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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.”
> 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.
>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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
>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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
40 years ago the USN was working on using SAR with a elliptical kalmann filter to detect _submarine_ wakes. I assume things haven't digressed since then.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
To get a naval fix, you usually define an "area of uncertainty" around the last confirmed location of the ship. The area is usually a circle with the radius being the maximum distance the ship/group could travel at full speed.
So, you don't exactly "know" where the ship is, but you can draw a hypothetical geofence around where it's likely to be, and scan that area.
So the satellite can know where the ship is, because it knows where it isn't? Then it's a simple matter of subtracting the isn't from the is, or the is from the isn't (whichever is greater)?
Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks.
It did not say if it had acted at the request of US authorities.
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?
You certainly can't do continuous observation but even just with commercial satellite offerings you can get pretty close.
For example nowadays Planet Labs [1] offers 30-50cm resolution imaging at a rate of one image or 120sec video stream every 90 minutes over a given 500 km^2 region. There is no situation where an aircraft carrier is going to be capable of evading a commercial satellite offering with that frequency and resolution. Once you know approximately where it is or even where it was in the semi-recent past, it's fairly trivial to narrow in and build a track off the location and course.
Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover.
Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The resolution is up as well and they can do massive image capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their passes.
Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.
The problem then is the black out zones themselves reveal a lot as well if adversaries can find their bounds. That narrows the search area for their own observation satellites immensely even if it's too large to respond to IRL.
If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and therefore must move over time to follow the carrier group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything else until there's actual hostilities.
Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't show you this", reused imagery from their long running historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed imagery after alteration.
So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.
And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.
...literally yes (to the latter)? Is that not exactly why modern warships have to implement things like measures to reduce their radar cross section? If you could actually just rely on "ocean too big" then there would be no need for that.
It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes) but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing those ships.
The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict.
Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship.
Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it.
And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel.
So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Just do a youtube search and you'll find plenty of talking head explainer videos. Ignore the talking head and just look at the imagery and data they share.
Even with an extremely low resolution radar hit they are very identifiable.
Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.
This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.
But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
Granted, but how does satellite radar actually see ships at all? How do the ships not blend into the ocean (the relative difference between the distances between ship<->satellite and ocean<->satellite is minescule)?
Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you.
Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you.
A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.
> 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?
That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification.
However, aircraft carriers are big, so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept.
If only it could actually do anything. I genuinely don't understand how we refused to retrofit any weapon system to the gun mounts. We have 5inch guns. They aren't the magic cannon it was designed for but do they really not fit? Apparently we are now putting hypersonic missiles in those mounts instead.
A Zumwalt with 5 inch gun offers almost no mission capability above a simple coast guard cutter.
They're putting hypersonics on it because they've got 3 hulls and might as well get some value out of them, but not because it's what you'd design for from scratch.
The Zumwalt program was dumb from day 1. It was driven by elderly people on the congressional arms committees that have romantic notions of battleships blasting it out.
The reality is since the development of anti ship missiles, sitting off the coast and plinking at someone is suicidal, even if you have stealth shaping and uber guns of some sort.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I mean, a personal yacht can sail around the world, that's not really demonstrating whether the vessel is useful in combat operations anywhere in the world.
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.
Who is Iran a proxy for? Russia, as usual, has only benefited from Trump's actions.
The one thing you can say about Iran is that they were absolute morons not to actually build or otherwise acquire a nuclear arsenal. They had decades. If Pakistan could do 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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).
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
For facilities where this actually matters, controls are put in place to try and prevent that type of thing. You aren't actually allowed to bring an Apple Watch into a SCIF, and there are processes in place to try to screen to prevent you from doing that.
If there was a "secret base" that didn't screen for people bringing outside devices it's likely because they didn't think that someone listening in on the conversations happening inside the base, or being able to use external devices to locate the base was big enough of a threat to warrant the hassle of adding screening.
You can't actually implement app blacklists and packet inspections for a wireless device you don't control. And if you want to prohibit people from having and using devices you don't control in specific locations, you implement controls to prevent that from happening.
If you allow sailors or soldiers to have personal electronic devices in the first place, you've already accepted the risks they represent.
This really is a non issue.
