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Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

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Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#81

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.

It's as annoying to see all these unfounded comments like yours making China some sort of omniscient bogeyman.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#82
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I suppose then that it is OK for foreign governments to ban FB, Insta, etc? After all, we all know what lengths the US via NSA will go to.

Yes, of course it's ok. The role of a government is to do what is in the best interest of its citizens. If there is a possible threat from a foreign adversary, the government should deal with it.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#83
post #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 o…

Yeah already stuff like contact information can be highly informative.

I think we need to arrange for an age in which great powers learn a lot about each other through internet services, similarly to how we had to arrange to satellite imagery becoming available of each other.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#84
I suspect the various comments about "better OPSEC" miss the underlying point - we as citizens realise there is no such thing as privacy, but governments have not caught on there is no such thing as secrecy.

Even with Office of Personel management, wikileaks etc, the vast amounts of data poured out pibkically over the past two decades should tell anyone watching who got their avionics engineering degrees, where they celebrated their house warming party, which retirement lunch they were at with five other avionics engineers, which construction company won which contract ... this sort of stuff should be bread and butter for all intelligence agencies and A struggle to see how anything much can be kept secret in this world.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#86
post #78

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.

The permissions of the app are one thing, whether the app does it is another. In theory what you say would be possible, yes, but does the TikTok app have a feature which allows remote enabling of the camera, i.e. without user interaction? The code is public and can be decompiled. TikTok is not in charge of application distribution either, Google is, so if they add such a feature, people might notice.

Modern apps are obfuscated and use certificate pinning to avoid network traffic introspection. It's really not simple to decompile an app into something understandable.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#87

I'm sure it's just because I'm too old to be in the target demographic but 9 times out of 10 when I see a Tik Tok video online (I don't have an account) the level of narcissism and lack of decorum on display is sickening.

Go back to bed grandpa, we get it

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#88
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Tiktok is technically slightly worse, focusing on that rather than the gaping real problem of publicly posting top secret info is missing the forest for the trees. Solve the problem of people posting this to social media and it won't matter if the company is US owned and operated or foreign owned and operated because neither will have anything to work with.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Publicly posting confidential information is definitely bad. Bringing a device that can covertly collect information for adversaries is even worse.

> I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Publicly posting confidential information is definitely bad. Bringing a device that can covertly collect enemies for adversaries is even worse.

If you aren't posting top secret data, you also aren't sharing it with enemies on accident.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#90

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.

Not to mention, the thing on the trailer is tiny. The B-2 is not.
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