To disguise the source of the intelligence for the Allied attacks on Axis supply ships bound for North Africa, “spotter” submarines and aircraft were sent to search for Axis ships. These searchers or their radio transmissions were observed by the Axis forces, who concluded their ships were being found by conventional reconnaissance. They suspected that there were some 400 Allied submarines in the Mediterranean and a huge fleet of reconnaissance aircraft on Malta. In fact, there were only 25 submarines and at times as few as three aircraft.[24]
This procedure also helped conceal the intelligence source from Allied personnel, who might give away the secret by careless talk, or under interrogation if captured. Along with the search mission that would find the Axis ships, two or three additional search missions would be sent out to other areas, so that crews would not begin to wonder why a single mission found the Axis ships every time.
Other deceptive means were used. On one occasion, a convoy of five ships sailed from Naples to North Africa with essential supplies at a critical moment in the North African fighting. There was no time to have the ships properly spotted beforehand. The decision to attack solely on Ultra intelligence went directly to Churchill. The ships were all sunk by an attack “out of the blue”, arousing German suspicions of a security breach. To distract the Germans from the idea of a signals breach (such as Ultra), the Allies sent a radio message to a fictitious spy in Naples, congratulating him for this success. According to some sources the Germans decrypted this message and believed it.[76]
In the Battle of the Atlantic, the precautions were taken to the extreme. In most cases where the Allies knew from intercepts the location of a U-boat in mid-Atlantic, the U-boat was not attacked immediately, until a “cover story” could be arranged. For example, a search plane might be “fortunate enough” to sight the U-boat, thus explaining the Allied attack.
For your second point, this post wasn’t an argument a random person should try and run projects secretly. Just that if you were trying to hide the progress or contents of your project from highly motivated state level actors, only partially hiding your project seems dumb.
That sounds to me like you don’t know anyone with a security mindset that has an interest in hiding certain parts of projects from state level actors and this is a completely theoretical exercise for you.
To me the post feels very speculative and is far removed from the practical concerns that come with the secrecy mindset.
Planning on running a big project without anyone knowing is a bad plan. There’s a reason of why open source code is valued in the security community.
Like I said most of the examples were of taking the mindset too far. Sometimes it is appropriate to go as far as I described. It depends on the stakes and the actors at play. For example to protect the secret that enigma had been broken the allies did the following.
For your second point, this post wasn’t an argument a random person should try and run projects secretly. Just that if you were trying to hide the progress or contents of your project from highly motivated state level actors, only partially hiding your project seems dumb.
That sounds to me like you don’t know anyone with a security mindset that has an interest in hiding certain parts of projects from state level actors and this is a completely theoretical exercise for you.