Beijing claims it's found 'underwater lighthouses' that its foes use for espionage
China has accused unnamed foreign entities of using devices hidden in the seabed and bobbing on the waves to learn its maritime secrets. The nation’s Ministry of State Security made the allegation in a Tuesday post to its WeChat account claiming authorities seized a variety of devices from the sea floor. The ministry alleged …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 22:20 GMT bombastic bob
Re: A "seabed device" ...
and don't forget the barnacles and that "sea grass" you often see at the waterline of ships. Sea life grows on anything it can attach itself to, and does not take that long to show up. A few weeks even...
[these land-lubbers know nuthin' 'bout the sea! Haarrrrr!]
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 12:02 GMT vtcodger
Re: A "seabed device" ...
from the article "... and bobbing on the waves"
This looks to be a bobbing on the waves gidgee. The black tank-like thing on top with the antenna (not much use underwater that?) would be the float I should think. The dark grey thing below is the payload? And the light grey thing with the casters is a cart to hold the device while it is examined/displayed? The "float" looks to have a rudder. And the "payload" has things that might be stabilisers of some sort. So perhaps this thing is at least somewhat mobile.
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 13:34 GMT Malcolm Weir
Re: A "seabed device" ...
What it mostly looks like is a sonobuoy outside its launch housing. Whose sonobuoy is another matter, but as China's rivals in the area are very interested in the PLAN submarine fleet (and the reverse is equally true: they're interested in ours) it seems entirely likely that someone dropped a buoy and someone else scooped it up and clutched their pearls...
You would expect to see some kind of identification on it (or on components within), so either this particular one is unmarked, or more likely China knows damn well what and whose it is, but prefer the narrative that they're being spied on in contrast to their sneakiness (submarines) are being rivalled by ours (ASW systems).
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 19:52 GMT vtcodger
Re: A "seabed device" ...
If it's a device planted by the US three letter lads, My guess is that any parts with manufacturer's logo or part number will trace back to some nebulous company purportedly operating in a compound on the Bolivian Altiplano. Or something equally unhelpful in absolutely establishing provenance. Same likely true if it's Russian? Any country in the neighborhood probably used Chinese commodity parts with perhaps a bit of custom machining?
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Thursday 31st October 2024 05:34 GMT DS999
Re: A "seabed device" ...
If you're planting a device like that knowing that China would be unhappy when it was discovered, you're gonna make it look like another country that China is maybe becoming more friendly with is responsible. That way you get a two-fer of whatever intelligence it gathers before discovery plus you drive a wedge in China's relations with other countries in the region.
Bonus points if you manage to create some fake intelligence that China made the whole thing up to implicate that other country, because there are some in the leadership who don't like those improving relations. You just have to find a way for them that other country to discover the intelligence in a way that makes them believe it is real.
Or I suppose you could create some fake devices with complicated sensors and circuitry that will baffle Chinese scientists, so they waste a lot of time trying to figure out what it is and what it is doing, assuming that someone wouldn't have gone to the expense required to build it and deploy who knows how many if it wasn't important.
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 12:53 GMT vtcodger
Re: "secret sentinels"
Only fishing? Absolutely!!! Modern technology demands that fishing boats have at least 15 antennae of various sorts. And there are a lot of fish downrange from rocket test/satellite launch sites and around Naval bases. Many, many fish.
Actually, I think it's mostly the Russians that disguise their intelligence gathering vessels as trawlers. I can't find much reference to Chinese intelligence gathering vessels disguised as trawlers. Lots of concern about the Chinese fishing where they aren't supposed to and ignoring rules intended to preserve fish stocks though. The Chinese do have several "research" vessels operating in the Indian Ocean. And some "Intelligence vessels operating in the Western Pacific. Since a boat bristling with antennae doesn't fool much of anyone even if it has a few nets, maybe the Chinese don't see much point in disguising their vessels. Neither does the US so far as I can tell.
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 20:30 GMT Cris E
Re: "secret sentinels"
The Chinese are currently in enthralled by the concept of a vast Chinese Coast Guard. Vast as in the number of ships (approx 140 over 1000 tons), in the scale of some of them (eg 540 foot, 12,000 ton "coast guard" ship) and the odd functions of some of them (like the landing craft...) It's a thin civilian veneer over the actions of the People's Liberation Army Navy.
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 15:03 GMT VicMortimer
Re: "...a prolonged great power war"
You're assuming that the nukes would get used. They probably won't.
Russia would have already used nukes in Ukraine if they didn't know they'd get nuked back if they did. And that's the case in any conflict, nobody will use one because they know how that ends.
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Friday 1st November 2024 19:05 GMT TJ1
They Probably Won't - come back Sir Humphrey Appleby!
Appleby: It's a deterrent.
PM Hacker: It's a bluff. I probably wouldn't use it.
Appleby: Yes, but they don't know that you probably wouldn't.
PM Hacker: They probably do.
Appleby: Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn't. But they can't certainly know.
PM Hacker: They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn't.
Appleby: Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn't, they don't certainly know that, although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would.
