15 ms·

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

649 points by MrDresden 7mo ago

paxys 7mo ago
Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
- nickburns 7mo ago
  Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.
  - caminante 7mo ago
    that...wasn't nice
- miningape 7mo ago
  No need to make it easier though
- dgrin91 7mo ago
  Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.
  - fuoqi 7mo ago
    For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather. I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them. [0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Sentinel-1D_delivers_first_images_from_Antarctica_to_Bremen https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
    - phire 7mo ago
      China has Huanjing [0], which is officially for "environmental monitoring", but almost certainly has enough resolution to track large ships (at least the later versions, apparently the early versions had poor resolution) And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)
  - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
    Clouds only affect a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Plenty of satellite constellations use synthetic aperture radar, for example, which can see ships regardless of cloud cover. There are gaps in revisit rates, especially over the ocean, but even that has come way down.
  - mxfh 7mo ago
    Strava tracks can also be spoofed and you have no guarantee for them to appear on a schedule either. I just find this to be on the sensationalist side of "data" journalism lacking any sort of contextualization or threat level assessment. Unless there was evidence of some more sensitive locations that have not been published along this story, it looks like some serious unserious case of journalism to me.
    - usrusr 7mo ago
      Heh, establishing an "opsec failure guy" on the boat with software on his Garmin that can be activated on days with special secrecy demands to translate his runs to a plausible fake location? I like that idea. It would actually fit a one-off like the Charles de Gaulle quite nicely!
      - mxfh 7mo ago
        They are usually called Public Affairs Officers :D
- petee 7mo ago
  I'd guess it also risks exposing a specific account as a crew member, making them trackable back on shore; particularly if you're uploading the same routes
  - alexfoo 7mo ago
    I would expect that most nations are performing some kind of surveillance like this. Finding people who serve on carriers shouldn't be difficult. That kind of information can be plastered anywhere over FB or similar. Many of their friends will also be active in similar roles. Then find associated Strava accounts. Find more friends that way. The information you can gather is useful on many fronts. Someone does a few runs a week on shore and then suddenly stops? Could be injury, could be that carrier has sailed. Have many of their "friends" who also serve there also stopped logging things on dry land? Do any of them accidentally log a run out in the open ocean? This kind of patchy unreliable information is the mainstay for old-school style espionage. Strava Labs beta "Flybys" site used to be a great source for stalkers. You could upload a GPS track (which can easily be faked in terms of both location and timestamps) and see who was running/riding/etc nearby around that same time. The outcry was enough that it was switched to being opt-in (in 2020 I think) but for a while all of the data was laid bare for people to trawl and misuse.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
  Sometimes there are things that you don't want publicly known even if they're not strictly secret.
  - blitzar 7mo ago
    Sometimes there are things that you want publicly known even if they're strictly secret.
- mmooss 7mo ago
  > Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine. At one time I guessed that too, but I've heard navy people explain that it's actually pretty effective. Imagine saying 'pretty hard to hide in North America from a satellite' - it's actually not hard because the area is so large; there aren't live images of the entire area and someone needs to examine them. Oceans are an order of magnitude larger. A significant element of security for naval ships is hiding in the ocean. US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. And remember that to target them, you need a precise target and the ships tend to be moving. With ML image recognition at least some of that security is lost. Also, the Mediterranean is smaller than the oceans, but the precision issue applies. And we might guess that countries keep critical areas under constant surveillance - e.g., I doubt anything sails near the Taiwan Strait without many countries having a live picture.
  - Jblx2 7mo ago
    >US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. pi*(500 miles)^2 = 785,400 sq. miles.
    - mmooss 7mo ago
      Of course I meant, 'within a circle of 3,142 mi circumference'. But no I didn't - how embarassing. I leapt at thinking '1,000 x pi is the operating area of an aircraft carrier - so perfect.'. 785,400 sq miles is more impressive and harder to find. That explains the downvotes!
- ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
  Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.
  - paxys 7mo ago
    Iran is being fed intelligence by Russia, so they definitely have that info.
    - ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
      okay, imagine a different example which you don't think is being fed intelligence by russia
      - nitwit005 7mo ago
        Everyone capable of damaging the ships can get that intelligence.
    - barrenko 7mo ago
      China*
  - rtkwe 7mo ago
    Anyone with a big enough checkbook can rent 12 50 centimeter resolution overflights a day from Planet Labs. Their 1.3m resolution is maybe enough to track it in decently cooperative weather given enough compute spend. https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/ https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/
- hollerith 7mo ago
  >Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Precise location, yes. At least in the US Navy this is an important part of the carrier's protection. (Having destroyers between the carrier and potential threats is another.)
- sandworm101 7mo ago
  >> 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.
  - tokai 7mo ago
    Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.
    - drnick1 7mo ago
      > Iran has their own satellites. It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.
      - rtkwe 7mo ago
        Not destroyed at least. Anything that big would show up pretty clearly, the US and other publish the orbital tracks of anything big enough to be a meaningful spy sat and it being destroyed would show up in that data.
      - tokai 7mo ago
        That is not safe to say at all. There is not reason to suspect that without any sources. Messing with satellites is a taboo approaching that of nuclear, every time someone test or mention anti-satellite capabilities it has made for international condemnation. So please don't make unlikely claims up without any evidence.
      - unselect5917 7mo ago
        Based on what? They said it would take a few days and now they're asking for $200,000,000,000.00 to continue it, because it's not going as planned and Israel is still getting hammered: https://x.com/search?q=israel%20sirens%20since%3A2026-03-19&f=top&src=typed_query https://x.com/search?q=israel%20sirens%20since%3A2026-03-19&...
- 4fterd4rk 7mo ago
  Many of the threats to a carrier aren’t nation states with a constellation of satellites.
  - snowwrestler 7mo ago
    You can buy satellite imaging. Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents know where they are.
    - Someone 7mo ago
      Commercial image providers can delay their images. See for example https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-firm-extends-middle-east-image-delay https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-...: “American firm Planet Labs PBC on Tuesday said it now imposes a two-week delay for access to its satellite images of the Middle East because of the US-Israeli war against Iran.”
      - filleduchaos 7mo ago
        Do you seriously think they were referring to commercial image providers when they mentioned nation-states being able to buy images/tracking?
        Someone 7mo ago
        Yes. https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-sensing/2025/05/19/commercial-satellite-imagery-leaders-see-increased-international-demand/ https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-sensing/2025/05/1...: “BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities. […] Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense […] Speaking to commercial imagery’s role in Ukraine, Capella Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical perspective and not just an intelligence perspective — driven by speed of access.”
- Totoradio 7mo ago
  True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- astrobe_ 7mo ago
  It's pretty hard to hide it from anything. Its surface is ~17000 m² (a tennis court is ~260 m²), and is 75 m high (~ 25 floors building - probably half of it under water, but still). And that's a mid-sized carrier according to Wikipedia. It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).
  - cosmicgadget 7mo ago
    Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.
  - chistev 7mo ago
    But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.
    - paxys 7mo ago
