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

lemonde.fr

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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] https://x.com/hwtnv/status/2031326840519041114 [1] https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/_…

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.

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.

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

#392

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.

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.

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS 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.

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 expen…

>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.

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 orde…

But what you're describing is stealth. "Stealth" doesn't mean "invisible". Humans wearing combat fatigues aren't literally invisible either especially when moving, they're just harder to track/get a visual lock on to aim at. The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is not.

I think you are sim-interpreting what I was saying (and if you see what I've posted elsewhere in the discussion thread I'm very much in agreement with you).

I was just saying that stealth is a component of ship design for small crafts (i.e. those that would generally stay close to the coast) but that it's not the case for larger ships and even for those smaller ships it's just not the primary purpose for radar optimized hulls.

Close to the coast, non-coastal radar won't be able to detect ships nearly as well as out at sea where they stand out like a sore thumb. And of course coastal radar will still light up any ship so stealth there is of little value on foreign shores.

But really outside of some niche cases for small crafts, radar "stealth" is all about survivability and not the traditional view of stealth.

TLDR I think we are pretty much in agreement.

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

#395
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have used grindr too for more datapoints.

Grindr is for locating ships

It's not gay if you're underway

It's not queer if you're tied to the pier

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

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 warni…

That is kind of an amazing point. I looked it up and this transcript was enlightening!

https://www.badassoftheweek.com/stanislav-petrov-and-the-rcs...

> 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.

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

#398
post #278

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.

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 Dis…

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.

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

#399
post #320

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...

No, this is notoriously difficult. The earth is vast and a carrier is tiny in comparison.

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.

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

#400
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.

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