PM Hacker: What?
You brought back to my mind this famous and fabulous repartee that Anthony Jay scripted for Yes Prime Minister! Always makes me laugh but it is spot on.
Regarding Ukraine; early in the full-scale war when Russian officials were talking up nuclear weapons threats US SecDef had a "quiet word" with Shoigu (Russian minister of war). Various sources, paraphrased, report that essentially the Russians were told that if they used any kind of nuclear weapon against Ukraine, including contriving a nuclear "accident" at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, a large number of Ukraine's allies (not necessarily under the NATO umbrella) would use conventional weapons to take out the entire Russian black sea fleet and all Russia's command, control and logistics facilities in occupied territories.
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 11:59 GMT John Smith 19
Hmmmm....
Anyone remember "Ivy Bells"?
Cold War mission run by the US to bug submarine cables in Russian waters and record them on very long play tape recorders.
As others have noticed this looks very clean for something that was sitting on the sea bed for any substantial length of time.
IT angle? Does it have a processor? What's its OS?
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Friday 1st November 2024 13:46 GMT Trygve Henriksen
I don't think it's the Islands we need to worry about. That's just a diversion.
No, what we, or rather Taiwan, needs to worry about is the enormous dredgers.
They are operating near or even in Taiwan's territorial waters.
Any even halfway competent submarine captain can navigate his sub under one of those and follow it to wherever its dredging, then let his sub sink down to rest in the newly dug out hole and be much more difficult to detect.
Each dredge takes the round trip 3 or 4 times, and you end up with a flotilla of subs on the seabed, just waiting for the signal to move towards Taiwan to release teams of SF operatives.
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 13:39 GMT heyrick
A what now?
Tiny castors, a metal frame (that's boxy to ensure its more likely to show up on anything scanning), doesn't look like there's anything to control it's up and down, not to mention the left and right, and large amounts of empty space.
Honestly, if I was designing something to put into the ocean to spy on the Chinese, it wouldn't look anything like that.
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 14:16 GMT Bill Gray
Translate captions on the picture?
As a Yank, I'm basically monolingual. Anyone willing to tell me what those three captions say in English?
As noted above, we can assume the frame and casters were supplied by the Chinese to move the thing around. But I can't make any real sense out of the rest of the picture.
(I'd add the icon of Paris scratching her head in confusion, were it still available.)
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 14:48 GMT jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid
Re: Translate captions on the picture?
According to Google translate the captions are "surface craft", "underwater drive unit" and "hanging cable".
The same Google image search found a few other references online to it:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3129897/chinese-fishermen-find-drone-ship-used-spying-foreign-country
That article suggests that is one of these.
https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/
This website suggests that this is either an old story from a few years ago, or a new instance of it happening again.
https://gaodawei.wordpress.com/2021/04/14/chinese-fishermen-net-sea-drone-experts-call-it-a-teleguided-spy/
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Wednesday 30th October 2024 19:02 GMT Bill Gray
Re: Translate captions on the picture?
Thank you! Didn't think G__gle Translate would work on images; that's a good thing to know.
The "Wave Glider" looks interesting. In hindsight, that looks like a natural way to power an aquatic drone, and a very handy thing for any navy. I'd expect the oceans to be just about littered with them (and their Chinese and Russian counterparts).
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Thursday 31st October 2024 11:32 GMT Jon 37
USS Jimmy Carter
America has a submarine specially designed for sneaky underwater operations. So I would be surprised if they **weren't** dropping surveillance devices near "Chinese" waters.
The USS Jimmy Carter is the fourth in a series of such submarines that the US has operated over the decades, and they're now building a new one.
Note that the Chinese claim to "Chinese waters" is much larger than the rest of the world thinks they should get.So America can claim to be legally surveying what it considers international waters, while inside waters that China claim.
The reason for that discrepancy is partly because China has been building artificial islands and claiming the sea around those islands. And partly because they claim natural islands that other countries also claim - and China has been building military bases on some of them.
China has been running a major operation dredging up sand from the seabed to create and expand islands there, and building bases, for many years. They clearly aim to be so well entrenched that the rest of the world can't do anything about their claim to basically the entire South China Sea.
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Thursday 31st October 2024 20:37 GMT O'Reg Inalsin
What it is, according to the labels
Pictured are three, probably connected, parts, on a trolley. The casters and frame of the trolley are not part of the device. The top label is "surface vessel". The bottom right label is "hanging cable". And the bottom left label is "underwater drive unit". Sounds plausible to me. If so there ought to be communication equipment, but that is not mentioned - otherwise it is not much use. It could have been made by any one of a number of parties - including the CCP - the left hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing.
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Friday 1st November 2024 19:40 GMT TJ1
It's a Liquid Robotics Wave Glider
Looking at the detail I think it could be a Liquid Robotics "Wave Glider" that includes an optional "Solar electric thruster" , see
https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/
The handle at the front of the floating solar electric thruster in the banner photo (left side) and the circular 'stub' behind it matches the right side of the Chinese photograph as do the three solar panels and central antenna/warning beacon.