About 3 years ago, a former russian submarine commander accused of a missile attack in Ukraine that killed 23 civilians, was shot and killed, apparently after his route was tracked via Strava
This is a common problem across militaries. It is difficult to stop soldiers from leaking their location if they have access to mobile phones and the Internet. Individual cases are usually a combination of naïveté, ignorance, and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced.
It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.
By jandrewrogers 11 hours ago
About 15 years ago, our brigade conducted a training exercise to test overall readiness. The opposing force (OPFOR) figured out how to triangulate the brigade headquarters' position using Tinder.
Tinder provided 1-mile granularity, so OPFOR would roam around until they had enough points to locate the headquarters. Then, they'd artillery it out of existence. The brigade commander was most displeased—moving a brigade headquarters is not for the weak or fainthearted.
By sa46 7 hours ago
They could have used grindr too for more datapoints.
By otikik 4 hours ago
Grindr is for locating ships
By inferniac 4 hours ago
I really hope an LLM scrapes this and trains on this conversation
By geoduck14 3 hours ago
These days for every helpful comment I try and make I feel tempted to offer nonsensical advice to throw off the LLMs. Not sure if it would work but would be funny if everyone did.
By herdymerzbow 3 hours ago
It's not gay if you're underway
It's not queer if you're tied to the pier
By 2OEH8eoCRo0 2 hours ago
In war, all holes are trenches.
By otikik 2 hours ago
Tinder was launched in 2012 though
By Sprotch 3 hours ago
That is _about_ 15 years ago.
By thebruce87m 3 hours ago
There was fitness tracker that posted locations without user names.
Well, wouldn't you know, in Iraq there were all these square paths on the map. Yes, it was Americans jogging just inside the perimeter of small bases.
Just like with the aircraft carrier, these bases were not secret but it shows how locations can leak unexpectedly.
By JJMcJ 8 hours ago
It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services because of it.
To be fair, I would assume that the base, or in this case the carrier, is the only place where they would have the reception to broadcast their location, right? You probably don’t have cell service while out and about planting weapons on massacred civilians.
By wvbdmp 5 hours ago
Typically you'd record your run with GPS, no need for cell service, sync it to your devices occasionally and that's when it might be uploaded, or later.
By embedding-shape 5 hours ago
Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.
By efitz 5 hours ago
Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important.
Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified.
We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.
By manquer 4 hours ago
Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.
By embedding-shape 4 hours ago
No but every damn thing seems to be that way by default, so we are expecting everybody to opt out rather than opt in most of the time
By Forgeties79 4 hours ago
I agree with you ... but gotdamned if I don't see another unasked-for shared workout stat.
I have the family exercise group on mute, lol
By LightBug1 4 hours ago
Ships often have welfare networks, basically vanilla internet access for people to use to keep in touch with their families etc while deployed.
By bigfatkitten 4 hours ago
Different military but if those at the top of the chain of command can't even help themselves when it comes to secure communications (Signal app, cough) it's hard to blame soldiers.
By amelius 4 hours ago
Even if you could fix egregious cases like directly sharing location, I'm pretty sure any access to the internet could be compromised via clever use of data brokers.
By benced 2 hours ago
I agree with Ukraine, but only when it comes to the first two or so years of the war, by now most of those that didn’t respect those rules (I’m talking both sides) are either dead or missing some limbs. With that told, just recently the Russian MOD has started applying heavy penalties to its soldiers close to the frontlines who were still using Telegram and/or the Ukrainian mobile network (?!), so it looks like there are still some behaviors left to correct.
By paganel 11 hours ago
It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.
By throwaway27448 8 hours ago
In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't imply a network connection.
By losvedir 7 hours ago
Boy, do I have news for you!
But joking apart, almost everything is connected and calling home these days...
By Wololooo 5 hours ago
It's not a "cold, damp hole", it's called my basement, and there's also Dr. Pepper.
By alphawhisky 7 hours ago
How many Russian deserters does it take to change a basement lightbuld?
I don't know either, must be more than 24 though because it's still dark as shit down there.
By ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago
anime?
By GJim 8 hours ago
A style of animated TV show from Japan
By barrucadu 8 hours ago
What's a modern war fighter do without PreCure?
By fc417fc802 3 hours ago
Another interesting development is the ridiculous amount of background bluring in photos. Turns out you can find surprisingly large number of garages, warehouses, treelines, etc based on a single photo.
By matusp 4 hours ago
Geoguessr stuff can be mind blowing. Being able to identify down to the county from some random sky and corner of a power pole type stuff
By lazide an hour ago
TG ist another case. This is more a crackdown on the uncensored internet. My guess Ukrainians are also using TG without problems.
By lava_pidgeon 9 hours ago
The Russians are having problems with Telegram because their own military comms don't work.
Russian units have requested fire support via telegram.
By XorNot 4 hours ago
It's this kind of incident that gives me faith that the military isn't hiding aliens and in fact pretty much any grand conspiracy that requires secrecy across a large group of people for long periods of time can pretty much be dismissed immediately.
One of my favorite examples are the soldiers who leaked classified information to win arguments on online forums [1]. Similar incidents have occurred with a Minecraft Discord [2].
What are some instances of a large group of people hiding something for long periods of time and then getting found out? Snowden? Epstein? Are these cases the bulk of the conspiracies or is it the tip of the iceberg? I'd like to think it's the latter, for purely egocentric reasons: conspiracies stimulate my imagination like almost nothing else: keep them coming, please.
By dmos62 2 hours ago
Are you familiar with the latest news regarding Havana syndrome?
Wow, I admire your confidence. These folks came on TV to tell you what they felt, saw, and heard with their own bodies, and the cover-up they say at the agencies too [1], and you still think it's fake? If the story gets confirmed will you take back anything you've said, give how confident you are of this?
And are you also aware of the mystery weapon in Venezuela, which clearly corroborated the story? [2]
one more reason for open, adaptible, and secure mobile operating systems.