      You don't have to search the entire planet. A carrier's general location is always semi-public. There are websites dedicated to tracking them, just like jets. And carriers roll with an entire strike group of 8-10 ships and 5-10K personnel, which are together impossible to miss. A carrier strike group isn't meant to be stealthy. Quite the opposite. It is the ultimate tool for power projection and making a statement. If it is moving to a new region it will do so with horns blaring. Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as the news is making it out to be.
    - justsomehnguy 7mo ago
      And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.
      - cwillu 7mo ago
        The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.
- jcalx 7mo ago
  I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.) [0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1 https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1 [1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-warship-survival/ https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...
  - rtkwe 7mo ago
    It is important to note the Naval Gazing article is specifically talking about the difficulties of actually targeting a ship for a successful kill rather than just tracking it. It's in response to the idea that satellites plus missiles would mean carriers could be instantly destroyed in a first round of hostilities with a sufficiently prepared opponent. Tracking is a lot easier to do than getting data fresh and precise enough to hit the ship with no other tools (eg ships already nearby that can get a live precise track vs terminal detection and guidance on the missile itself). Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since the article was written.
    - btown 7mo ago
      It also seems worth considering that the article's view that "spending a lot of time searching for the carrier is a good way to get killed by defending fighters" is a distinctly pre-drone-ubiquity assumption. Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm their shape optically, paint them for missiles, and take the disconnection/destruction of any one of them as an indication of possible activity and automated retasking? It's a scary world to be a slow-moving vehicle, these days.
      - XorNot 7mo ago
        How cheap do you think a drone which can cover a large area of ocean actually is? And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.
- altairprime 7mo ago
  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 from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime. It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?
  - alphawhisky 7mo ago
    I'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly boarded/shot at yes.
  - loeg 7mo ago
    > It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking. > It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.
    - altairprime 7mo ago
      Oh. Duh, that’s a good point. The plane can shoot in Z-axes. Thanks.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mrguyorama 7mo ago
    >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 warning shot across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was not really.
- MikeNotThePope 7mo ago
  If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say that it's not a big deal that an adversary capable of threatening an aircraft carrier knows where it generally is. What is a big deal is knowing precisely where it is when an undetected projectile needs pinpoint accuracy moments before blowing a big hole in it.
  - reactordev 7mo ago
    It’s impossible for any projectile to come towards an aircraft carrier of the US and not be detected. Technically impossible. You’re only hope is that they don’t have CIWS turned on. A 20mm Vulkan cannon of computerized vision models pointed right at you.
    - themafia 7mo ago
      > computerized vision models The CIWS is radar guided.
      - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
        Modern ones are broad-spectrum optical.
        reactordev 7mo ago
        Let them keep thinking a radar jammer will work…
- saxonww 7mo ago
  This boils down to a security via obscurity argument. Is obscurity a useful tool? Often, yes. Should you depend on it? Definitely not. Is it annoying to lose? Yes.
- BHSPitMonkey 7mo ago
  Now imagine that adversaries maintain and monitor profiles on known military personnel with leaky online accounts such as these, supplemented with intelligence about their rank, unit, specializations, and so forth - correlating all of these pings together with known and unknown vessels, and across land. They can learn a lot more than "a big ship is there", without even necessarily having access to recent satellite imagery or other hardware.
- dkga 7mo ago
  At the very least it lowered the barriers for agents without satellite or maritime intelligence. Another piece of information extracted from the Strava episode is that the carrier is not going through a GPS-jammed location, or jamming it itself.
  - alexfoo 7mo ago
    Or it was disinformation and the carrier is/was somewhere else. Faking GPX tracks can be done in a text editor.
- bigfatkitten 7mo ago
  The number of adversaries who can track a vessel at sea live via satellite is much smaller than the number who can scrape Strava.
  - sneak 7mo ago
    Yes and furthermore what percentage of those who can scrape Strava can actually take action based on the information so obtained? Probably close to 0% would be my guess.
    - beede 7mo ago
      One-half of a percent of a million is 5000. That’s what makes “cyber” stuff so different than IRL, “every crook in his mom’s basement anywhere” is a much different threat than “every crook in your neighborhood.”
- soleveloper 7mo ago
  An intelligence satellite - which is not a super common utility nations have - will locate where the aircraft _was_ X hours ago, or at least many minutes ago. A constantly updated missile with a rather simple GPS tracker would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target.
  - themafia 7mo ago
    > would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target. There are very few attack modes which are enabled by this. The ship is a giant slow moving metallic object. You just need to get relatively close. Guidance will easily do the rest. The real problem is not seeing the instantaneous location of the ship. It's being able to draw a line on a map such that you know it's likely destination and time of arrival.
teroshan 7mo ago
https://archive.is/jDMmD https://archive.is/jDMmD
Remi_Etien 7mo ago
[flagged]
orian 7mo ago
Maybe it was just an old stupid treason? Someone against the war and… hard to believe there are no rules about location.
- Theodores 7mo ago
  Maybe it was fake. Someone with a water-borne drone and Starlink could spoof it, in order to throw those pesky Iranians off the scent. Unless you were on the aircraft carrier, had satellite imagery or could physically see it, it would be hard to prove that it was a fake. Any attempt at debunking would meet fierce resistance from Strava bros.
  - blitzar 7mo ago
    Someone with a computer sitting basically anywhere in the world could spoof it.
- giarc 7mo ago
  I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.
  - krick 7mo ago
    You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere, but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.
FridayoLeary 7mo ago
[flagged]
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  You do not put your resources in danger unless you are actually ready to commit to it. And I mean possible loss of them and then entering to much hotter war.
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    If only someone in the Oval Office was this smart.
- rcxdude 7mo ago
  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.
  - FridayoLeary 7mo ago
    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.
    - Maken 7mo ago
      How is Iran anyone but Israel and USA's problem?
mrtksn 7mo ago
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-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
jandrewrogers 7mo ago
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.
- paganel 7mo ago
  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.
  - lava_pidgeon 7mo ago
    TG ist another case. This is more a crackdown on the uncensored internet. My guess Ukrainians are also using TG without problems.
  - throwaway27448 7mo ago
    It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.
    - GJim 7mo ago
      anime?
      - barrucadu 7mo ago
        A style of animated TV show from Japan
        7mo ago
Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark. Modern militaries face some interesting challenges. Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law. Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored. Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea. Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale. B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.
josefritzishere 7mo ago
I recall something similar happened on US ships last year because of the Applewatch.
elif 7mo ago
I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea. We are not talking about stealth vehicles.
- deepsun 7mo ago
  Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    You would only need to find it once, potentially at a port, and then you can follow it.
    - matkoniecz 7mo ago
      This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.
      - SteveNuts 7mo ago
        I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?
        malfist 7mo ago
        Clouds occasionally happen
        IshKebab 7mo ago
        SAR is not blocked by clouds.
elif 7mo ago
An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles. So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.
- CGMthrowaway 7mo ago
  Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation? Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?
  - rustyhancock 7mo ago
    This isn't a novel problem. Detailed maps of military and other sensitive areas have been created through run maps from fitness watches[0]. [0] 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...
- HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago
  If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.
mlmonkey 7mo ago
It's been a problem for nearly 2 decades. Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.
toss1 7mo ago
Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards. This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location. The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs. Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone. Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up). Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.
- yunnpp 7mo ago
  > This is the modern way to die of stupidity With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if we did things correctly.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- varenc 7mo ago
  No amount of OPSEC lectures or packet inspection is going to sufficiently keep the carrier's private information private. There's thousands of sailors on these things. When details like its location and readiness level actually need to be secret, all regular internet access should just be cut off. Radio silence. I assume this person had internet access to use Strava because the carrier isn't yet in some higher level of readiness and its location isn't yet considered much of a secret.
  - JackSlateur 7mo ago
    You are correct Any system that is based on the perfection of humans is doom from the start .. A jammer is easy and very effective, you can even use it at home to piss off your neighbor, so I guess the army can do it too;
  - toss1 6mo ago
SoftTalker 7mo ago
How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not firewalling outbound traffic?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- francisofascii 7mo ago
  GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.
- NullPrefix 7mo ago
  GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this
- rtkwe 7mo ago
  Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment etc to keep morale up.
  - ninalanyon 7mo ago
    Are the sailors really such wimps that they can't go without Netflix?
    - rtkwe 7mo ago
      It's more just that peacetime navy life is extremely boring and repetitive when you're deployed at sea. If you're lucky it's mildly mentally stimulating repetitive boredom but there are people who's whole life for 6+ months at a time involves chipping paint off various pieces of the ship and applying fresh paint in the unending fight against corrosion.
ck2 7mo ago
What's funny is I can imagine the sailor not understanding how the code works and properly setting up a "privacy zone" while at port to mask his location and verifying it was working while there then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm
- mrguyorama 7mo ago
  As a coder at strava fixing this would not be hard at all. A global "Private mode" switch that sends zero data about anything at all while it is enabled. Your runs stay on device. All network calls are rejected. No data saved with it enabled will ever leave the device, full stop. Every single app in the world should have this. It should be an OS setting that forces network calls to fail as well as part of the app review process that no data generated during a private session can ever leave the device. They don't do that because they like your data for money.
  - ck2 7mo ago
    you can do that "offline" with any regular Garmin but once you start using the Strava app the point is socializing activity, otherwise why bother? Strava privacy zones actually work, well as long as the location isn't physically moving by itself, lol hope the sailor didn't get into too much trouble if it was innocent enough
adolph 7mo ago
Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink: As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, that it is hard to believe. https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-installing-starlink-on-their-littoral-combat-ship-is-truly-bonkers https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-instal...
- ninalanyon 7mo ago
  Was anyone disrated for that quite blatant disregard for naval discipline?
  - adolph 6mo ago
    Yes, from the article: The chief who set up the WiFi network, dubbed “STINKY,” definitely knew better. Then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero’s “background is in Navy intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management, according to her biography,” Navy Times noted. She was later convicted at court-martial earlier this year on charges related to the scheme. For people who are unaware, "STINKY" was the default wifi ssid for at least a time. [0] It is a very distinct ssid, which plays into the discovery of the illicit Starlink: [1] Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking questions about it. Some of these questions came to Marrero directly, but she denied knowing anything about the network… and then privately changed its Wi-Fi name to “another moniker that looked like a wireless printer—even though no such general-use wireless printers were present on the ship, the investigation found.” 0. https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/did-your-starlink-just-become-stinky/ https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/did-your-starlink-just-beco... 1. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/sailors-hid-an-unauthorized-starlink-on-the-deck-of-a-us-warship-and-lied-about-it/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/sailors-hid-an-unau...
helsinkiandrew 7mo ago
Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction. That would really screw up your Strava stats
- swarnie 7mo ago
  Reminds me of Fitbit using heartrate to approximately guess calories used. I'm told with a lengthy night on uppers can you can get your 24/hr burn up to the 7000-10000.
  - fenykep 7mo ago
    I was doing support for a fitness data aggregator where a partner reported an issue: a user logging 15k+ steps between 9pm and 4am with minimal location delta. Sadly I wasn't able to push a "stay hydrated" notification over our system to the user.
- yread 7mo ago
  His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he is running faster than they are carrier. I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles
  - anonu 7mo ago
    He's running laps while the ship is moving. The little circles is him backtracking against the direction of the ship. It seems to me the ship is just going in a straight line.
    - emilburzo 7mo ago
      Yep, that looks like a paraglider circling in a thermal while being drifted due the wind. Random tracklog example: https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:mattmozza/21.03.2026/00:21 https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:mattmozza/2... (zoom in until you see circles on the track line)
Yanko_11 7mo ago
[dead]
B1FF_PSUVM 7mo ago
Those LeMonde guys are pretty sharp, it was on Twitcher only yesterday ... https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740 https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740
francisofascii 7mo ago
It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"
PeterStuer 7mo ago
Many questions: I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent? Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures? Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration? Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?
- philipwhiuk 7mo ago
  > I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent? Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track. I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.
  - PeterStuer 7mo ago
    So how did the carriers network not block Strava? I doubt the sailors watch was direct to satellite. And why would a Le Monde 'journalist' dox his 'buddy' and expose and thus endanger the ship? Anything for a click?
    - philipwhiuk 7mo ago
      > So how did the carriers network not block Strava? I'm sure someone in the tech team is getting questioned on this.
  - loeg 7mo ago
    Surely the GPDR does not prevent users from consenting to share their data with a public audience.
    - philipwhiuk 7mo ago
      It doesn't, but the effect of gaining consent and being opt-in vastly reduced the data. Strava also made it (in 2019) so you'd need at least N samples for it to be visible rather than simply a single user.
rozab 7mo ago
All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off. Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?
dummytrial1212 7mo ago
[flagged]
EGreg 7mo ago
That's nothing, we also have this: https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker
Einenlum 7mo ago
Some people here say an aircraft carrier can be seen from satellites so it's not a big deal. They miss a point (as I did too): this means you can identify individuals present on the carrier, so they become vulnerable to investigation and blackmail. Another country could threaten this individual's family to give some important information or worse (sabotage).
dummytrial1212 7mo ago
[flagged]
dummytrial1212 7mo ago
[flagged]
largbae 7mo ago
This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land. Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore thumb).
dummytrial12133 7mo ago
[flagged]
kylehotchkiss 7mo ago
If I were china I would buy strata and offer all features free of charge
qcautomation 7mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- ccmcarey 7mo ago
