rseeker

Maybe people have already seen this, but Strava is in the news because there's a heat map view of all public Strava data combined, and people are taking it to reveal the locations and internal layouts of overseas military bases, including some for which the location was not previously acknowledged.

https://medium.com/strava-engineerin...r-23fc01d301de

twitter DOT com/arawnsley/status/957356785442152448
twitter DOT com/Nrg8000/status/957318498102865920
twitter DOT com/AlecMuffett/status/957615895899238401

https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/...-was-too-easy/

Strava has responded by saying, in essence, "hey, people, when you don't make your routes private? that means they're public." Which is important to remember.

https://blog.strava.com/privacy-14288/

veganbikes

That is good news. Everything a government does should be public if they are claiming they are a democracy. One does not need secrets in a government of the people, by the people and for the people, it leads to bad things.

Also big kudos to all those overseas in those bases cycling : ) Maybe if we all biked together there might be a little less strife in the world. Instead of wars just create teams and have them all face off on a bike race and have fun.

Marcus_Ti

Not Strava's fault at all. There's a privacy setting and the user didn't set it.




Just because you have a top secret clearance...doesn't mean you're smart.

tyrion

TimothyH

This is non news.

The whole thing is a non-story driven by two or three developers and IT security guys on Twitter who spend all their time tweeting about secret US military bases, black ops, conspiracies and complaining about incompetency at the CIA.

The links provided by the OP don't even make sense relative to the story vis a vis using Strava to map military bases.


The medium.com and strava.com links are about Strava and don't mention the military, CIA, pentagon, black ops sites, area 51 or anything else about this topic at all. They are just about strava's heat map and privacy settings, that's all.

The freethought blog is the opposite - it is about military bases but has nothing to do with Strava. Strava is not mentioned in the article at all.

Non news. Nothing to see here.


-Tim-

avole

Er, no, this is real news Fitness tracker Strava lights up military base - BBC News.

Good on the military I say, they should be encouraged to make more information public. I’m with veganbikes on this.

rseeker

Tim, FYI, I don't have an agenda other than sharing a story interesting to bike people. I think the story here is that with so much data collected in so many different ways, we should expect it to be combined to reveal things previously hidden. About the freethought blog, I had the feeling I might be stirring things up with that because it has a slant, and you're right, it doesn't mention Strava, but I think it's part of the story because it shows working with one data source which is part of the overall picture. The images from the freethought blog match up with Strava data shown in other places.

I didn't look at *other* posts by people I linked. The pictures in the linked posts were relevant IMO.

Now back to replacing my right-hand indexed grip shifter, which has degraded into a continuously-variable friction shifter.

avole

This story is now being reported by many newspapers. I've always thought blogs not necessarily the best of sources. I wouldn't comment about twitter. However, sites like the BBC do have to research their news stories thoroughly before presenting them so can generally be quotede without a qualm.

diphthong

ride more. suppress less.

Lazyass

Not if it puts the life of military personnel in danger. The public has absolutely no need to know the exact layout of all our bases. It affects your freedom in no way whatsoever.

MikeyMK

Yes there is a need for certain secrecy against the public, else there would be no need in having a defence system in the first place.

avole

I don’t see that. Also, it applies to bases for any country where strava is popular, which includes many more countries than just the US.

bobwysiwyg

I guess I don't understand the Strava issue in this regard. You can just pull up Google satellite image of, for example the Kandahar Air Base, and get all the detail one might need.

Lazyass

I don't use Strava but I think it's more about revealing where high traffic areas are. For instance, if I was a terrorist and wanted to blow troops up at Ft. Bragg I know the absolute perfect places where I could destroy a whole platoon while they're doing a morning run on the firebreaks in the woods. Someone who hasn't been in the military there would have no clue. The same would apply to any military base in the world, secret or not, because troops do PT wherever they are. Some places you wouldn't even be able to spot on google like tiny FOB's in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan. Even if they aren't running PT out of there they go on patrols and the young troops nowadays are using Strava wherever they go. Basically, Strava is letting people track the movement of troops.

I bet one million dollars by the end of the week the department of defense will have already put orders out banning soldiers from using Strava after this news. Nobody should worry, it won't take away their freedoms lol

f4rrest

$20 this ends in p&r...

Lazyass

Yeah I just looked at the Strava heat map in Afghanistan. There's lots of places showing tracking and I doubt it's the Taliban or Iraq's Quds forces haha

indyfabz

Wouldn't touch that bet with a thirty-two and a half foot pole.

indyfabz

Marcus_Ti

It isn't just Strava. Although in this instance they were the visible problem

The problem is fitness trackers are hardware data-miners. That is their base function. Carrying ANY device that relays your geographical whereabouts to the internet, when your job explicitly entails "undisclosed" whereabouts...is just a colossally dumb idea. Bonus 10 points for the DoD for wanting to address the obesity problem in the military....but minus several thousand points for not thinking this through.

But, yup. COs are probably going to demand all fitness trackers from their underlings before the end of the week.


The problem goes further...because we in the USA basically tell companies they can data mine consumers to their heart's content so long as there's a TOS/EULA that no one ever reads. There really is no privacy WRT metrics or user data. What is more even financial institutions put an abysmal amount of effort into securing user data....which combine with the military using consumer hardware on the battlefields--leads to something rather inevitable. Strava might not have had a public heatmap--but an enterprising soul could have breached Strava's servers and gotten it anyway. For all we know that has already happened more than once and Strava simply hasn't admitted it or doesn't know it.


There really is zero accountability WRT data security in the USA.

FBOATSB

Exactly. I spent a good bit of my carreer working on military installations all over the lower 48. As long as you had a legitimate reason to get in the main gate, you had pretty much free movement throughout with the exception of more restricted areas. Of course this was before the era of handheld cellular and gps technology available to the general public. Most all places I work nowadays have strict rules against cell phones, especially with cameras. Immediate termination if caught taking pictures. Enforcement can be pretty lax at times. Just another example of the DoD being slow to the punch IMO.
IBTM

Lazyass

A few months before I retired in 2010 my commander and I were walking through the barracks one morning while the troops were out. We saw one door cracked open and went inside. It was a guy who was off duty, but we smelled something funny like incense. This guy was so wasted he couldn't even talk. Turns out he had been smoking that fake marijuana you could buy at the gas station. I had never even heard of it. The guy was lucky because it wasn't illegal but we sent word up and five days later the DOD classified it as an illegal drug. AND then we still busted a few guys for it before I left, they got kicked out of the army.

TimothyH

Non news.

BBC picked up the story from some twitter feeds including Nathan Ruser.

Nathan Ruser is a 20 year old college student. He claims to work for an organization called the Institute for United Conflict Analysists but the organization doesn't exist apart from a facebook page and posts on military and security message boards.

The other two are similar. This is three guys on twitter trying to make names for themselves. It is non news.


-Tim-

Lazyass

The DOD will still ban Strava if for no other reason than just because it's in the news and they'll get asked about it. No doubt about that.

bobwysiwyg

I see your point, but I'm not convinced it's critical.

Lazyass

Critical or not, the DOD has already put out a statement