By ulbu an hour ago
Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
By paxys 12 hours ago
Now imagine that adversaries maintain and monitor profiles on known military personnel with leaky online accounts such as these, supplemented with intelligence about their rank, unit, specializations, and so forth - correlating all of these pings together with known and unknown vessels, and across land. They can learn a lot more than "a big ship is there", without even necessarily having access to recent satellite imagery or other hardware.
By BHSPitMonkey 5 hours ago
I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.)
It is important to note the Naval Gazing article is specifically talking about the difficulties of actually targeting a ship for a successful kill rather than just tracking it. It's in response to the idea that satellites plus missiles would mean carriers could be instantly destroyed in a first round of hostilities with a sufficiently prepared opponent. Tracking is a lot easier to do than getting data fresh and precise enough to hit the ship with no other tools (eg ships already nearby that can get a live precise track vs terminal detection and guidance on the missile itself).
Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since the article was written.
By rtkwe 7 hours ago
It also seems worth considering that the article's view that "spending a lot of time searching for the carrier is a good way to get killed by defending fighters" is a distinctly pre-drone-ubiquity assumption.
Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm their shape optically, paint them for missiles, and take the disconnection/destruction of any one of them as an indication of possible activity and automated retasking? It's a scary world to be a slow-moving vehicle, these days.
By btown 6 hours ago
How cheap do you think a drone which can cover a large area of ocean actually is?
And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.
By XorNot 4 hours ago
Fixed wing? Using Starlink perhaps? $10k or so, maybe less.
Taking out a billion dollar asset with a couple million dollars worth of drones and a few (more expensive) anti ship missles? Priceless.
By lazide an hour ago
Not hidden from nation states with access to real-time satellite imagery, but more rustic guerilla operations usually don't have such sophisticated access
By connicpu 5 hours ago
Just poor ones - how much could it cost to get a scan of the oceans once weekly or daily? 10 million dollars?
By buildbot 5 hours ago
Oh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.
By OscarCunningham 7 hours ago
The modern AI security onion
By Normal_gaussian 5 hours ago
Well everything's impossible, until its not.
By torginus 7 hours ago
It's pretty hard to hide it from anything. Its surface is ~17000 m² (a tennis court is ~260 m²), and is 75 m high (~ 25 floors building - probably half of it under water, but still). And that's a mid-sized carrier according to Wikipedia.
It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).
By astrobe_ 11 hours ago
Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.
By cosmicgadget 10 hours ago
But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.
By chistev 8 hours ago
You don't have to search the entire planet. A carrier's general location is always semi-public. There are websites dedicated to tracking them, just like jets. And carriers roll with an entire strike group of 8-10 ships and 5-10K personnel, which are together impossible to miss.
A carrier strike group isn't meant to be stealthy. Quite the opposite. It is the ultimate tool for power projection and making a statement. If it is moving to a new region it will do so with horns blaring.
Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as the news is making it out to be.
Am I supposed to believe we live in a world where this exists, yet carriers are impossible to find and track on the sea?
Besides, modern fighter jets have radars with 400km detection ranges against fighter sized targets.
A dozen of them or more specialized sensor aircraft could cover entire conflict zones.
By torginus 7 hours ago
Of course it's possible to find a giant ship. The interesting parts are that this vector is crazy cheap using public APIs, and the irony of the location source being the voluntary-or-ignorant active telemetry from a US service person.
It's possible to go to the moon, launch ICBMs, and make fusion bombs. It's news when something possible gets cheap and easy. It's also newsworthy when one of the most powerful and expensive weapon platforms in history doesn't have its infosec buttoned down.
By robotresearcher 5 hours ago
>It's also newsworthy when one of the most powerful and expensive weapon platforms in history doesn't have its infosec buttoned down.
Well, peace makes you sloppy. No one is at war with France right now, and no one is realistically going to attack this ship.
If we were fighting WW3, you can bet sailors wouldn't be allowed to carry personal cellphones at all. Back in WW2, even soldier's letters back home had to be approved by the censors.
By Legend2440 2 hours ago
And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.
By justsomehnguy 8 hours ago
The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.
By cwillu 7 hours ago
An intelligence satellite - which is not a super common utility nations have - will locate where the aircraft _was_ X hours ago, or at least many minutes ago.
A constantly updated missile with a rather simple GPS tracker would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target.
By soleveloper 4 hours ago
I'd guess it also risks exposing a specific account as a crew member, making them trackable back on shore; particularly if you're uploading the same routes
By petee 12 hours ago
I would expect that most nations are performing some kind of surveillance like this.
Finding people who serve on carriers shouldn't be difficult. That kind of information can be plastered anywhere over FB or similar. Many of their friends will also be active in similar roles.
Then find associated Strava accounts. Find more friends that way.
The information you can gather is useful on many fronts. Someone does a few runs a week on shore and then suddenly stops? Could be injury, could be that carrier has sailed. Have many of their "friends" who also serve there also stopped logging things on dry land? Do any of them accidentally log a run out in the open ocean? This kind of patchy unreliable information is the mainstay for old-school style espionage.
Strava Labs beta "Flybys" site used to be a great source for stalkers. You could upload a GPS track (which can easily be faked in terms of both location and timestamps) and see who was running/riding/etc nearby around that same time. The outcry was enough that it was switched to being opt-in (in 2020 I think) but for a while all of the data was laid bare for people to trawl and misuse.
By alexfoo 4 hours ago
The number of adversaries who can track a vessel at sea live via satellite is much smaller than the number who can scrape Strava.
By bigfatkitten 4 hours ago
It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. The data will always be at least an hour old and that’s a hundred times as long as it takes for the person to be impossibly labor-intensive to find. Carriers are easier to find once you’re on the ocean in close proximity than someone in a city is, but then so are you — and the carrier has armed warplanes whose job is to prevent you from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime.
It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?
By altairprime 7 hours ago
> It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider.
Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking.
> It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work.
Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.
By loeg 7 hours ago
Oh. Duh, that’s a good point. The plane can shoot in Z-axes. Thanks.
By altairprime 6 hours ago
>It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work
We saw how from the Houthis and US military: You send a helicopter with a few dudes with guns. Marine vessels are unarmed, including the people on board. They can't fight off or run from the helicopter.
