil

correspondent.afp.com

189 pointshoward94153 comments

Total especutlation mode about the origin of this disaster: Venezuela is suffering oil export sanctions. When that kind of sanction happens it's not uncommon to transport oil in ships with "rented" flags or no flags to ports of close countries, so the oil is incorporated to that country's production and can be sold.

It is a tiny quantity, but generate some money to some people. As everything clandestine, this transportation doesn't care much about safety and environmental precautions.

It is tough investigation to make, so maybe we will end only with those especutlations

You’re right on. Chemical analysis has already confirmed that the oil comes from Venezuelan fields, and the quantity is smaller than you’d expect, they are currently investigating a handful of suspect ships, but most likely the responsible one would have had its comm equipment turned off and hence not recorded by radar.

Turning communications equipment off is all that's necessary to disappear from radar?

Radar can detect ships that don't cooperate with it, but not identify them.

Ships are supposed to actively cooperate with a system called AIS (which is like aviation's ADS-B).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

If they use AIS as required, they will be identified by receivers that they pass nearby.

Surely there's a short list of usual suspects.

Process of elimination. List of all known ships (tankers). Rule out ships accounted for (alibis). Investigate the handful of rouges.

The hard limit on naval radar is the horizon which is determined by the height of the mast it's mounted on so much of the sea's surface at any given time isn't actually covered by radar. Even when a ship happens to be on radar there's no indication of what ship it is without a transponder like AIS.

Think of the air traffic controller screens in Movies or TV Shows. It shows Delta 1234 from the aircraft’s transponder. Similar to ships, the ones with radars would still see a blip but there wouldn’t be an info on screen. The Automated Identification System (AIS) wouldn’t be broadcasting.

Not exactly...

turning off radios would prevent inadvertent/automatic transmissions

disabling transponders would reduce footprint on more modernized port control radars

not using radar from ownship reduces the chance of being seen

all these together would render the ship's ELINT footprint down to an old school blob on whatever radar plot

that's about as anonymous as you can get without active countermeasures and those are VERY obvious

Can you tell us more about the active countermeasures? How do they work and what makes them very obvious?

That is “stealth”. It’s obvious because it is expensive and secret tech. But also because if you look at the ship you see a ship, whereas the radar shows an albatross or something small. Transitions are also notable for radar operators that are really paying attention. A ship that turns into a goose and then back into a ship, for example.

I think you may be mixing up active jamming (which works like shining a searchlight in someone's eyes--they can't see or track you, but it's very obvious that there's someone out there) and passive stealth (which tries to reduce the emissions that the vehicle emits or reflects).

Anyone can make a jammer, but it only helps if you can evade your pursuer before they get a look at you optically; it's not much use for a lumbering oil tanker.

As zentiggr says, you can get some degree of passive stealth just by turning off your own radio/radar, but anything more than that requires a custom-engineered (and strangely-shaped) hull, propulsion, etc. that takes military-level money to design and would be extremely obvious in any port. So, again, not practical for this kind of smuggler.

From the POV of the radar stealth tech is mostly passive countermeasures. Active = jamming.

Add in transmitting a false AIS signal. Illegal but not hard to do.

Yes for active radar. As ships aren't flying, passive radars have a very small range.

Do you have source for the chemical analysis? Curious to read...

I'm not sure if data from the analysis will be made available to the large public anytime soon, but in the links below you can find more information about the protocol in use, measures taken so far and a statement from Petrobrás about the type of oil found in the region.

https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2019/10/25/petrobras-d...

https://www.marinha.mil.br/manchasdeoleo/informacoes-sobre-o...

http://www.petrobras.com.br/fatos-e-dados/recolhemos-mais-de...

English tl;dr: Gas Chromatography and “Positive Ion Electron Impact Low Resolution Mass Spectrometry” allow them to compare the samples with known samples from other oil fields. Since petroleum has organic origins, it’s footprint is pretty much specific to the environment it comes from.

Lift the sanctions.

A common hypothesis in South America is that Maduro did that on purpose. Maduro and Bolsonaro are on the opposite side of the political spectrum and I don't find that hard to believe.

This is not common at all, except in a few fringe groups. Also, if you don't find that hard to believe, maybe you should check out your information sources.

A bit of local context. The Brazilian president accused Green Peace in staging the accident. Also according to Bolsanaro fish are not dumb and if they see oil they are going to avoid it (that was a real treasure for memes).

