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Comment by qikInNdOutReply | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that somebody half as clever as the development team, can guess a lot from little information, and be right in about 1/10 of the cases. Resulting in "Top Scret" Info guessed right by some poor sob. Which is then proven correct with a raid.

Espionage is a squishy word, term and action. Dislike some reality being publicly discussed - voila its espionage.

Some SciFi author, gamedev creates some fictional weapons system that looks like a real one and has the same capability. Espionage.

Military Intelligence.

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Except that's not what happens. Authors, movie prop designers and game developers have all been asked a lot of questions when their stuff rings a little too true. They don't get in trouble (although the FBI asking questions is some amount of trouble). But the FBI is trying to find who leaked stuff to them, and if they just had good imaginations and/or the government published too much stuff, it's not their fault.

It seems pretty clear-cut to me. "Guessing right" cannot be espionage, because you didn't gather any new information, just discussed existing publicly available information. Similarly, "publicly discussing reality" cannot be espionage unless the "reality" you're discussing includes information you obtained illicitly (e.g. by flying drones near government facilities and taking pictures of them in a concerted effort to obtain said information), or as a result of you having a security clearance.

It's sticky to "guess right", in the case where publicizing that guess would reveal technology "secrets". Those secrets are export controlled whether or not you know of a government program creating those secrets in parallel, even if nobody is working on it. Some capabilities are just automatically guarded from inception.

For example, if you "guess" that a certain type of lens would be better for certain types of infrared imaging, and publish this, you have potentially violated the US export control / international traffic in arms regulation (ITAR) by "exporting" that design to the wider public.

It's easy to complain about that, but widely publishing information on highly effective weaponry is (I hope) clearly a bad idea, lest some rogue actor start shooting down airliners for fun.

Pretty sure export control is a different thing. If you come up with original designs for an ICBM yourself by definition that's not espionage, but you might still get in trouble for sending those designs to a foreign country.

What is and isn’t espionage is defined by investigators, prosecutors, and courts.

That’s how our legal system works. Waxing poetic with no authority to enforce the poetry risks implanting false reality in readers heads.

Fair point. I'm not a lawyer; this is just a combination of common sense and wishful thinking / public advocacy about how I believe things _should_ work. I have no idea how close my opinion here is to the current reality.

Reporting to the enemy on plainly visible realities, like the locations of infrastructure and military personnel, is classic wartime espionage.

...classic wartime espionage.

Are we at war? When did it start? When will it end?

The global war on terror has been ongoing for 21 years and began on the 15th of September, 2001. It will end when there are no more terrorists or when voters decide to reclassify terrorism as a criminal issue again. In the interim, the government has granted itself additional war powers and suspended certain rights.

One struggles to imagine how "terrorists" will take advantage of grainy pictures of Area 51. Perhaps now that TFA has informed them of its existence, they'll leave an IED outside the front gate?

The United States is not at war with Russia. Still, Russians who come here under false pretenses for the purpose of reporting to the GRU on American business and academia - even from civilian positions with no access to classified information - are clearly spies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegals_Program

The people at your link didn't have anything to do with Area 51. The guy in TFA doesn't have anything to do with Russians or any other war-media-appointed "enemies". We in USA ourselves have a long history of spying on (and interfering in the internal matters of) every other nation. We're not at war with anyone who could gain any advantage from information about Area 51. If we were to go to war with Russia, it would benefit no one but already-incredibly-wealthy USA armaments manufacturers. Also it would probably result in the extinction of humanity in nuclear war. "Plainly visible reality" is not secret, by definition.

Somehow you have claimed that a war we're not fighting with people who couldn't benefit from knowledge of information that isn't secret justifies charging this guy with espionage. One would marvel that anyone could be so incoherent, except this is the typical result of consuming American corporate war media content.

Yes, that's precisely my point. If you're going around actively gathering information about military secrets (such as the appearance or capabilities of aircraft in Area 51) and sending that information to the enemy via a public website, then that's espionage.

I think modern technology has made things a bit less clear-cut in some ways, because advances in technology have made a lot of things that were previously military secrets (e.g. troop movements) arguably not secret anymore (the enemy obviously already knows where that army is, it's clearly visible by their satellites). I think aircraft hidden in Area 51 definitely don't fall into that category though.

If an FBI raid is confirmation of guessing right, then could we brute force all top secrets by making guesses and seeing who gets raided?

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