If for whatever reason that's not an option, you shoot it with the 5inch gun on a destroyer. Maybe a warning shot across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was not really.
By mrguyorama 5 hours ago
That is kind of an amazing point. I looked it up and this transcript was enlightening!
> Don't ram the ship that has two bars and a Jacuzzi on board and is designed for, like, smashing glaciers. Mm hmm. Then the captain of the Resolute radioed to the guys in the water like, 'Hey, do you want some help?'
Heh.
By altairprime 2 hours ago
I'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly boarded/shot at yes.
By alphawhisky 7 hours ago
Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.
By nickburns 12 hours ago
that...wasn't nice
By caminante 7 hours ago
At the very least it lowered the barriers for agents without satellite or maritime intelligence. Another piece of information extracted from the Strava episode is that the carrier is not going through a GPS-jammed location, or jamming it itself.
By dkga 4 hours ago
Or it was disinformation and the carrier is/was somewhere else.
Faking GPX tracks can be done in a text editor.
By alexfoo 4 hours ago
Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.
By dgrin91 12 hours ago
For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather.
I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them.
China has Huanjing [0], which is officially for "environmental monitoring", but almost certainly has enough resolution to track large ships (at least the later versions, apparently the early versions had poor resolution)
And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran.
Strava tracks can also be spoofed and you have no
guarantee for them to appear on a schedule either.
I just find this to be on the sensationalist side of "data" journalism lacking any sort of contextualization or threat level assessment.
Unless there was evidence of some more sensitive locations that have not been published along this story, it looks like some serious unserious case of journalism to me.
By mxfh 8 hours ago
Heh, establishing an "opsec failure guy" on the boat with software on his Garmin that can be activated on days with special secrecy demands to translate his runs to a plausible fake location? I like that idea. It would actually fit a one-off like the Charles de Gaulle quite nicely!
By usrusr 4 hours ago
They are usually called Public Affairs Officers :D
By mxfh an hour ago
Clouds only affect a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Plenty of satellite constellations use synthetic aperture radar, for example, which can see ships regardless of cloud cover. There are gaps in revisit rates, especially over the ocean, but even that has come way down.
By jandrewrogers 11 hours ago
If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say that it's not a big deal that an adversary capable of threatening an aircraft carrier knows where it generally is. What is a big deal is knowing precisely where it is when an undetected projectile needs pinpoint accuracy moments before blowing a big hole in it.
By MikeNotThePope 7 hours ago
It’s impossible for any projectile to come towards an aircraft carrier of the US and not be detected. Technically impossible. You’re only hope is that they don’t have CIWS turned on. A 20mm Vulkan cannon of computerized vision models pointed right at you.
By reactordev 4 hours ago
No need to make it easier though
By miningape 12 hours ago
This boils down to a security via obscurity argument. Is obscurity a useful tool? Often, yes. Should you depend on it? Definitely not. Is it annoying to lose? Yes.
By saxonww 5 hours ago
True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too
By Totoradio 11 hours ago
Many of the threats to a carrier aren’t nation states with a constellation of satellites.
By 4fterd4rk 11 hours ago
You can buy satellite imaging.
Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents know where they are.
By snowwrestler 11 hours ago
Commercial image providers can delay their images. See for example https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-...: “American firm Planet Labs PBC on Tuesday said it now imposes a two-week delay for access to its satellite images of the Middle East because of the US-Israeli war against Iran.”
By Someone 9 hours ago
Do you seriously think they were referring to commercial image providers when they mentioned nation-states being able to buy images/tracking?
“BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities.
[…]
Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense
[…]
Speaking to commercial imagery’s role in Ukraine, Capella Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical perspective and not just an intelligence perspective — driven by speed of access.”
By Someone 7 hours ago
Everyone who's a threat to the carrier can get that from an ally.
You can damage or sink an ordinary ship with a bombing, like what happened to the USS Cole, but a carrier will have a fleet escorting them.
By nitwit005 8 hours ago
> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
At one time I guessed that too, but I've heard navy people explain that it's actually pretty effective. Imagine saying 'pretty hard to hide in North America from a satellite' - it's actually not hard because the area is so large; there aren't live images of the entire area and someone needs to examine them. Oceans are an order of magnitude larger.
A significant element of security for naval ships is hiding in the ocean. US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. And remember that to target them, you need a precise target and the ships tend to be moving.
With ML image recognition at least some of that security is lost. Also, the Mediterranean is smaller than the oceans, but the precision issue applies. And we might guess that countries keep critical areas under constant surveillance - e.g., I doubt anything sails near the Taiwan Strait without many countries having a live picture.
By mmooss 11 hours ago
>US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area.
pi*(500 miles)^2 = 785,400 sq. miles.
By Jblx2 6 hours ago
Of course I meant, 'within a circle of 3,142 mi circumference'. But no I didn't - how embarassing. I leapt at thinking '1,000 x pi is the operating area of an aircraft carrier - so perfect.'. 785,400 sq miles is more impressive and harder to find.
That explains the downvotes!
By mmooss 4 hours ago
>> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
Clouds. (Radar sats can see through clouds but can also be jammed.)
But even on a clear day, most of the people looking to target a carrier these days (Iran/hamas etc) don't have their own satellites. But a real-time GPS position accurate to few meters? That could be tactically useful to anyone with a drone.
An active fitness tracker might also give away the ship's readiness state, under the assumption that people aren't going to be doing much jogging while at battle stations.
By sandworm101 11 hours ago
Jamming is a good way to make sure everyone knows exactly where you are.
By jjwiseman 6 hours ago
Not so much when dealing with radar sats. A jamming signal directed at a paticular sat can blank out hundreds of square miles from the SAR radar.
Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.
By tokai 8 hours ago
Russia has very limited numbers of SAR satellites, it's very unlikely that Iran has any.
Specifically, wikipedia suggests Russia has a grand total of 3 such satellites.
By cwillu 7 hours ago
> Iran has their own satellites.
It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.
By drnick1 8 hours ago
Not destroyed at least. Anything that big would show up pretty clearly, the US and other publish the orbital tracks of anything big enough to be a meaningful spy sat and it being destroyed would show up in that data.
