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michh | 11 months ago

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information.

Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade.

Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire, exposing the flaw.

discuss

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crote|11 months ago

This kind of information has been available via open data for ages, and it isn't exactly hard for a foreign power with boots on the ground to figure out either.

With this kind of large-scale infrastructure it just isn't viable to rely on security through obscurity. If you want to protect against failure, invest in redundancy.

rchaud|11 months ago

Sounds like a cost center. Heathrow is privately owned. Would the board approve?

michh|11 months ago

I didn’t mean this substation existing. I know that’s obviously not a secret. The fact taking it out takes out the entire main airport for at least an entire day is a different matter. Do you really think they’d have been fine with you announcing that to the world yesterday?

Don’t forget the BT Tower existing was technically classified under the official secrets act, even though it was extremely obviously there for everyone to see including on maps.

hypeatei|11 months ago

Taking out any power infrastructure is going to cause significant problems, no? I don't think that's a national secret in any country.

I get it, all modern intelligence apparatus is draconian but this take doesn't really make sense IMO.

michh|11 months ago

There's "significant problems" and there's taking out *the* most important airport in the country. Yes, there are other airports but this one matters most. Both in terms of (inter)national perception and in terms of real damage to the economy.

From an US perspective it'd be like taking out JFK, LAX and ATL at the same time. But even then, it doesn't really compare.

chaps|11 months ago

What a weird take. Arresting someone for reporting a major security vulnerability is pretty shitty thing for a state to do. What you're suggesting is that that's not actually that bad.

Same sort of logic that leads to people getting arrested for looking at HTML and reporting that it includes passwords.

traceroute66|11 months ago

> we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information

Its not highly classified. Its not even plain classified.

Its available on streetmap. The substation (like most are) is located on the edge of a residential area / industrial estate. People walk and drive past it every day.

Looking at streetmap, there's even a multiple big signs outside that says "North Hyde Substation". They don't even make any effort to hide it with obscured fencing, its all out in the open.

As others have also pointed out, its in open data downloads for ages.

michh|11 months ago

The fact this substation exists, yes, obviously. The fact taking it out takes out the entire airport: not so much! These kind of things usually aren’t dependent on a single substation. The fact that it is, is not something the UK government would have liked to be made public.

baq|11 months ago

> because it happened to catch fire

Not a conspiracy theorist here, but... there's been quite a few expensive things which caught fire in Europe in the past year and change and it turned out those things didn't catch it by accident.

petertodd|11 months ago

An example from a few days ago is how Lithuania's government believes that the Russian military intelligence was behind an arson attack on an Ikea: https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/17/lithuania-says-russian-m...

There's also the "accident" that just happened to destroy a US military oil tanker. Sure enough, the captain of the ship was Russian: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/captain-arr...

And it's very clear that multiple undersea cables have been intentionally cut by Russia-linked entities. You just don't drag anchors for hours over known cables by accident (the cables are on charts precisely to help captains avoid damaging them).

We're at war with Russia, and these kinds of attacks have both economic and psychological harms. They also allow Russia to practice techniques in case they need to ramp things up for a hotter conflict.