So the name, and internal designation, is "top secret"? You're saying the capabilities are also secret but the newspaper just reported the data it generated, which certainly suggests what its capabilities are.

And why is it "widely known" that the military has this listening system? If it's really "top secret" then no, the public shouldn't know about it. Seems like everything is "top secret" until someone wants to show off all the cool toys.

I think existence of automatic surveillance isn't a secret.

The secret bits would include what this can detect, but I guess the presumption here is that an imploding civilian sub is easier to hear than a Russian military sub. So not really giving anything away.

That's ridiculous though, either it is "top secret" or it isn't. There shouldn't be some arbitrary sliding scale of what's ok to reveal and what's not.

There kinda is though, this is true for almost all military gear: it's quite hard to hide the existance of a new tank once you're actually making it in large quantities, for example, but the detailed drawings of it, and the test results showing the strengths and weaknesses of it will be varying levels of secret. In the case of a listening system, it's the kind of thing which is pretty obvious to do, but the exact nature and means of it being secret makes sense (cageyness about the name of the system is odder: but it may be a concern about revealing exactly which system this came from, assuming there's multiple, for correlation with other information which may be less public).

(The same thing happened with the snowden leaks, BTW: it was suspected for a long time that the NSA or FBI had a survellance system similar to PRISM, because it's the kind of thing that they would want to do and have the means to do, even absent any concrete evidence of its existance. The leaks just confirmed the existance undeniably and also showed how extensive it was)

I'll note that Snowden, whatever you think of him, had the balls to come forward and put his name on all his disclosures. He got help from journalists as far as summarizing and prioritizing and coordinating with major newspapers but he never was "an anonymous source" or "a person with knowledge of the meeting."

As to the other points, when some top secret info does get revealed, legally or not, and the public reaction is pretty much, ehh, we already assumed that -- that seems like a pretty big failing of the whole concept of "secret." And on the other hand, I'll grant you a few exceptions, like the names of spies, position of gear or troops, perhaps the detailed weapons specs like you mentioned -- but when the name of this system is "top secret" and seemingly well over 90% of what is marked "classified" lacks any informational value whatsoever, that's a failing in the other direction, people stop caring about "secret" because so little of it is actually important.