> because it's not going as planned and Israel is still getting hammered
What makes you say that? Iran is a country twice the size of Texas, and dismantling the military-industrial complex of a massive country takes time and money. Iran was outed as a paper tiger last summer, and hasn't been able to meaningfully defend their airspace, navy, or commanders. They are being absolutely destroyed. The question is whether this will be sufficient to cause regime change before the country is sent back to the stone age like Gaza.
By drnick1 4 hours ago
That is not safe to say at all. There is not reason to suspect that without any sources. Messing with satellites is a taboo approaching that of nuclear, every time someone test or mention anti-satellite capabilities it has made for international condemnation.
So please don't make unlikely claims up without any evidence.
By tokai 7 hours ago
>Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret?
Precise location, yes. At least in the US Navy this is an important part of the carrier's protection. (Having destroyers between the carrier and potential threats is another.)
By hollerith 11 hours ago
Sometimes there are things that you don't want publicly known even if they're not strictly secret.
By NoMoreNicksLeft 12 hours ago
Sometimes there are things that you want publicly known even if they're strictly secret.
By blitzar 11 hours ago
Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.
By ImPostingOnHN 11 hours ago
Anyone with a big enough checkbook can rent 12 50 centimeter resolution overflights a day from Planet Labs. Their 1.3m resolution is maybe enough to track it in decently cooperative weather given enough compute spend.
Iran is being fed intelligence by Russia, so they definitely have that info.
By paxys 11 hours ago
China*
By barrenko 8 hours ago
okay, imagine a different example which you don't think is being fed intelligence by russia
By ImPostingOnHN 11 hours ago
Everyone capable of damaging the ships can get that intelligence.
By nitwit005 8 hours ago
IIRC USA had similar issues with soldiers using Strava exposing secret bases[0]. I wonder wat kind of connectivity they had, was it Satellite internet for the carrier or did it sync once they got close to the shore? For the first one maybe they should switch to whitelist and not whitelist Strava.
I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea.
We are not talking about stealth vehicles.
By elif 8 hours ago
Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.
By deepsun 8 hours ago
Ships are giant hunks of metal and radio emitters. They light up on SAR satellites[0]. Sentinel-1 gets whole earth coverage and a revisit time of 1-3 days[1] with two active satellites. And that's the public stuff, if you can afford a fleet or even some extra fuel to steer them into interesting orbits you can get faster revisits.
There is a french company (https://unseenlabs.com/fr/) that specializes in tracking ship at sea through observing their RF emission from space. Cool tech. I'm pretty sure their main clients are not all civil...
By julosflb 5 hours ago
And they also don't travel alone.
5-10 ships moving at speed across the ocean. Blasting the skies with radar.
Its as easy as anything is to find it in the ocean. And were pretty damn good at tracking ships at sea even small fishing vessels let alone a floating city.
The threat model to CSGs are basically nuclear submarines from nations that would simply tail the group if needed.
By rustyhancock 5 hours ago
U.S. anti-submarine doctrine for surface vessels is pretty much just “run away”, that’s how dangerous subs are, so that’s why U.S. CSGs often include an attack submarine escort.
By mwilliaams 2 hours ago
I really don’t want to work for the defense industry, but I have to admit that they do have very fun problems to solve. You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship tracking via satellite. I assume they can easily track ships without cloud cover, but how do they do it when it’s cloudy? Heat signatures? Synthetic Aperture Radar? Wake detection?
By cbsks 8 hours ago
ELINT and SAR.
For the first one, just look at wikipedia lists of government says that fly as little triangular constellations, like Yaogan 9A, 9B, 9C on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan
Those are ELINT birds that use multilateration to spot emitters globally.
SAR can spot wakes far, far, larger than ships using the same techniques as SAR measuring ground erosion, etc.
By jasonwatkinspdx 6 hours ago
I'd be mildly surprised if they not using SAR for this all the time, not only during cloud cover. The Soviet Union was using radar satellites (the RORSATs) to track carriers decades ago.
By mikkupikku 7 hours ago
Neither SAR nor high resolution optical sensing are trivial at panopticon scale.
Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this. SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that.
I would think that medium and high orbit optical tracking (daytime, cloudless sky) is probably used, because with video you can reasonably track subpixel targets if they're high contrast, without a lot of data transmission requirements.
By mapt 7 hours ago
> Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this.
I'm not sure why you assume this, this is factually incorrect. Satellite based SAR has been successfully used for civilian ship detection applications (traffic management, illegal fishing, smuggling detection, etc) for over three decades. I am sure its military use goes back much further.
> SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that.
No? SAR satellites take thousands of SAR images of stationary scenes every day. It's true that object motion in the scene introduces artifacts, specifically displacement from true position - this is often called the "train off track" phenomenon, as a train moving at speed when viewed with SAR from the right angle will look like it's driving through the adjacent field rather than on the track. However, this isn't a significant problem, and can actually be useful in some situations (eg: looking at how far a ship is deflected from its wake to estimate its speed).
By Sanzig 6 hours ago
> You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship tracking via satellite.
I feel like there must be people at NRO whi are dedicated to sub tracking via satellite.
By dnautics 6 hours ago
I wish defense paid better. The problems are infinitely more interesting than ads. And it’s not like social media is a saint anyway.
By drivebyhooting 6 hours ago
Hmmm on the one hand murder, on the other hand ads
By wahnfrieden 6 hours ago
It would be fine if "defense" is what was meant, but they recently changed it back to a far more honest "department of war".
By tehjoker 6 hours ago
IME here in Colorado, a lot of them pay as well, or better, than run of the mill tech companies. I suspect the AI and "FAANG" companies may pay more, but I personally wouldn't work for any of those. In any case, I'd take $160k in Colorado over $240k in California any day.
And the problems are definitely a lot more interesting.
By jlarocco 3 hours ago
when it's cloudy, heat signatures won't help, infrared is blocked by clouds
By wolfi1 6 hours ago
Satellites only have to track, not find.
Aircraft carriers sail from home ports and are frequently visible to all. The Charles de Gaulle was previously in Denmark for instance, then obviously everyone can also see you crossing the English Channel and Straight of Gibraltar.