  AI slop
- cataflam 7mo ago
  Your AI powered comment is wrong. Le monde has been doing this for years. They have a series of articles about this. There is no "gap closing."
yawpitch 7mo ago
Merde!
heyitsmedotjayb 7mo ago
President Xi - my country yearns for freedom.
nanoparticle 7mo ago
About 3 years ago, a former russian submarine commander accused of a missile attack in Ukraine that killed 23 civilians, was shot and killed, apparently after his route was tracked via Strava https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-commander-killed-krasnador-intl https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-... https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness-app/ https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness...
- applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
  Crazy to die because you used a jogging app. Really goes to show the value of privacy. And, you know, not committing war crimes that would make people want to hunt you down and kill you. Either or.
  - DaedalusII 7mo ago
    I have to call out this disingenuous mob like language which is basically saying "because this person served in the military of a UN Security Council member, it is justifiable to murder them in the street years into their retirement" how is a submarine commander committing war crimes? by the same way of thinking, it would be completely justified for people from many countries to show up at random US service members houses and shoot them in the street , or perhaps attack their embassies, commit suicide bombings...
    - applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
      You're so close to getting it! It turns out that terrorists don't hate Americans because they're jealous of the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world, they hate Americans because Americans commit crimes against their people. I said nothing about whether it was justified, simply noted the state of reality in which you should probably avoid doing harmful things to others if you would like to not motivate them to harm you in return. Americans would absolutely benefit from doing fewer things to harm other countries if they would like to be targeted by fewer terrorists.
    - 7mo ago
llsf 7mo ago
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...
- fnord77 7mo ago
  No, this is notoriously difficult. The earth is vast and a carrier is tiny in comparison.
  - boxingdog 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - Aperocky 7mo ago
    Difficult 40 years ago maybe. I can't imagine with the satellite image and compute we have it would be difficult at all to know the real_time +- 30min location of any carrier by maybe the top 5-10 states, even at night.
  - llsf 7mo ago
    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.
- system2 7mo ago
  Sub wouldn't get a GPS signal, luckily.
RiskScore 7mo ago
I wonder if there is a way to stop these apps when they enter the vessel.
- louthy 7mo ago
  Take their phones off them, turn them off, and place them in a faraday cage. It really is the only completely safe way of operating.
Padriac 7mo ago
That's the deception plan.
todsopon 7mo ago
wow amazing
ryguz 7mo ago
[flagged]
louthy 7mo ago
Loose lips sinks ships. So does uncontrolled mobile phone access. It just doesn’t rhyme as well.
- pokstad 7mo ago
  Seems like the phone was using some internet access point hosted on the ship? In which case, the French naval IT services should ban certain risky services to soldiers.
- dsjoerg 7mo ago
  it's mind boggling. personal mobile phones have potentially anyone's software running on them and that can connect to the internet means that literally anyone could be tracking and gathering who knows what data from your operation. it's an indication of the greatest unseriousness.
  - dsjoerg 7mo ago
    the location of the ship of course is not secret. but there is finer grained data about the people, the devices and what they're doing that could be gathered. and inferences made from that data. i would only allow this data to leak out if i could somehow use it to deceive my enemy.
igonvalue 7mo ago
Tangential but related: Do these workout apps correct for the movement of the ship when tracking your runs? I imagine it's a borderline-common scenario that someone on a cruise ship goes for a jog on deck?
thr0w__4w4y 7mo ago
Sarah Adams (ex-CIA, The Watchfloor podcast) literally discussed this possibility yesterday in a podcast titled "Your Phone Isn't Safe Right Now" Most people here are tech savvy and understand VPNs, location sharing in apps, privacy agreeements, metadata in shared/posted JPEG files, etc but the episode I mentioned is like 20 minutes & provides maybe 100 different things you can do to reduce your footprint & increase your security while traveling abroad. According to her, the biggest threats were fitness apps & dating apps (both of which are mentioned heavily here in the comments)
m463 7mo ago
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.
- ninalanyon 7mo ago
  If the military need mobile phones then surely the base budget would stretch to a few thousand Nokia 105s? After all they are only about 10 USD each. How were such situations managed before 1990?
dualblocksgame 7mo ago
[flagged]
olavostauros 7mo ago
tragic if not comic.
thehumanmeat 7mo ago
Same thing happened with hidden Antarctica bases in 2018.
chris_money202 7mo ago
I'm surprised this has been on front page of HN all day. As others said, its a surface boat, you could just follow it with a plane, ship, or submarine. If someone knows where it is, everyone does. Would be more concerning if it was a submarine that was able to be tracked.
- corentin88 7mo ago
  The aircraft career has a submarine and other ships to defend him. So they are all at risk.
  - chris_money202 7mo ago
    The carrier moves with that group though for the exact reason this story isnt a big deal. They are slow and very visible so they need other ships to defend them
- tgv 7mo ago
  Think resources. For most countries, the position of that particular ship isn't interesting during 99.99% of the time. If you can locate it easily du moment your interest is piqued, you can dedicate the resources needed to track it continuously elsewhere.
suriyaai2026 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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klawed 7mo ago
How hard is it to find an aircraft carrier without resorting to this? Not saying there’s no privacy leak here but aircraft carriers are not exactly stealthy…
- Eisenstein 7mo ago
  I think the issue is that it tracks it in real time so it can be used for targeting.
delis-thumbs-7e 7mo ago
This is always Strava isn’t it? Was it Finnish security services that leaked the exacti location of the president because some of them wanted to share their runs? Why don’t militaries and security services just ban it?
- Schiendelman 7mo ago
  They do ban it. Humans ignore bans. They'd need a comprehensive device restriction - and then they'd somehow have to keep soldiers from keeping a second phone around.
- ninalanyon 7mo ago
  It's not the service that should be banned but the hardware that connects to it. No active duty military personell should be using personal devices nor should they be able to install anything on the devices provided for them.
- etskinner 7mo ago
  Strava just happens to be the most popular run tracking app. If they banned it, another would take its place. If anything, they should be working with Strava to create an incognito mode. At this point, the US military should be willing to spend millions of dollars supporting that one feature
INTPenis 7mo ago
A year ago they found where Swedish politicians were through the Strava apps of their bodyguards. Clearly we're not learning from our mistakes...
BenGosub 7mo ago
I don't understand, why is it hard to track or find such a large ship?
daliliu 7mo ago
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notepad0x90 7mo ago
I am more surprised at the concept of something the size of aircraft carrier being expected to have some level of location privacy. I would think the general area of the world it's operating at could be deduced easily from its last port of call and other things, a cheap amateur home-made radar can have a general idea within a few sq-km resolution by pinging from any littoral up to a few hundred km. I would also have thought, anyone that would care about targeting an aircraft carrier that's at a greater distance away from a coast would also have access to satellite imagery and high-altitude UAV. I have seen more concerning things being revealed like locations of secret bases, and even internal building maps by looking at troops' WiFi. but those are secret places.
fnordfnordfnord 7mo ago
They're huge. Also, it's never a secret where they're being sent. That's the whole point of an aircraft carrier.
jwsteigerwalt 7mo ago
I disagree with the characterization that this is a security flaw unaddressed by Strava. Does anyone (French military in this case) really want Strava to be responsible to decide if the data is from a sailor on a military ship vs. a tourist on a cruise ship. Its operational security and the French military alone is responsible for polices and processes that maintain its security. The idea that the public profile is the problem is ludicrous. The French military should have a problem with any geolocation data about its deployed sailors ever leaving its own networks.
23david 7mo ago
So many astroturf comments here.. the moderation here is out of control terrible :/
scm7k 7mo ago
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pugchat 7mo ago
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649 points by MrDresden 7mo ago