I wonder when the middle class and the entrepreneurs will realize the price was too high for the promise of reforms. I won't comment on other countries but the 2018 elections in Brazil are a warning for all people that think voting for an "outsider" is the way to solve problems. Fun fact, Bolsonaro has been a politician for 28 years but still ran the campaign on the "outsider" message.

Reason #1 I'm avoiding the news, I just want 2022 to be here soon.

Economically Brazil has been considerably better since he got elected and most things seem to be moving in the right direction. What exactly is this cost that you mentioned?

Debatable at best.

1- Employment is slightly increasing but still tragically low. Whatever gains in employment are coming from loss of worker rights.

2- Record historical inequality and increasing means unavoidable civil unrest in the future

3- Inflation is down due to idle capacity, not increasing production

4- Stock market is up at the cost of (the promise of) privatization of oil and profitable public companies

5- Goods and services consumption going up with mean household income going down means people are selling dinner to buy lunch - the government is allowing people to spend their government pension deposits again. Didn't work for long when they did it in 2018, won't work now

The possibility of growth is at least there if Bolsanaro can mitigate the gross inefficiency of government corruption that has plagued Brazil for so long. See Operation Car Wash for the tip of the iceberg. His politics are almost incidental; the leftists would still be in power if they hadn't habitually robbed the state of its seed money.

You're beating a dead horse with that argument. Brazil has a wealth distribution problem that has little to do with corruption (though that doesn't help), and the parties in power now have been corrupt for decades. It's gonna be solved with long-term, rational public policies, education and strategic investments - like not selling out oil reserves for pennies on the dollar - and not a little bag of extra money.

Even the higher estimates for the Petrobras scandal mean the amount stolen is roughly 1% of the federal annual budget (49B vs 3.2T). If you truly believe this is the country's major issue you've been had by the same people that orchestrated it.

Brazil has a wealth inequality problem because starting a business here is extremely hard. These are problems that Bolsonaro's finance minister has been tackling very hard. Similarly, because of the way the federation is set up it makes things really inefficient. For instance, many cities have to overspend the amount of money they get on education even though they need way more money for general healthcare, but the mayors of those cities can't reallocate those sums of money or they can go to jail for fiscal irresponsibility. This is an outdated system that was set up 30 years ago and never changed again, which effectively makes it impossible for politicians to enact effective change when it comes to something as simple as how they should allocate the money they receive from the union. Similar unhelpful setups run across our entire country which makes it so that it's an extremely costly place to do anything productive in which exacerbates inequality.

The dead weight of corruption is seen not just in the embezzled funds that we happen to know about. Corruption contaminates and degrades everything it touches. The media, which it abducts to its ends. The political atmosphere, which becomes a farce of competing, corrupt self-interests masked behind ideologies that grow ever more extreme as quality of life deteriorates. We enter into a twilight of democracy, where nobody is clean, crime has no meaning, laws serve no good purpose, and no improvement seems possible.

When the powers that be embezzle 49 billion dollars and are voted out, it's a miracle of democracy. It is the one saving grace, the only alternative to continuing decline. The people who orchestrated this are none other than a teetering legal system and voters who were sliding toward the abyss.

The Carwash Judge Moro who Bolsonaro appointed as anti-corruption czar turned out to have rigged the whole operation in colluding with other justices - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/alleged-le...

Very similar to the US and elsewhere where the right act in bad-faith to take over democratic processes.

The guy has been in office for 10 months. The projected 2019 GDP growth is less than actual 2018 growth. Latest available unemployment rate was the same as the rate from the year prior. Which aspect of the Brazilian economy strikes you as considerably better?

Considering the comment he responded to I interpreted the cost being ... the truth. Toss out the truth and I'm not sure you can count on anything.

Up to now the price has been much, much smaller than with the previous government.

My vote in particular went to another candidate, but if popular pools are to be trusted, the low, middle, and upper classes are all mildly satisfied with him.

> the low, middle, and upper classes are all mildly satisfied with him.

See, that's where you're making a mistake. People being satisfied != things going right. Apparently you can't say this and not be called all sorts of names, but democracy doesn't work when most of the population is deeply ignorant.

Can they see the oil? I read mobile fish can avoid it, but shellfish and such can't move that fast if they're already in it.

https://www.itopf.org/knowledge-resources/documents-guides/e...

This is the bullshit asymmetry principle at work:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

a/k/a Brandolino's Law.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a...

The claim is bullshit. We know it's bullshit. Refuting it ties up resources and conversations.

Flag it as bullshit and move on.