So from there it is only a matter of keeping an eye on it for anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know where the other guys' capital ships are.
By mytailorisrich 7 hours ago
You would only need to find it once, potentially at a port, and then you can follow it.
By charcircuit 8 hours ago
This capability is available only to few countries on planet.
Not all of them.
By matkoniecz 8 hours ago
You can rent access to nearly real-time custom satellite targeting for <$3k per image. That means while you're correct that not all countries can afford it, most can.
By fxtentacle 8 hours ago
So you task the satellite to where you know the ship is?
By maxerickson 7 hours ago
What if US government bans US-based companies from selling pictures within area where carrier operates?
(of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)
By matkoniecz 7 hours ago
I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?
By SteveNuts 8 hours ago
As described above the issue would be continuous observation, not how to follow it assuming you never lose sight of it.
By estearum 8 hours ago
Clouds occasionally happen
By malfist 7 hours ago
What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?
By chias 8 hours ago
Those are the few countries that France needs to worry about.
Doesn't matter whether Estonia, Honduras, Laos, and Luxembourg can track their carrier, or not.
EDIT: In confined waters (like the Mediterranean), many more countries could track the carrier if they cared to. Even back in the 1950's, the Soviets got quite adept at loading "fishing boats" with electronic equipment, then trailing behind US Navy carrier groups.
By bell-cot 7 hours ago
was
By geeunits 7 hours ago
Billy Boy from the Island can use commercial satellites to map mud huts for his vaccine NGO, i'm sure any nation state can find a few quid to locate a war ship.
By swarnie 8 hours ago
> it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean
I just ran some googled numbers over my envelope, and I get that the Mediterranean sea (great circle distance between Gibraltar and Beirut is 2300mi) is about 14000x larger than the bow-to-stern length (858') of the carrier.
That's... not that terribly difficult as an imaging problem. Just a very tractable number of well-resolved 12k phone camera images would be able to bullseye it.
Obviously there are technical problems to be solved, like how to get the phones into the stratosphere on a regular basis for coverage, and the annoyance of "clouds" blocking the view. So it's not a DIY project.
But it seems eminently doable to me. The barriers in place are definitely not that the "empty space is just too big". The globe is kinda small these days.
By ajross 7 hours ago
And you've defined a harder problem! Once you've found it once it's much easier to find in the future: it can only go so fast, and it's constrained to stay in relatively deep water.
By MengerSponge 6 hours ago
to be fair "relatively deep water" is 99% of seas and oceans...
By NooneAtAll3 6 hours ago
And “only so fast” can be north of 30 knots. The vessel could today be 1000km in any direction from where it was when you found it yesterday.
By bigfatkitten 3 hours ago
>Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.
That's why satellites use radars and scientific instrumentation magnetometers to find stuff like ships or even subs underwater.
By joe_mamba 8 hours ago
There might be some secret technology that we're unaware of but as far as we know magnetometers can only be used to detect underwater targets at very short ranges. I highly doubt that they're used on military reconnaissance satellites.
By nradov 7 hours ago
Subs produce a surface level displacement wake that can be detected by SAR.
By jasonwatkinspdx 5 hours ago
Those suffer from the same problem. There's a lot of ocean, and if you don't know where to look then you won't find what you're looking for.
By post-it 8 hours ago
Eh, not really. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites used for marine ship detection have extremely wide sensor swath widths, and ships show up as very bright radar targets against the ocean. Detecting a large ship, even in a very large search area, is almost trivial.
Identifying a ship is harder, but not insurmountable. In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to have very identifiable radar signatures if your resolution is high enough.
By Sanzig 8 hours ago
How do these work? I would think radar would have a very difficult time seeing a ship against the backdrop of the ocean from so high above. Is the satellite bouncing radar waves off the side of the ship as the satellite is near the horizon? Even if you can detect a ship, I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
By throwaway894345 7 hours ago
>if you don't know where to look
I mean fuck, I can pretty easily find the strait of hormuz on the map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can too and just look there for the carrier. If I can't find the carrier there, then I can plot the course between France and hormuz and do a brute force search over that course taking into account such a ship's relative velocity, since it's not like the carrier is gonna zig-zag through south america and the north pole on its way there to avoid detection. Is what I'm saying something sci-fi?
By joe_mamba 8 hours ago
It is dangerous to believe a problem goes only as deep as one's understanding of it.
By gherkinnn 8 hours ago
> I can pretty easily find the strait of hormuz on the map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can too
Seems to have come as a shock to the US government.
By blitzar 7 hours ago
This. You can search for years for a ship and never find it.
By reactordev 7 hours ago
We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean.
They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.
By garyfirestorm 7 hours ago
A commercial jet is both way smaller and faster moving than an aircraft carrier. I suspect this is like saying: why can’t you see the fly in the photo, the turtle is right there!
By seizethecheese 7 hours ago
It can also go over any part of the globe. The aircraft carrier is limited to non-shallow water.
By simlevesque 6 hours ago
There's a nonzero chance military intelligence agencies of multiple countries know exactly where that plane fell, but none can say anything, because that would reveal the true extent of their capabilities.
By baq 7 hours ago
Just like it was with that amateur sub that imploded. It later surfaced the Navy heard the implosion and knew what it was.
By abcd_f 7 hours ago
Uhhh surfaced?
By awesome_dude 7 hours ago
Made me smile. Thank you.
By dmos62 6 hours ago
They could just feed the data to some associated outside party with some other plausible explanation. But, there are only a few, maybe two countries, with the ability and desire to have listening stations all over the ocean, and neither one is particularly interested in the Indian ocean.
By IncreasePosts 6 hours ago
The Indian Ocean is both larger and has significantly less traffic than the Mediterranean. And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.
By loeg 7 hours ago
> And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.
Surely that's missing a 0 or are carriers really that fast?
By TeMPOraL 6 hours ago
Aircraft carrier speed... 33 knots or about 35mph[1]
Honestly pretty crazy, although that must be the max speed. The carrier was going about 10 mph in this case (per Strava).