paxys 7mo ago

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

nickburns 7mo ago
Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.
- caminante 7mo ago
  that...wasn't nice
miningape 7mo ago
No need to make it easier though
dgrin91 7mo ago
Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.
- fuoqi 7mo ago
  For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather. I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them. [0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Sentinel-1D_delivers_first_images_from_Antarctica_to_Bremen https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
  - phire 7mo ago
    China has Huanjing [0], which is officially for "environmental monitoring", but almost certainly has enough resolution to track large ships (at least the later versions, apparently the early versions had poor resolution) And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)
- jandrewrogers 7mo ago
  Clouds only affect a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Plenty of satellite constellations use synthetic aperture radar, for example, which can see ships regardless of cloud cover. There are gaps in revisit rates, especially over the ocean, but even that has come way down.
- mxfh 7mo ago
  Strava tracks can also be spoofed and you have no guarantee for them to appear on a schedule either. I just find this to be on the sensationalist side of "data" journalism lacking any sort of contextualization or threat level assessment. Unless there was evidence of some more sensitive locations that have not been published along this story, it looks like some serious unserious case of journalism to me.
  - usrusr 7mo ago
    Heh, establishing an "opsec failure guy" on the boat with software on his Garmin that can be activated on days with special secrecy demands to translate his runs to a plausible fake location? I like that idea. It would actually fit a one-off like the Charles de Gaulle quite nicely!
    - mxfh 7mo ago
      They are usually called Public Affairs Officers :D
petee 7mo ago
I'd guess it also risks exposing a specific account as a crew member, making them trackable back on shore; particularly if you're uploading the same routes
- alexfoo 7mo ago
  I would expect that most nations are performing some kind of surveillance like this. Finding people who serve on carriers shouldn't be difficult. That kind of information can be plastered anywhere over FB or similar. Many of their friends will also be active in similar roles. Then find associated Strava accounts. Find more friends that way. The information you can gather is useful on many fronts. Someone does a few runs a week on shore and then suddenly stops? Could be injury, could be that carrier has sailed. Have many of their "friends" who also serve there also stopped logging things on dry land? Do any of them accidentally log a run out in the open ocean? This kind of patchy unreliable information is the mainstay for old-school style espionage. Strava Labs beta "Flybys" site used to be a great source for stalkers. You could upload a GPS track (which can easily be faked in terms of both location and timestamps) and see who was running/riding/etc nearby around that same time. The outcry was enough that it was switched to being opt-in (in 2020 I think) but for a while all of the data was laid bare for people to trawl and misuse.
NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
Sometimes there are things that you don't want publicly known even if they're not strictly secret.
- blitzar 7mo ago
  Sometimes there are things that you want publicly known even if they're strictly secret.
mmooss 7mo ago
> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine. At one time I guessed that too, but I've heard navy people explain that it's actually pretty effective. Imagine saying 'pretty hard to hide in North America from a satellite' - it's actually not hard because the area is so large; there aren't live images of the entire area and someone needs to examine them. Oceans are an order of magnitude larger. A significant element of security for naval ships is hiding in the ocean. US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. And remember that to target them, you need a precise target and the ships tend to be moving. With ML image recognition at least some of that security is lost. Also, the Mediterranean is smaller than the oceans, but the precision issue applies. And we might guess that countries keep critical areas under constant surveillance - e.g., I doubt anything sails near the Taiwan Strait without many countries having a live picture.
- Jblx2 7mo ago
  >US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. pi*(500 miles)^2 = 785,400 sq. miles.
  - mmooss 7mo ago
    Of course I meant, 'within a circle of 3,142 mi circumference'. But no I didn't - how embarassing. I leapt at thinking '1,000 x pi is the operating area of an aircraft carrier - so perfect.'. 785,400 sq miles is more impressive and harder to find. That explains the downvotes!
ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.
- paxys 7mo ago
  Iran is being fed intelligence by Russia, so they definitely have that info.
  - ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
    okay, imagine a different example which you don't think is being fed intelligence by russia
    - nitwit005 7mo ago
      Everyone capable of damaging the ships can get that intelligence.
  - barrenko 7mo ago
    China*
- rtkwe 7mo ago
  Anyone with a big enough checkbook can rent 12 50 centimeter resolution overflights a day from Planet Labs. Their 1.3m resolution is maybe enough to track it in decently cooperative weather given enough compute spend. https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/ https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/
hollerith 7mo ago
>Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Precise location, yes. At least in the US Navy this is an important part of the carrier's protection. (Having destroyers between the carrier and potential threats is another.)
sandworm101 7mo ago
>> 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.
- tokai 7mo ago
  Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.
  - drnick1 7mo ago
    > Iran has their own satellites. It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.
    - rtkwe 7mo ago
      Not destroyed at least. Anything that big would show up pretty clearly, the US and other publish the orbital tracks of anything big enough to be a meaningful spy sat and it being destroyed would show up in that data.
    - tokai 7mo ago
      That is not safe to say at all. There is not reason to suspect that without any sources. Messing with satellites is a taboo approaching that of nuclear, every time someone test or mention anti-satellite capabilities it has made for international condemnation. So please don't make unlikely claims up without any evidence.
    - unselect5917 7mo ago
      Based on what? They said it would take a few days and now they're asking for $200,000,000,000.00 to continue it, because it's not going as planned and Israel is still getting hammered: https://x.com/search?q=israel%20sirens%20since%3A2026-03-19&f=top&src=typed_query https://x.com/search?q=israel%20sirens%20since%3A2026-03-19&...
4fterd4rk 7mo ago
Many of the threats to a carrier aren’t nation states with a constellation of satellites.
- snowwrestler 7mo ago
  You can buy satellite imaging. Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents know where they are.
  - Someone 7mo ago
    Commercial image providers can delay their images. See for example https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-firm-extends-middle-east-image-delay https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-...: “American firm Planet Labs PBC on Tuesday said it now imposes a two-week delay for access to its satellite images of the Middle East because of the US-Israeli war against Iran.”