For example, the fact that devices with wireless radios, microphones, and cameras with both hardware and software of unknown provenance are allowed on an aircraft carrier are much bigger security risks than the fact that the device was using an exercise tracking app. There's much, much, much, much more valuable information on an aircraft carrier that could be compromised by these devices than the boat's location (which is not really secret).
I'm willing to make a bet that the Captian of the Aircraft Carrier and the Admiral commanding the strike group prefer the fitness benefits their sailors get from having such devices / apps then they do from the security risks they represented.
If the risk was real enough... the devices wouldn't be allowed on the boat in the first place.
This just seems like people overreacting to what is really a non event.
> It's not a declaration of war to project your military power to a region you have an interest in.
There was no declaration of war by anyone so far, and I doubt Iran would wait for an official letter telling them they're allowed to sink a US allied carrier, especially now that they killed the leader's wife, son, dad, and a bunch of relatives (plus the only dude who the US could reasonably negotiate with)
Nobody declares war these days. It is always going to be some type of 'special military operation' at best.
Declaring war implies sticking to the rules. Decapitation strikes on the leadership with side portions of schools getting bombed would be considered illegal if war had been formally declared. Equally, having cluster munitions rain down from the sky over populated cities is also not exactly morally correct.
Rules makes war a sport of sorts, it might as well be boxing where you are not supposed to bite ears or punch below the belt. Yet, if you came under assault and needed to defend yourself, then a bite to the ear or a kick in the balls might make sense at the time.
I think the international community is demonstrating to the US that they can't drop their military support for their allies and also expect that they still help to clean up their messes.
I kind of understand that, although of course i completely disagree with their line of thinking. Iran is everyones problem and open conflict like this would have been hard to avoid down the road. Point is they had months to anticipate this latest conflict, why did they do absolutely nothing to mitigate this? Why was the UK apparently completely unprepared? Europe's economy is suffering, more then America. Why do we even bother with a Navy if we don't wan't to use it?
Also what military support did they drop exactly? Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the US has been carrying 90% of NATO since forever. I will point out that it was the US, through a combination of bombing and diplomacy that got rid of the Houthi threat to shipping. Nobody else succeeded.
The pan of oil on the stove is everyone's problem, but when the dumbass decides the way to deal with it is to pour water on it, it is now in everyone's interest to leave the area.
They fund terrorism in the countries around them, all the neighboring countries there hates Iran. That is why they aren't really angry that USA is bombing Iran.
I think they are kind of angry? At least they don't seem interested in participating despite being targeted by Iran themselves, I don't know how more they could express their disagreement with this operation than even accepting to be bombed without any reaction?
It was at best a regional problem until the US and israel decided to fuck things up and make it a global problem, they didn't have nukes, they were not building nukes, even if they had nukes they would not have used them for anything other than extinction level threats, so just like israel, everyone is OK with them having nukes despite being the same type of religious nutjob thecracy, strange. Iranians are very rational when it comes to escalation, more so than israel.
> Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the US has been carrying 90% of NATO since forever
Yeah idk, maybe don't put cia bases there then? And maybe don't antagonize russia for decades and act surprised when they act like enemies.
You won't catch me defending Russia or Iran but get the fuck out of here with the "the US are the good guys and we're doing god's work by wiping out evil regimes" rhetoric lmao
> Nobody else succeeded.
Yes because that's the only thing they know and understand, bombs, if the problem cannot be solved with bombs they're useless
> even if they had nukes they would not have used them for anything other than extinction level threats
I'd agree for just about any other country, but Iran have a terrorist regime that is funding terrorists everywhere. They are not like Pakistan or North Korea etc, Iran is crazy and doesn't follow normal international norms.
Even Russia and Ukraine doesn't bomb third party countries in war just for supporting the other side, that is a crazy stupid thing to do and any country behaving like that should never ever have nukes.
Funding coups is not the same thing as funding terrorists. Terrorists attacks and kills civilians, coups just targets leaders. If Iran funded coups in nearby countries that would be a sane thing to do, funding terrorists is what makes them an insane force that you can't predict what they will do with a bomb.
Russia also funds coups, not terrorists. You didn't see a lot of suicide bombings and such in Ukraine before Russia attacked, Russia did the sane thing and sent in Russians in the Russian areas to build support etc, funding terrorism is just plain evil and serves no purpose. That is the difference.