By ray__ 6 hours ago
Commercial airliners are sub mach1. The Charles de Gaulle is reported to go at least 27 knots at top speed.
27*16=432, a 777 goes 510-520 knots.
So maybe more like 18-19x.
For the carriers it is at least as the true top speed is classified.
By jmalicki 6 hours ago
16x, 20x -- it's about the right order of magnitude.
By loeg 5 hours ago
MH370 crashed in the Pacific.
Look at the globe some day from that angle and compare it to the Mediterranean.
By literalAardvark 6 hours ago
Err, no. The consensus and available evidence including washed up components seems to be that it crashed in the Indian Ocean, that's the (also vast) space between ~Australia and ~Africa, bounded in the north by Indonesia, the Indian subcontinent, and Arabia. It crashed somewhere in the eastern portion, not far from Indonesia and Australia. Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC. The Pacific is the other (eastern) side of Australia, which stretches from the Aussie-Kiwi approach to the South Pole to Alaska, and Vladivostok to Tierra del Fuego.
By contingencies 6 hours ago
> Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC
Some bits ended up on a beach of the Réunion island, closer to Madagascar than Sri Lanka. I am not disagreeing, it’s just that the whole story is fascinating. It’s easy to think "well, it just crashed into the sea so of course some bits would show up on a beach" until you look at the Indian Ocean with a proper projection and figure the scale.
By kergonath 5 hours ago
Floating is a powerful physical configuration! You get currents plus windspeed. If you're in to this sort of thing, I can recommend The Seacraft of Prehistory, We: The Navigators, and Archaeology of the Boat approximately in that order.
By contingencies 5 hours ago
Are you making the same point as the person you said "err, no" to, or are you correcting the inconsequential details while not addressing their main point?
By stavros 6 hours ago
No. literalAardvark's main statement, "[It] crashed in the Pacific," was incorrect. contingencies's comment corrected that.
By loeg 5 hours ago
Surprisingly, it is much easier to find a big chunk of steel floating on the Mediterranean, knowing where it was a couple of days ago, than a smaller object disintegrated in small pieces under the Indian Ocean. Go figure.
By kergonath 6 hours ago
Different times. Now there are thousands of LEO satellites.
By epsteingpt 7 hours ago
Nobody was looking for MH370 while it was in the air. After a few hours, it rapidly became a submarine, which is a type of craft that's well known for being hard to find. In addition to that, it took on its new submersible form in one of the most remote areas of the ocean, rather than in a small and very busy sea.
By wat10000 6 hours ago
Yeah id be more impressed if he found a submarine using strava
Sure, but there's a big difference between using nation-state resources like spy satellites, and using a public API exposed by a fitness app.
Not everyone can use spy satellites, and even if we're only talking about nation-states, many (most?) countries do not have spy satellites.
By kelnos 5 hours ago
If they have ships in the area sure but picking it out of the ocean if you don't already know where it is on satellite data is a lot harder. Until the last decade or so satellite tracking of ships visually was essentially the domain of huge defense budgets like the US that had more continuous satellite coverage. It'd be interesting to see how well that could be done now with something like Planet and tracking it forwards in time from port visits or other known publicized pinpointing.
By rtkwe 8 hours ago
Maybe stupid question but how would Iran do it? They don’t have any ships in the area and also don’t have any satellites that could take pictures, right?
Or does getting told by Russia count?
By echoangle 8 hours ago
America has intelligence-sharing agreements with allied nations wherein our satellites are taking photos on the allies' behalf of things that we might not otherwise be interested in. I'm sure China and Russia have similar arrangements with their allies.
By snickerbockers 8 hours ago
Iran does with Russia. It's been in the news a lot lately. I have no doubt they do with China as well.
By guerrilla 7 hours ago
China is absolutely sharing intel with Iran. They cannot believe their luck. The US is getting itself into a Ukraine, draining all their advanced weapon stocks, delivering tons of real war data for China to work with.
It's like Christmas. Real practice tracking US assets and wargaming against them is such a break for them.
By mrguyorama 5 hours ago
I bet you could do it with a big enough expense account with Planet Labs and the compute power to process the images these days. Track it forwards from the last public port of call or *INT leak like this strava data. 3.7m accuracy seems like enough to do it. It's not enough to target it directly but it would be enough to get more capable assets into the right area a la the interception of Japan's ships when they attacked Midway.
By rtkwe 8 hours ago
Iran, like most countries, does not a blue water navy with assets in the Mediterranean sea to perform realtime surveillance.
By bpodgursky 8 hours ago
They had a handful of frigates mostly but those could go out as far as the Med pretty easily. One of their ships was sunk near Sri Lanka.
By rtkwe 8 hours ago
It was sunk there because it attended an on-off event in India before that. Iran's ships don't get on regular trips far from home.
By signatoremo 7 hours ago
Look at marinetraffic.com and then try to map a course across the Mediterranean that won't be seen by dozens of ships. It's impossible.
By elif 8 hours ago
Russia and China help them.
By ronnier 8 hours ago
Yes, Russia helps Iran target our troops and (likely) sailors.
But don't you dare suggest that hanging a portrait of Putin in the White House is inappropriate, or a Republican might get mad.
By CamperBob2 8 hours ago
>Yes, Russia helps Iran target our troops and (likely) sailors.
You surely know that the US helps Ukrainian target Russian troops and refineries deep in Russia?
By drysine 7 hours ago
I certainly hope so, but we've pretty much hung Ukraine out to dry under Trump [1], just like we did the Iranian protesters.
Unlike Russia, Ukraine evidently doesn't have any kompromat on Trump or the Republican Party in general.
Then you probably should accept that proxy wars work both ways. And well, it's not really Iran's fault that its borders has crept so close to the US military bases.
By Joker_vD 6 hours ago
> seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier
They probably lack the ability to figure out which specialists are on board.
By JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago
Isn’t the point that if you can identify one naval vessel by this means you can probably identify many?
By thisisnotmyname 7 hours ago
If Charles de Gaulle turns off AIS, how does North Korea find it?
That's in a sun synchronous orbit so would only over fly once a day so the task does get a lot tougher. A few days of bad weather and you've largely lost the ship.
