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France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

lemonde.fr

21–30 of 571 posts

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#21
post #2

Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

>> 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.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#22
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.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#23
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.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#25
post #2

Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.

Iran is being fed intelligence by Russia, so they definitely have that info.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#26
post #2

Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#27
post #16

[flagged]

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.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#29

[flagged]

> 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)

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#30

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.

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.
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