This died day 1 when you bombed a fucking school and killed 168 girls. For a lot of these countries the US is a terrorist state. It doesn't matter if the explosive is strapped to a guy's chest or to a tomahawk
> This died day 1 when you bombed a fucking school and killed 168 girls
I didn't bomb a school, I am not American. Americans are much more against this war than most people of the world. I know a lot of Iranians that are very happy that the regime is getting bombed.
> I know a lot of Iranians that are very happy that the regime is getting bombed.
Ask them about the electrical infrastructure, or the unis, or the research enters, or the heritage sites... How did it go in Afghanistan btw? The "democracy" was delivered and well received right?
> Even Russia and Ukraine doesn't bomb third party countries
Third party to who? they all host US bases lmao, a country which just attacked them without declaring war, pearl harbor style, without congress approval, against all kind of international laws, because israel was going in anyways (according to Rubio) for their holy war
Stop drinking the kool aid and plug in your brain, it's way more nuanced than you're lead to believe. No one is "crazy", they all have very rational reasons for what they're doing, the fact that you don't even try to understand them doesn't mean they don't exist.
That is no reason to bomb them. Belarus hosts Russian bases but Ukraine doesn't bomb them. International norms is that military bases that aren't actively used to attack aren't valid targets, only Iran breaks that.
> Stop drinking the kool aid and plug in your brain, it's way more nuanced than you're lead to believe. No one is "crazy", they all have very rational reasons for what they're doing, the fact that you don't even try to understand them doesn't mean they don't exist.
They are crazy, they got the entire middle east against them now with those attacks. I read all the reports from them, they aren't condemning USA about those attacks, they do however condemn Iran for launching attacks at them. Iran strategy failed fully and all they do is dig in further and launch even more attacks on these countries.
For you, for the new leader of Iran who just lost his dad/wife/brother/son in US strikes it might sound like a very reasonable thing to do.
> That is insane and serves no purpose.
How do you qualify the original attack that started the whole thing? Iran has been pretty clear about how it retaliates and escalates, they did not attack all the targets on day 1, they gradually increased with the US/Israel strikes. They only attacked foreign infrastructure once their own equivalent had been struck first
What do you think about the US/Israel strikes on historical buildings, electrical infrastructure, schools/uni, civilian research centers? What do you think of hegseth literally saying they're here to bring death and destruction ?
I think the US got drunk on their own supply of "we can do whatever the fuck we want because we have the biggest bombs and the cultural superiority".
> I read all the reports from them, they aren't condemning USA about those attacks,
Well you clearly didn't read much outside of US/Israel propaganda
> Well you clearly didn't read much outside of US/Israel propaganda
I read every update on Aljazeera, they are very representative of the views of the middle east and aren't American or Israeli propaganda. To me it seems like it is you who only read the propaganda.
> they are very representative of the views of the middle east
Al Jazeera is primarily funded by the government of Qatar, an American ally and (currently) enemy of Iran. It reflects Qatar's views, not that of "the middle east" as a whole.
It's a newspaper not analysts reports. Did you read one of the pro israeli op-ed by any chance, I can't find anything stating Iran is "crazy"
> Analysts say US threat of ‘no quarter’ for Iran violates international law
> The US-Israeli war on Iran is illegal and goes against the interests of the American people.
> Iran war updates: Israel refinery bombed as >>> retaliatory <<< strikes reverberate
> Iran has ratcheted up the pressure on several Gulf nations by attacking their energy facilities in >>> retaliation <<< for an Israeli strike on its South Pars gasfield
> Even Russia and Ukraine doesn't bomb third party countries in war just for supporting the other side, that is a crazy stupid thing to do and any country behaving like that should never ever have nukes.
To the extent this might be true, it seems like it would be even more true of the two countries that unprovokedly bombed a third party country to start the war in the first place.
It isn't unprovoked, Iran current regime has chanted "Death to America" since its founding. USA has plenty of reasons to attack here which is why you don't see more international outcry or support for Iran. Iran are on their own.
They don't need to provide a reason, its probably related to greed etc, but greed is still a rational reason. Iran attacking their neighbors is not rational here, it just makes the middle east hate them more.
I am not talking about international laws here, just the norms everyone follows in wars. Everyone breaks the international laws, but the norms of not attacking third parties etc are there for rational reasons, since you don't gain anything for doing so its just stupid and causes damage and strife and hurts you for doing it.