    - filleduchaos 7mo ago
      Do you seriously think they were referring to commercial image providers when they mentioned nation-states being able to buy images/tracking?
      - Someone 7mo ago
        Yes. https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-sensing/2025/05/19/commercial-satellite-imagery-leaders-see-increased-international-demand/ https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-sensing/2025/05/1...: “BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities. […] Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense […] Speaking to commercial imagery’s role in Ukraine, Capella Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical perspective and not just an intelligence perspective — driven by speed of access.”
Totoradio 7mo ago
True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
astrobe_ 7mo ago
It's pretty hard to hide it from anything. Its surface is ~17000 m² (a tennis court is ~260 m²), and is 75 m high (~ 25 floors building - probably half of it under water, but still). And that's a mid-sized carrier according to Wikipedia. It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).
- cosmicgadget 7mo ago
  Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.
- chistev 7mo ago
  But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.
  - paxys 7mo ago
    You don't have to search the entire planet. A carrier's general location is always semi-public. There are websites dedicated to tracking them, just like jets. And carriers roll with an entire strike group of 8-10 ships and 5-10K personnel, which are together impossible to miss. A carrier strike group isn't meant to be stealthy. Quite the opposite. It is the ultimate tool for power projection and making a statement. If it is moving to a new region it will do so with horns blaring. Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as the news is making it out to be.
  - justsomehnguy 7mo ago
    And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.
    - cwillu 7mo ago
      The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.
jcalx 7mo ago
I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.) [0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1 https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1 [1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-warship-survival/ https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...
- rtkwe 7mo ago
  It is important to note the Naval Gazing article is specifically talking about the difficulties of actually targeting a ship for a successful kill rather than just tracking it. It's in response to the idea that satellites plus missiles would mean carriers could be instantly destroyed in a first round of hostilities with a sufficiently prepared opponent. Tracking is a lot easier to do than getting data fresh and precise enough to hit the ship with no other tools (eg ships already nearby that can get a live precise track vs terminal detection and guidance on the missile itself). Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since the article was written.
  - btown 7mo ago
    It also seems worth considering that the article's view that "spending a lot of time searching for the carrier is a good way to get killed by defending fighters" is a distinctly pre-drone-ubiquity assumption. Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm their shape optically, paint them for missiles, and take the disconnection/destruction of any one of them as an indication of possible activity and automated retasking? It's a scary world to be a slow-moving vehicle, these days.
    - XorNot 7mo ago
      How cheap do you think a drone which can cover a large area of ocean actually is? And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.
altairprime 7mo ago
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 from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime. It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?
- alphawhisky 7mo ago
  I'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly boarded/shot at yes.
- loeg 7mo ago
  > It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking. > It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.
  - altairprime 7mo ago
    Oh. Duh, that’s a good point. The plane can shoot in Z-axes. Thanks.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- mrguyorama 7mo ago
  >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 warning shot across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was not really.
MikeNotThePope 7mo ago
If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say that it's not a big deal that an adversary capable of threatening an aircraft carrier knows where it generally is. What is a big deal is knowing precisely where it is when an undetected projectile needs pinpoint accuracy moments before blowing a big hole in it.
- reactordev 7mo ago
  It’s impossible for any projectile to come towards an aircraft carrier of the US and not be detected. Technically impossible. You’re only hope is that they don’t have CIWS turned on. A 20mm Vulkan cannon of computerized vision models pointed right at you.
  - themafia 7mo ago
    > computerized vision models The CIWS is radar guided.
    - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
      Modern ones are broad-spectrum optical.
      - reactordev 7mo ago
        Let them keep thinking a radar jammer will work…
saxonww 7mo ago
This boils down to a security via obscurity argument. Is obscurity a useful tool? Often, yes. Should you depend on it? Definitely not. Is it annoying to lose? Yes.
BHSPitMonkey 7mo ago
Now imagine that adversaries maintain and monitor profiles on known military personnel with leaky online accounts such as these, supplemented with intelligence about their rank, unit, specializations, and so forth - correlating all of these pings together with known and unknown vessels, and across land. They can learn a lot more than "a big ship is there", without even necessarily having access to recent satellite imagery or other hardware.
dkga 7mo ago
At the very least it lowered the barriers for agents without satellite or maritime intelligence. Another piece of information extracted from the Strava episode is that the carrier is not going through a GPS-jammed location, or jamming it itself.
- alexfoo 7mo ago
  Or it was disinformation and the carrier is/was somewhere else. Faking GPX tracks can be done in a text editor.
bigfatkitten 7mo ago
The number of adversaries who can track a vessel at sea live via satellite is much smaller than the number who can scrape Strava.
- sneak 7mo ago
  Yes and furthermore what percentage of those who can scrape Strava can actually take action based on the information so obtained? Probably close to 0% would be my guess.
  - beede 7mo ago
    One-half of a percent of a million is 5000. That’s what makes “cyber” stuff so different than IRL, “every crook in his mom’s basement anywhere” is a much different threat than “every crook in your neighborhood.”
soleveloper 7mo ago
An intelligence satellite - which is not a super common utility nations have - will locate where the aircraft _was_ X hours ago, or at least many minutes ago. A constantly updated missile with a rather simple GPS tracker would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target.
- themafia 7mo ago
  > would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target. There are very few attack modes which are enabled by this. The ship is a giant slow moving metallic object. You just need to get relatively close. Guidance will easily do the rest. The real problem is not seeing the instantaneous location of the ship. It's being able to draw a line on a map such that you know it's likely destination and time of arrival.

