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Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

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Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#41
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slant I picked up on is that Chinese authorities operating TikTok is the problem because the president can’t just dial Zuck and say “take that shit down immediately or else”. But in general I agree and find the slant annoying. I do think there is some discussion point buried in here about whether or not it’s strategic for the US to build dependencies on foreign software services… but… not sure if it’s a productiv…

Getting pictures deleted from the internet is not a thing. Doesn't matter if you are the president or Zuck.

Precisely, if Mark Zuckerberg could delete pictures from the internet the photo of him wearing sunscreen[1] would never have been allowed to spawn so many memes.

1. https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2021-04/27/2...

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#42
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slant I picked up on is that Chinese authorities operating TikTok is the problem because the president can’t just dial Zuck and say “take that shit down immediately or else”. But in general I agree and find the slant annoying. I do think there is some discussion point buried in here about whether or not it’s strategic for the US to build dependencies on foreign software services… but… not sure if it’s a productiv…

Getting pictures deleted from the internet is not a thing. Doesn't matter if you are the president or Zuck.

You’re missing the point. The GP was commenting on their impression of the slant the article was taking (and I agree with their point there). They were not suggesting the article’s slant was correct, in fact they specifically stated that they disliked the way the article was slanted.

Maybe they could have been more explicit in the way they worded their reply. But I think given the question they were responding to and the typical audience of this forum, it should have been obvious to most people that the GP wasn’t trying to imply pictures can be deleted from the internet. Or at least obvious to anyone that read the OPs question and the source article.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#43

An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud. If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phon…

Do they anywhere? My neighbor works at a government facility for building and repairing … machines and he surrenders his phone every morning. Something smells weird here, but I suppose not everywhere has perfect security all the time. I just wouldn’t want to be the person that proved that.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#44

An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud. If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phon…

The TikTok app may have camera access and location access. It could capture images and send them to China when it detects its on a military base without the user even knowing. It’s so annoying to see “what about X” comments on every story with almost no thought put into the response.

You nailed it

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#45

An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud. If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phon…

The TikTok app may have camera access and location access. It could capture images and send them to China when it detects its on a military base without the user even knowing. It’s so annoying to see “what about X” comments on every story with almost no thought put into the response.

Did you watch the video? Someone is clearly recording this object intentionally. The camera pans and zooms to follow the truck. Whether this is secretly being sent to China via TikTok is somewhat irrelevant if an individual is breaking protocol by intentionally taking video on their smartphone.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#46

An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud. If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phon…

>It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud.

There's an additional layer here that's often ignored: that specific piece of information that leaked is the same regardless of what platform it was released on, but if it was released on a foreign government controlled platform, that government might start monitoring aspects of data being collected by TikTok that aren't being posted for the user or look at historical data if it's being collected. More detailed location data, who their friends are, where they typically go, and so on. Not all of that additional data is probably going to be available to them on Facebook, just the video. The information in the video may be more valuable when it's incorporated with a series of other data points that may be attainable from TikTok for that now closely monitored account.

Sharing this information to begin with isn't good but it's even worse if you're now potentially leaking additional data unknowingly. Maybe the guy who recorded that begins taking photos at some specific base, maybe their TikTok friends include some coworkers that include some videos in on a boat in the South China Sea... it's possible to start linking more information together that could be valuable to an adversary.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#47

I heard on reddit that some thought it could potentially be the fuselage for the new B-21 Raider, the replacement for the B-2 bomber that already kinda looks like a pretty futuristic aircraft.

> I heard on reddit that some thought it could potentially be the fuselage for the new B-21 Raider, the replacement for the B-2 bomber that already kinda looks like a pretty futuristic aircraft.

I thought the B-21 was going to be a pretty conservative program, so it's design will mostly follow the B-2's. It's a weird angle, but this doesn't really look like that to me.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TikTok app may have camera access and location access. It could capture images and send them to China when it detects its on a military base without the user even knowing. It’s so annoying to see “what about X” comments on every story with almost no thought put into the response.

Did you watch the video? Someone is clearly recording this object intentionally. The camera pans and zooms to follow the truck. Whether this is secretly being sent to China via TikTok is somewhat irrelevant if an individual is breaking protocol by intentionally taking video on their smartphone.

I was responding to the comment asking why TikTok should be banned vs. other social media.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#50

The War Zone over at the Drive published this about a week ago. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42480/mysterious-steal... It's got some videos from the RCS testing and possible ideas on what it could be.

From a tweet[0] in the article:

> I showed this to Gen Mark Kelly, Air Combat Command chief. His immediate reply was that he had no idea what it was. And then he took my laptop and stared at it for about 20 seconds. His expression was (WARNING: my impression) somewhere between confused and impressed.

Idea: He was confused because it wasn't lensing. It's probably a target drone for craft which can lense, and which are dropped off at their destinations not by truck, but by theoretical gravity physics.

(The above is tongue in cheek)

0. https://twitter.com/TheDEWLine/status/1440806852560707587

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