Of course, since they did not ask for the congress approval, which is already against their own constitution. That's exactly the kind of things you do when you're a good guy doing the right thing
> but the norms of not attacking third parties etc are there for rational reasons, since you don't gain anything for doing so its just stupid and causes damage and strife and hurts you for doing it.
What norms? No wars = no rules of war, they started something they can't control anymore
They gain plenty from doing it in term of leverage, nobody attacked Iran in such way until now because it was well understood that this is exactly how it would play out
What actual terrorism they funded that was actually deadlier than what US created in Iraq with ISIS (created as a result of pretty much the same, let's get some country stripped by force of some [imagined] WMDs, US adventure)?
Generally, the one who causes the problem should fix it. Especially when the problem they caused is hurting their friends.
It takes a really good friend to not only accept and forgive the hurt caused, but to help fix the problem, too. Usually an apology from the problem-causer must come first.
I think what we're seeing is that the USA has un-good-friended so many countries that it has no good friends left with the military capabilities to help. It has allies maybe, but nobody who would do such a favor after being victimized by the asker and the problems they caused, without even so much as an apology.
It certainly doesn't help that the USA is asking for help, but probably wants to boss around anybody who volunteers, and it is doing none of the work itself. Sounds like a toxic team.
> Iran is everyones problem
Iran is not everyone's problem. The effects of israel and the USA's war of choice on Iran are everyone's problem. What we're seeing now is not a result of anything Iran did, but rather something the USA and israel did. The worse the effects get, the more blame will be heaped upon the USA and israel. To that end, most countries are likely of the attitude that they have already incurred enough costs from the USA and israel's war, and that the USA and israel had better fix the problem they caused ASAP.
there are no friends at the global scale just alliances. If Europe doesn't want to help then there's no forcing them to. Conversely, if the US manages to get the strait open and oil flowing there's no stopping them from requiring Europe to pay a little extra for the trouble. Fair or not, who's going to stop the other side? You can't exactly ask to speak to the manager.
If the USA manages to get the strait open and oil flowing, then allies might be satisfied with the harms the USA caused, even if there is no apology, much less restitution. At that point, we will be back to the status quo.
If, at that point, the USA perpetrates any sort of further economic attacks on allies, then of course they will respond appropriately.
They move a carrier into a vulnerable position in the Strait, where an attack by a tiny boat could both result in causalities and draw the UK into another protracted war in the Middle East with no clear exit condition and even more casualties?
And for what, exactly, a pat on the back from Trump? (who will then inevitably turn on them after a week and blame them for anything that goes wrong in the war.)
If escorting ship traffic was so straightforward with only upside, the US would be doing it already. Instead of trying to get someone else to take that risk.
Because even the UK is getting fed up with Trump? They literally started preparing to deploy on of the carriers to the Gulf and Trump basically told them to fuck off because they were "late" to the war? Now he's changed his mind again, who gives a damn? He can reap what he has sowed.
deploy and do what exactly? Get involved and potentially sacrifice a few UK soldiers to stroke Trumps ego? Sit around and look pretty? Having a carrier there doesn't magically make problems go away.
Quite. It will in fact make a lot of problems for you if it gets attacked as then you need to decide if you've just had war declared on you and have to decide what to do about that.
Escorting shipping through the Straight isn't like helping an old lady across the road, it's doing it at a red crossing light while pointing an AK47 through the windscreen of the cars with your finger on the trigger daring them to test your resolve.
Cheap drones are only effective against relatively soft targets. Weak penetration and small warheads limit their utility.
Many countries already have long-range drones designed to attack ships i.e. anti-ship missiles. They cost $1-2M a piece. It would still require a minimum of many direct hits to sink a modern aircraft carrier, as commonly demonstrated for SINKEX.
A drone payload can only sink a small ship, there is no way a single drone can sink a carrier. And the amount of drones Iraq can launch today isn't enough to get through a carriers defenses.
Russia-Ukraine war is different since there are many more drones and neither side has air superiority. Also most of those kills were done by missiles or sea drones, not the shahed drones Iran has that costs 20k.
You do not put your resources in danger unless you are actually ready to commit to it. And I mean possible loss of them and then entering to much hotter war.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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