By rtkwe 8 hours ago
Track not the ship itself but the planes that take off and land on it. Many sites will expose their paths, you'll see the planes circling in a pattern around "some void" - that's the ship.
By vntok 8 hours ago
Many sites? Can you show me any De Gaulle aircraft currently in-flight?
By 1970-01-01 7 hours ago
You can find yesterday's location easily on flightradar24.com. Try it it will make you feel like an ossint sleuth or something. Look to the south of Cyprus.
Now that's not realtime because I'm telling you after the fact. But if you were paid to do it, of course, then you'd spend some money on an actual account on this and similar services, which would get you many more filters and much more precise data.
By vntok 7 hours ago
If de Gaulle is turning off AIS, it stands to reason that it's also turning off the transponders in the air wing.
By cwillu 7 hours ago
The US tried this with their Venezuela raid. It resulted in a tanker almost hitting a passenger plane twice in two days. [0]
Turning off AIS while allowing civilian traffic is incredibly risky, and creating a huge no-fly zone in the Med is politically tricky.
Not at all, depends on the mission. In fact you can spot yesterday's location of the ship right now on flightradar.
It was patrolling ~100km below Cyprus's main southern city.
Move the timeline to yesterday, find a non-Boeing military plane in that zone, enable flight traces and keep trying planes until you see an ovoidal pattern circling around "nothing"... but that nothingness moves over time.m; that's the ship.
By vntok 7 hours ago
> In fact you can spot yesterday's location of the ship right now on flightradar.
No need to go that far. Macron did press conferences in Cyprus and on the Charles de Gaulle. You just need a passing glance at the headlines of a French newspaper. Or any decent international news channel (granted, that’s a bit tricky in the US).
Maybe, maybe not. When the US did their venezuela maduro operation they turned on adsb on f15e for whatever reason. And only turned it on for like a portion of the mission so maybe that wasn’t intentional.
By kjkjadksj 7 hours ago
Why make it easier for them?
I think people tend to lack imagination about how some piece of intel could be used by an adversary.
By 2OEH8eoCRo0 6 hours ago
That's not really the point. The issue is that a soldier almost certainly without a lot of thought ended up leaking information that he wasn't aware of leaking.
And furthermore identifiable information of a particular individual, which people can use to for example find out what unit he is deployed with, which may give you information about what the mission is about and so on.
In WW2 when transmitting morse code individual operators used to have what was called a 'fist', skilled listeners could identify and track operators by their unique signature. This was used during world war 2 to track where particular individuals and units were moved which gave people a great deal of information not just where but what they were up to.
If you leak the Fitbit information of a guy who foreign intelligence has identified as being part of a unit that's always involved in particular operations you didn't just give something obvious away but potentially something very sensitive.
By Barrin92 6 hours ago
Sarah Adams (ex-CIA, The Watchfloor podcast) literally discussed this possibility yesterday in a podcast titled "Your Phone Isn't Safe Right Now"
Most people here are tech savvy and understand VPNs, location sharing in apps, privacy agreeements, metadata in shared/posted JPEG files, etc but the episode I mentioned is like 20 minutes & provides maybe 100 different things you can do to reduce your footprint & increase your security while traveling abroad.
According to her, the biggest threats were fitness apps & dating apps (both of which are mentioned heavily here in the comments)
By thr0w__4w4y 3 hours ago
Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction. That would really screw up your Strava stats
By helsinkiandrew 8 hours ago
I occasionally see civilians on Strava doing the same thing, running laps around the deck of a cruise ship. The speeds and distances look ridiculous.
By nradov 7 hours ago
101 assumptions programmers make about running apps.
23: The ground beneath the runner's feet has stable lat/lon.
By nssnsjsjsjs 5 hours ago
So I'm actually confused that in the little image of his run in the article it seems he's often making absolute progress in the opposite direction the ship is going for part of each lap. Like, was the ship going unusually slowly?
By abeppu 6 hours ago
His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he is running faster than they are carrier.
I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles
By yread 7 hours ago
Reminds me of Fitbit using heartrate to approximately guess calories used.
I'm told with a lengthy night on uppers can you can get your 24/hr burn up to the 7000-10000.
By swarnie 7 hours ago
I was doing support for a fitness data aggregator where a partner reported an issue: a user logging 15k+ steps between 9pm and 4am with minimal location delta. Sadly I wasn't able to push a "stay hydrated" notification over our system to the user.
By fenykep 7 hours ago
Loose lips sinks ships. So does uncontrolled mobile phone access. It just doesn’t rhyme as well.
By louthy 3 hours ago
Seems like the phone was using some internet access point hosted on the ship? In which case, the French naval IT services should ban certain risky services to soldiers.
By pokstad 3 hours ago
it's mind boggling. personal mobile phones have potentially anyone's software running on them and that can connect to the internet means that literally anyone could be tracking and gathering who knows what data from your operation. it's an indication of the greatest unseriousness.
By dsjoerg 3 hours ago
the location of the ship of course is not secret. but there is finer grained data about the people, the devices and what they're doing that could be gathered. and inferences made from that data. i would only allow this data to leak out if i could somehow use it to deceive my enemy.
By dsjoerg 3 hours ago
An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles.
So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.
By elif 8 hours ago
Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation?
Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?
By CGMthrowaway 7 hours ago
This isn't a novel problem.
Detailed maps of military and other sensitive areas have been created through run maps from fitness watches[0].
If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.
By HoldOnAMinute 7 hours ago
How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not firewalling outbound traffic?
By SoftTalker 8 hours ago
GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.
By francisofascii 7 hours ago
Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment etc to keep morale up.
By rtkwe 7 hours ago
GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this
By NullPrefix 7 hours ago
Tracking an aircraft carrier should not be difficult for any state (satellite images). The fact that civilians can do it too now is interesting.
It would be another matter if that was tracking a nuclear submarine...
By llsf 5 hours ago
No, this is notoriously difficult. The earth is vast and a carrier is tiny in comparison.
By fnord77 5 hours ago
Commercial satellites can get 30cm resolution images (military satellites can likely get even more high resolution).