teroshan 7mo ago

https://archive.is/jDMmD https://archive.is/jDMmD

Remi_Etien 7mo ago

[flagged]

orian 7mo ago

Maybe it was just an old stupid treason? Someone against the war and… hard to believe there are no rules about location.

Theodores 7mo ago
Maybe it was fake. Someone with a water-borne drone and Starlink could spoof it, in order to throw those pesky Iranians off the scent. Unless you were on the aircraft carrier, had satellite imagery or could physically see it, it would be hard to prove that it was a fake. Any attempt at debunking would meet fierce resistance from Strava bros.
- blitzar 7mo ago
  Someone with a computer sitting basically anywhere in the world could spoof it.
giarc 7mo ago
I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.
- krick 7mo ago
  You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere, but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.

FridayoLeary 7mo ago

[flagged]

Ekaros 7mo ago
You do not put your resources in danger unless you are actually ready to commit to it. And I mean possible loss of them and then entering to much hotter war.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  If only someone in the Oval Office was this smart.
rcxdude 7mo ago
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.
- FridayoLeary 7mo ago
  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.
  - Maken 7mo ago
    How is Iran anyone but Israel and USA's problem?

mrtksn 7mo ago

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

jandrewrogers 7mo ago

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.

paganel 7mo ago
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.
- lava_pidgeon 7mo ago
  TG ist another case. This is more a crackdown on the uncensored internet. My guess Ukrainians are also using TG without problems.
- throwaway27448 7mo ago
  It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.
  - GJim 7mo ago
    anime?
    - barrucadu 7mo ago
      A style of animated TV show from Japan
      - 7mo ago

Kim_Bruning 7mo ago

More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark. Modern militaries face some interesting challenges. Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law. Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored. Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea. Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale. B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.

josefritzishere 7mo ago

I recall something similar happened on US ships last year because of the Applewatch.

elif 7mo ago

I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea. We are not talking about stealth vehicles.

deepsun 7mo ago
Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  You would only need to find it once, potentially at a port, and then you can follow it.
  - matkoniecz 7mo ago
    This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.
    - SteveNuts 7mo ago
      I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?
      - malfist 7mo ago
        Clouds occasionally happen
        IshKebab 7mo ago
        SAR is not blocked by clouds.

elif 7mo ago

An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles. So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.

CGMthrowaway 7mo ago
Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation? Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?
- rustyhancock 7mo ago
  This isn't a novel problem. Detailed maps of military and other sensitive areas have been created through run maps from fitness watches[0]. [0] 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...
HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago
If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.

mlmonkey 7mo ago

It's been a problem for nearly 2 decades. Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.

toss1 7mo ago

Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards. This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location. The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs. Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone. Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up). Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.

yunnpp 7mo ago
> This is the modern way to die of stupidity With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if we did things correctly.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
varenc 7mo ago
No amount of OPSEC lectures or packet inspection is going to sufficiently keep the carrier's private information private. There's thousands of sailors on these things. When details like its location and readiness level actually need to be secret, all regular internet access should just be cut off. Radio silence. I assume this person had internet access to use Strava because the carrier isn't yet in some higher level of readiness and its location isn't yet considered much of a secret.
- JackSlateur 7mo ago
  You are correct Any system that is based on the perfection of humans is doom from the start .. A jammer is easy and very effective, you can even use it at home to piss off your neighbor, so I guess the army can do it too;
- toss1 6mo ago

SoftTalker 7mo ago

How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not firewalling outbound traffic?

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
francisofascii 7mo ago
GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.
NullPrefix 7mo ago
GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this
rtkwe 7mo ago
Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment etc to keep morale up.
- ninalanyon 7mo ago
  Are the sailors really such wimps that they can't go without Netflix?
  - rtkwe 7mo ago
    It's more just that peacetime navy life is extremely boring and repetitive when you're deployed at sea. If you're lucky it's mildly mentally stimulating repetitive boredom but there are people who's whole life for 6+ months at a time involves chipping paint off various pieces of the ship and applying fresh paint in the unending fight against corrosion.

ck2 7mo ago

What's funny is I can imagine the sailor not understanding how the code works and properly setting up a "privacy zone" while at port to mask his location and verifying it was working while there then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm

mrguyorama 7mo ago
As a coder at strava fixing this would not be hard at all. A global "Private mode" switch that sends zero data about anything at all while it is enabled. Your runs stay on device. All network calls are rejected. No data saved with it enabled will ever leave the device, full stop. Every single app in the world should have this. It should be an OS setting that forces network calls to fail as well as part of the app review process that no data generated during a private session can ever leave the device. They don't do that because they like your data for money.
- ck2 7mo ago
  you can do that "offline" with any regular Garmin but once you start using the Strava app the point is socializing activity, otherwise why bother? Strava privacy zones actually work, well as long as the location isn't physically moving by itself, lol hope the sailor didn't get into too much trouble if it was innocent enough

adolph 7mo ago

Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink: As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, that it is hard to believe. https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-installing-starlink-on-their-littoral-combat-ship-is-truly-bonkers https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-instal...

ninalanyon 7mo ago
Was anyone disrated for that quite blatant disregard for naval discipline?
- adolph 6mo ago
  Yes, from the article: The chief who set up the WiFi network, dubbed “STINKY,” definitely knew better. Then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero’s “background is in Navy intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management, according to her biography,” Navy Times noted. She was later convicted at court-martial earlier this year on charges related to the scheme. For people who are unaware, "STINKY" was the default wifi ssid for at least a time. [0] It is a very distinct ssid, which plays into the discovery of the illicit Starlink: [1] Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking questions about it. Some of these questions came to Marrero directly, but she denied knowing anything about the network… and then privately changed its Wi-Fi name to “another moniker that looked like a wireless printer—even though no such general-use wireless printers were present on the ship, the investigation found.” 0. https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/did-your-starlink-just-become-stinky/ https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/did-your-starlink-just-beco... 1. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/sailors-hid-an-unauthorized-starlink-on-the-deck-of-a-us-warship-and-lied-about-it/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/sailors-hid-an-unau...

helsinkiandrew 7mo ago

Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction. That would really screw up your Strava stats

swarnie 7mo ago
Reminds me of Fitbit using heartrate to approximately guess calories used. I'm told with a lengthy night on uppers can you can get your 24/hr burn up to the 7000-10000.
- fenykep 7mo ago
  I was doing support for a fitness data aggregator where a partner reported an issue: a user logging 15k+ steps between 9pm and 4am with minimal location delta. Sadly I wasn't able to push a "stay hydrated" notification over our system to the user.
yread 7mo ago
His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he is running faster than they are carrier. I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles
- anonu 7mo ago
  He's running laps while the ship is moving. The little circles is him backtracking against the direction of the ship. It seems to me the ship is just going in a straight line.
  - emilburzo 7mo ago
    Yep, that looks like a paraglider circling in a thermal while being drifted due the wind. Random tracklog example: https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:mattmozza/21.03.2026/00:21 https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:mattmozza/2... (zoom in until you see circles on the track line)

Yanko_11 7mo ago

[dead]

B1FF_PSUVM 7mo ago

Those LeMonde guys are pretty sharp, it was on Twitcher only yesterday ... https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740 https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740

francisofascii 7mo ago

It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"

PeterStuer 7mo ago

Many questions: I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent? Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures? Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration? Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?

philipwhiuk 7mo ago
> I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent? Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track. I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.
- PeterStuer 7mo ago
  So how did the carriers network not block Strava? I doubt the sailors watch was direct to satellite. And why would a Le Monde 'journalist' dox his 'buddy' and expose and thus endanger the ship? Anything for a click?
  - philipwhiuk 7mo ago
    > So how did the carriers network not block Strava? I'm sure someone in the tech team is getting questioned on this.
- loeg 7mo ago
  Surely the GPDR does not prevent users from consenting to share their data with a public audience.
  - philipwhiuk 7mo ago
    It doesn't, but the effect of gaining consent and being opt-in vastly reduced the data. Strava also made it (in 2019) so you'd need at least N samples for it to be visible rather than simply a single user.

rozab 7mo ago

All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off. Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?

