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The most interesting part is that this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence. I thought the placement of staff and personnel

The most interesting part is that this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence. I thought the placement of staff and personnel was supposed to be a much guarded secret.

bigdict 5y ago
Are you imagining the Taliban running around with iPhones, ordering mortar fire on areas where all valuable Pokemon have been plucked by US military?
- tyingq 5y ago
  It would probably be effective.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  Guerillas can't be choosers.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Why not? The despite most most depictions, the Taliban (and insurgents in general) are capable of impressive feats of engineering and electronic hacking. Seems like this would be pretty basic.
- contravariant 5y ago
  When you put it like that, that does sound like a risk I wouldn't be willing to take.
- aaron695 5y ago
  If you could IED a Pokemon Go site or base location and hurt or kill personnel, every soldier in the region would be told about it and it would affect their daily lives if they played the game. It would work. If you could create something to drawn them in, it would work better, but I'm not sure how the game works. Like attacking certain locations in Go to make them 'hard' to draw solders to an 'easy' IED'ed location. The Taliban are just us, they like creativity, they'd think hacking Western Pokemon Go would be cool, it would help them recruit. But, the logistics of getting for instance a McDonalds on a base also has risk. It's all risk management.
- peteretep 5y ago
  The US has some very technically advanced adversaries who’d happily share their data with the Taliban
  - paganel 5y ago
    > who’d happily share their data with the Taliban Not the Taliban, but ISIS was very quick in adopting Google Earth/Google Maps early in their war in Syria, you could see some map screens in the videos where they used to prepare a targeted suicide bombing and such (not sure if those videos are on YT or Twitter anymore).
  - vkou 5y ago
    No, they currently don't, but this is a convenient boogieman to trot out whenever you need to drum up patriotism, or to accuse your political opponents of a lack of patriotism, or demand a higher defense budget or a justification for another extension of the forever-war in the Middle East. This isn't the Soviet-Afghan war, where the US was happily and openly supporting the same mujahedeen that eventually became the Taliban. Russia and China both have significant 'problematic' Muslim minorities, and have little taste for seriously sponsoring Islamic extremism. (The US and Saudi Wahhabism, on the other hand, continue to be odd bedfellows, because, you know, we still can't get over Iran.)
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  The article mentions using a hacked client to spoof your GPS location. You just need a computer that can run multiple android emulators. You could probably just make raw API calls. I'm pretty sure that's how all those pokemon-mapping websites worked for the first several months of the game's release before they removed those features from the game.
- herbst 5y ago
  Don't you think they have smartphones too? Why would that be weird?
stickydink 5y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
throwanem 5y ago
Pretty sure the location of Bagram isn't.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  A Fitbit could reveal patrol routes and timings. Something like Pokemon Go could permit dropping something rare to attract people to a sighted-in spot you'd then drop mortars on.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    So could an interpreter. Also, Afghanistan has mountains and binoculars, neither of which requires guessing Air Force usernames on Strava or whatever. Not that you don't do anything you can that works in asymmetrical warfare or whatever the inside-the-beltway crowd prefers to call it these days, but it's hardly as if there's much in the way of a unique threat model here. In any case, Pokemon Go's been out since, what, 2016? No one on any side has taken the American war in Afghanistan seriously since well before then. When you're just waiting around for Americans to acknowledge the inevitable and leave, there's not all that much point in finding clever ways to blow up Americans - all that's liable to do is make Americans maybe decide to stick around longer. That doesn't necessarily make Americans playing Pokemon Go in Bagram a good idea, but it also doesn't make it a bad one, and I can think of a lot worse.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      We weren't guessing usernames, lol — these assclowns had a public map — of every user's data!!
dfsegoat 5y ago
> this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence It may be backwards. Niantic - the developer of the game, was founded by a guy who worked in "foreign affairs" for the US Govt [1]. One of his early companies was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital branch [0]. Why put boots on the ground to get street level imagery, when you can just have kids all over the world do it for you? [0] - https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and-pokmon-go.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanke
parsimo2010 5y ago
I don’t want to be too dismissive of your claims, because the sentiment is well placed- lots of apps present security concerns. But the location of every FOB and COP is/was well known to the locals. Hopefully Pokémon Go isn’t revealing the locations of more sensitive locations, but the people running clandestine operations aren’t letting E-3’s play games on a cell phone next to them. There may be other vulnerabilities but Pokemon Go isn’t too big of a problem since it only reveals where people have been congregating for a while. So it’s different than a terrorist revealing their camp’s location because Twitter geotagged a post.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Several bases I went to in the continental US had all the gyms/pokestops disabled after the game came out. I wonder if that was intentionally not done at Bagram for morale reasons?
Thorrez 5y ago
Yeah, fitness tracking app Strava revealed a secret army base: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
- akersten 5y ago
  It may not be your intention, but both this and the parent comment really misplace the blame. The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base. I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    News are terrible at that kind of writing. For instance with traffic incidents, it's always "a person getting hit by a car", not "a driver ramming their car into a person". So they write it like as if the driver had no agency, and the incident was completely non-avoidable and no one should stop to think about why it happened or how it can be prevented in the future. For good measurement they also use the word "accident" a lot. Wording matter.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "Wording matter. " It does. "a person getting hit by a car" is quite neutral. "a driver ramming their car into a person"." This sounds intentional and shifts blame to the driver.
      - 5y ago

bigdict 5y ago

Are you imagining the Taliban running around with iPhones, ordering mortar fire on areas where all valuable Pokemon have been plucked by US military?