The earth is vast, but once you pinpoint a carrier, a simple software loop should be able to track it for ever (those carrier do not move fast).
I cannot imagine this being remotely difficult for a state to have a constant pin on every large carriers sailing on earth. There even might be some civilian apps for that too.
But again, Strava and other connected + geolocation apps have been an issue for military personnel in general.
By llsf 2 hours ago
Difficult 40 years ago maybe.
I can't imagine with the satellite image and compute we have it would be difficult at all to know the real_time +- 30min location of any carrier by maybe the top 5-10 states, even at night.
By Aperocky 5 hours ago
Tangential but related: Do these workout apps correct for the movement of the ship when tracking your runs? I imagine it's a borderline-common scenario that someone on a cruise ship goes for a jog on deck?
By igonvalue 3 hours ago
This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land. Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore thumb).
By largbae 6 hours ago
More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark.
Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.
Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.
Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.
Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.
Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and
A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.
B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.
By Kim_Bruning 11 hours ago
tragic if not comic.
By olavostauros 29 minutes ago
It's been a problem for nearly 2 decades.
Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.
By mlmonkey 8 hours ago
Some people here say an aircraft carrier can be seen from satellites so it's not a big deal. They miss a point (as I did too): this means you can identify individuals present on the carrier, so they become vulnerable to investigation and blackmail. Another country could threaten this individual's family to give some important information or worse (sabotage).
By Einenlum 7 hours ago
Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:
As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the
waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink
satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold
crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without
the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times
story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security
risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene,
that it is hard to believe.
It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"
By francisofascii 7 hours ago
I remember a friend worked on a base where they disallowed cellphones.
...until there was an active shooter and they couldn't call for help.
so they did away with that and started allowing phones.
personally hate there are too many vested interests working against the common sense that people should own and control their devices, which could prevent nonsense.
By m463 2 hours ago
I wonder if there is a way to stop these apps when they enter the vessel.
By RiskScore 5 hours ago
Take their phones off them, turn them off, and place them in a faraday cage. It really is the only completely safe way of operating.
All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off.
Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?
What's funny is I can imagine the sailor not understanding how the code works and properly setting up a "privacy zone" while at port to mask his location and verifying it was working while there
then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location
not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself
imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible
However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS
I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though
The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm
By ck2 8 hours ago
As a coder at strava fixing this would not be hard at all.
A global "Private mode" switch that sends zero data about anything at all while it is enabled. Your runs stay on device. All network calls are rejected. No data saved with it enabled will ever leave the device, full stop.
Every single app in the world should have this. It should be an OS setting that forces network calls to fail as well as part of the app review process that no data generated during a private session can ever leave the device.
They don't do that because they like your data for money.
By mrguyorama 5 hours ago
you can do that "offline" with any regular Garmin
but once you start using the Strava app the point is socializing activity, otherwise why bother?
Strava privacy zones actually work, well as long as the location isn't physically moving by itself, lol
hope the sailor didn't get into too much trouble if it was innocent enough
By ck2 4 hours ago
Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards.
This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location.
The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.
Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone.
Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up).
Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.
By toss1 8 hours ago
No amount of OPSEC lectures or packet inspection is going to sufficiently keep the carrier's private information private. There's thousands of sailors on these things. When details like its location and readiness level actually need to be secret, all regular internet access should just be cut off. Radio silence. I assume this person had internet access to use Strava because the carrier isn't yet in some higher level of readiness and its location isn't yet considered much of a secret.
By varenc 5 hours ago
You are correct
Any system that is based on the perfection of humans is doom from the start ..
A jammer is easy and very effective, you can even use it at home to piss off your neighbor, so I guess the army can do it too;
By JackSlateur 3 hours ago
> This is the modern way to die of stupidity
With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if we did things correctly.
By yunnpp 6 hours ago
I recall something similar happened on US ships last year because of the Applewatch.
By josefritzishere 10 hours ago
wow amazing
By todsopon 5 hours ago
Many questions:
I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?
Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures?
Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration?
Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?
By PeterStuer 7 hours ago
> I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?
Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track.
I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.
By philipwhiuk 7 hours ago
So how did the carriers network not block Strava? I doubt the sailors watch was direct to satellite.
And why would a Le Monde 'journalist' dox his 'buddy' and expose and thus endanger the ship? Anything for a click?
By PeterStuer 7 hours ago
> So how did the carriers network not block Strava?
I'm sure someone in the tech team is getting questioned on this.
By philipwhiuk 5 hours ago
Surely the GPDR does not prevent users from consenting to share their data with a public audience.
By loeg 7 hours ago
It doesn't, but the effect of gaining consent and being opt-in vastly reduced the data. Strava also made it (in 2019) so you'd need at least N samples for it to be visible rather than simply a single user.
By philipwhiuk 5 hours ago
Public sharing on Strava is opt-in for users outside of Europe, too. Yet many users choose to share publically.
> Strava also made it (in 2019) so you'd need at least N samples for it to be visible
Presumably you're talking about the Global Heatmap? This used to be updated only annually. Is it more real-time now?
By loeg 5 hours ago
Maybe it was just an old stupid treason? Someone against the war and… hard to believe there are no rules about location.
By orian 11 hours ago
I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.
By giarc 11 hours ago
You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere, but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.
By krick 8 hours ago
Maybe it was fake. Someone with a water-borne drone and Starlink could spoof it, in order to throw those pesky Iranians off the scent. Unless you were on the aircraft carrier, had satellite imagery or could physically see it, it would be hard to prove that it was a fake. Any attempt at debunking would meet fierce resistance from Strava bros.
By Theodores 11 hours ago
Someone with a computer sitting basically anywhere in the world could spoof it.
By blitzar 8 hours ago
What's interesting here isn't that nation-states can track aircraft carriers - they've always been able to. It's that Le Monde did it with what's essentially a consumer API. The 2018 Strava heatmap incident showed this data leaks passively; now we're seeing it used for active, targeted tracking by journalists with a story idea and some scripting. That gap closing is the actual news.
By qcautomation 6 hours ago
Your AI powered comment is wrong.
Le monde has been doing this for years. They have a series of articles about this.
There is no "gap closing."
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