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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

Nobody has asked it yet,so I will. What is the use case for this device. I know, the article says "measure radiation without being noticed", but what are the actual situations where you would want to do that?

Presumably sending spies to gather data on nuclear weapons production sites? Wouldn't those sites have crazy operational security and would confiscate things like iPods before entering anyways?

Or is the idea to detect facilities that are building dirty-bombs in dense urban areas (a-la some scene set in middle-eastern country X from the show 'Homeland')

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The use case for the iPod could be anything, but one time that Swedish authorities wanted to covertly measure radiation was during Whiskey on the rocks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_S-363). They pulled up small boats beside the sub and put Geiger counters directly against the hull while pretending to do something else.

Just goes to show, you really should take your whiskey neat.

As someone who has done some contracting work in this space, I'd say one of the use cases for this is shipping inspections at ports. Not everything the government considers sensitive is the Jason Bourne black-ops stuff most of the comments here are fantasizing about.

Here's a couple overviews:

https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/nnsa-and-nuclear-smuggling-detec...

https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radiation-and-shipping-port-secu...

But then why embed it in an iPod?

Because it's likely the device your longshoreman foremen and customs inspectors are already using around this inventory. If you can embed radiation detectors in them and send sensor data off to central servers at the same time, why wouldn't you?

My reading is that this was a one off or a very small batch, not a manufactured product.

>measure radiation without being noticed", but what are the actual situations where you would want to do that?

Most likely it was for use against Iran or some allies who we didn't want to overtly say we don't trust.

At the time, an iPod might have been as innocent enough to not warrant any concern at a security checkpoint. Cellphones, cameras, and any other obvious recording equipment would be more scrutinized whereas a music player would not. Someone like a janitor listening to music while mopping would get less scrutiny than a visitor trying to take a tour of restricted areas with an iPod in their pocket. The visitor has to pass through the same checkpoints but the janitor is a known person, they show up to work all the time and maybe they have a story about how they won a new iPod in a raffle (while actually getting paid to walk around with it). Guards trust the janitor since he's already been vetted so they let him through with it. Or maybe he sneaks it in in the hope that he receives less punishment if caught because it's just an iPod, it's not like he smuggled in a camera. A visitor getting caught with the same iPod would be immediately kicked out get in a lot more trouble because they just received instructions not to bring anything in.

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

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