tyingq 5y ago
It would probably be effective.
ahartmetz 5y ago
Guerillas can't be choosers.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
Why not? The despite most most depictions, the Taliban (and insurgents in general) are capable of impressive feats of engineering and electronic hacking. Seems like this would be pretty basic.
contravariant 5y ago
When you put it like that, that does sound like a risk I wouldn't be willing to take.
aaron695 5y ago
If you could IED a Pokemon Go site or base location and hurt or kill personnel, every soldier in the region would be told about it and it would affect their daily lives if they played the game. It would work. If you could create something to drawn them in, it would work better, but I'm not sure how the game works. Like attacking certain locations in Go to make them 'hard' to draw solders to an 'easy' IED'ed location. The Taliban are just us, they like creativity, they'd think hacking Western Pokemon Go would be cool, it would help them recruit. But, the logistics of getting for instance a McDonalds on a base also has risk. It's all risk management.
peteretep 5y ago
The US has some very technically advanced adversaries who’d happily share their data with the Taliban
- paganel 5y ago
  > who’d happily share their data with the Taliban Not the Taliban, but ISIS was very quick in adopting Google Earth/Google Maps early in their war in Syria, you could see some map screens in the videos where they used to prepare a targeted suicide bombing and such (not sure if those videos are on YT or Twitter anymore).
- vkou 5y ago
  No, they currently don't, but this is a convenient boogieman to trot out whenever you need to drum up patriotism, or to accuse your political opponents of a lack of patriotism, or demand a higher defense budget or a justification for another extension of the forever-war in the Middle East. This isn't the Soviet-Afghan war, where the US was happily and openly supporting the same mujahedeen that eventually became the Taliban. Russia and China both have significant 'problematic' Muslim minorities, and have little taste for seriously sponsoring Islamic extremism. (The US and Saudi Wahhabism, on the other hand, continue to be odd bedfellows, because, you know, we still can't get over Iran.)
squeaky-clean 5y ago
The article mentions using a hacked client to spoof your GPS location. You just need a computer that can run multiple android emulators. You could probably just make raw API calls. I'm pretty sure that's how all those pokemon-mapping websites worked for the first several months of the game's release before they removed those features from the game.
herbst 5y ago
Don't you think they have smartphones too? Why would that be weird?

stickydink 5y ago

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

throwanem 5y ago

Pretty sure the location of Bagram isn't.

ceejayoz 5y ago
A Fitbit could reveal patrol routes and timings. Something like Pokemon Go could permit dropping something rare to attract people to a sighted-in spot you'd then drop mortars on.
- throwanem 5y ago
  So could an interpreter. Also, Afghanistan has mountains and binoculars, neither of which requires guessing Air Force usernames on Strava or whatever. Not that you don't do anything you can that works in asymmetrical warfare or whatever the inside-the-beltway crowd prefers to call it these days, but it's hardly as if there's much in the way of a unique threat model here. In any case, Pokemon Go's been out since, what, 2016? No one on any side has taken the American war in Afghanistan seriously since well before then. When you're just waiting around for Americans to acknowledge the inevitable and leave, there's not all that much point in finding clever ways to blow up Americans - all that's liable to do is make Americans maybe decide to stick around longer. That doesn't necessarily make Americans playing Pokemon Go in Bagram a good idea, but it also doesn't make it a bad one, and I can think of a lot worse.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    We weren't guessing usernames, lol — these assclowns had a public map — of every user's data!!

dfsegoat 5y ago

> this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence It may be backwards. Niantic - the developer of the game, was founded by a guy who worked in "foreign affairs" for the US Govt [1]. One of his early companies was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital branch [0]. Why put boots on the ground to get street level imagery, when you can just have kids all over the world do it for you? [0] - https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and-pokmon-go.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanke

parsimo2010 5y ago

I don’t want to be too dismissive of your claims, because the sentiment is well placed- lots of apps present security concerns. But the location of every FOB and COP is/was well known to the locals. Hopefully Pokémon Go isn’t revealing the locations of more sensitive locations, but the people running clandestine operations aren’t letting E-3’s play games on a cell phone next to them. There may be other vulnerabilities but Pokemon Go isn’t too big of a problem since it only reveals where people have been congregating for a while. So it’s different than a terrorist revealing their camp’s location because Twitter geotagged a post.

Rebelgecko 5y ago

Several bases I went to in the continental US had all the gyms/pokestops disabled after the game came out. I wonder if that was intentionally not done at Bagram for morale reasons?

Thorrez 5y ago

Yeah, fitness tracking app Strava revealed a secret army base: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

akersten 5y ago
It may not be your intention, but both this and the parent comment really misplace the blame. The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base. I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.
- matsemann 5y ago
  News are terrible at that kind of writing. For instance with traffic incidents, it's always "a person getting hit by a car", not "a driver ramming their car into a person". So they write it like as if the driver had no agency, and the incident was completely non-avoidable and no one should stop to think about why it happened or how it can be prevented in the future. For good measurement they also use the word "accident" a lot. Wording matter.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "Wording matter. " It does. "a person getting hit by a car" is quite neutral. "a driver ramming their car into a person"." This sounds intentional and shifts blame to the driver.
    - 5y ago