dummytrial1212 7mo ago

[flagged]

EGreg 7mo ago

That's nothing, we also have this: https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker

Einenlum 7mo ago

Some people here say an aircraft carrier can be seen from satellites so it's not a big deal. They miss a point (as I did too): this means you can identify individuals present on the carrier, so they become vulnerable to investigation and blackmail. Another country could threaten this individual's family to give some important information or worse (sabotage).

dummytrial1212 7mo ago

[flagged]

dummytrial1212 7mo ago

[flagged]

largbae 7mo ago

This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land. Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore thumb).

dummytrial12133 7mo ago

[flagged]

kylehotchkiss 7mo ago

If I were china I would buy strata and offer all features free of charge

qcautomation 7mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ccmcarey 7mo ago
AI slop
cataflam 7mo ago
Your AI powered comment is wrong. Le monde has been doing this for years. They have a series of articles about this. There is no "gap closing."

yawpitch 7mo ago

Merde!

heyitsmedotjayb 7mo ago

President Xi - my country yearns for freedom.

nanoparticle 7mo ago

About 3 years ago, a former russian submarine commander accused of a missile attack in Ukraine that killed 23 civilians, was shot and killed, apparently after his route was tracked via Strava https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-commander-killed-krasnador-intl https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-... https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness-app/ https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness...

applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
Crazy to die because you used a jogging app. Really goes to show the value of privacy. And, you know, not committing war crimes that would make people want to hunt you down and kill you. Either or.
- DaedalusII 7mo ago
  I have to call out this disingenuous mob like language which is basically saying "because this person served in the military of a UN Security Council member, it is justifiable to murder them in the street years into their retirement" how is a submarine commander committing war crimes? by the same way of thinking, it would be completely justified for people from many countries to show up at random US service members houses and shoot them in the street , or perhaps attack their embassies, commit suicide bombings...
  - applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
    You're so close to getting it! It turns out that terrorists don't hate Americans because they're jealous of the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world, they hate Americans because Americans commit crimes against their people. I said nothing about whether it was justified, simply noted the state of reality in which you should probably avoid doing harmful things to others if you would like to not motivate them to harm you in return. Americans would absolutely benefit from doing fewer things to harm other countries if they would like to be targeted by fewer terrorists.
  - 7mo ago

llsf 7mo ago

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...

fnord77 7mo ago
No, this is notoriously difficult. The earth is vast and a carrier is tiny in comparison.
- boxingdog 7mo ago
  [dead]
- Aperocky 7mo ago
  Difficult 40 years ago maybe. I can't imagine with the satellite image and compute we have it would be difficult at all to know the real_time +- 30min location of any carrier by maybe the top 5-10 states, even at night.
- llsf 7mo ago
  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.
system2 7mo ago
Sub wouldn't get a GPS signal, luckily.

RiskScore 7mo ago

I wonder if there is a way to stop these apps when they enter the vessel.

louthy 7mo ago
Take their phones off them, turn them off, and place them in a faraday cage. It really is the only completely safe way of operating.

Padriac 7mo ago

That's the deception plan.

todsopon 7mo ago

wow amazing

ryguz 7mo ago

[flagged]

louthy 7mo ago

Loose lips sinks ships. So does uncontrolled mobile phone access. It just doesn’t rhyme as well.

pokstad 7mo ago
Seems like the phone was using some internet access point hosted on the ship? In which case, the French naval IT services should ban certain risky services to soldiers.
dsjoerg 7mo ago
it's mind boggling. personal mobile phones have potentially anyone's software running on them and that can connect to the internet means that literally anyone could be tracking and gathering who knows what data from your operation. it's an indication of the greatest unseriousness.
- dsjoerg 7mo ago
  the location of the ship of course is not secret. but there is finer grained data about the people, the devices and what they're doing that could be gathered. and inferences made from that data. i would only allow this data to leak out if i could somehow use it to deceive my enemy.

igonvalue 7mo ago

Tangential but related: Do these workout apps correct for the movement of the ship when tracking your runs? I imagine it's a borderline-common scenario that someone on a cruise ship goes for a jog on deck?

thr0w__4w4y 7mo ago

Sarah Adams (ex-CIA, The Watchfloor podcast) literally discussed this possibility yesterday in a podcast titled "Your Phone Isn't Safe Right Now" Most people here are tech savvy and understand VPNs, location sharing in apps, privacy agreeements, metadata in shared/posted JPEG files, etc but the episode I mentioned is like 20 minutes & provides maybe 100 different things you can do to reduce your footprint & increase your security while traveling abroad. According to her, the biggest threats were fitness apps & dating apps (both of which are mentioned heavily here in the comments)

m463 7mo ago

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.

ninalanyon 7mo ago
If the military need mobile phones then surely the base budget would stretch to a few thousand Nokia 105s? After all they are only about 10 USD each. How were such situations managed before 1990?

dualblocksgame 7mo ago

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olavostauros 7mo ago

tragic if not comic.

thehumanmeat 7mo ago

Same thing happened with hidden Antarctica bases in 2018.

chris_money202 7mo ago

I'm surprised this has been on front page of HN all day. As others said, its a surface boat, you could just follow it with a plane, ship, or submarine. If someone knows where it is, everyone does. Would be more concerning if it was a submarine that was able to be tracked.

corentin88 7mo ago
The aircraft career has a submarine and other ships to defend him. So they are all at risk.
- chris_money202 7mo ago
  The carrier moves with that group though for the exact reason this story isnt a big deal. They are slow and very visible so they need other ships to defend them
tgv 7mo ago
Think resources. For most countries, the position of that particular ship isn't interesting during 99.99% of the time. If you can locate it easily du moment your interest is piqued, you can dedicate the resources needed to track it continuously elsewhere.

suriyaai2026 7mo ago

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deleted 7mo ago

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klawed 7mo ago

How hard is it to find an aircraft carrier without resorting to this? Not saying there’s no privacy leak here but aircraft carriers are not exactly stealthy…

Eisenstein 7mo ago
I think the issue is that it tracks it in real time so it can be used for targeting.

delis-thumbs-7e 7mo ago

This is always Strava isn’t it? Was it Finnish security services that leaked the exacti location of the president because some of them wanted to share their runs? Why don’t militaries and security services just ban it?

Schiendelman 7mo ago
They do ban it. Humans ignore bans. They'd need a comprehensive device restriction - and then they'd somehow have to keep soldiers from keeping a second phone around.
ninalanyon 7mo ago
It's not the service that should be banned but the hardware that connects to it. No active duty military personell should be using personal devices nor should they be able to install anything on the devices provided for them.
etskinner 7mo ago
Strava just happens to be the most popular run tracking app. If they banned it, another would take its place. If anything, they should be working with Strava to create an incognito mode. At this point, the US military should be willing to spend millions of dollars supporting that one feature

INTPenis 7mo ago

A year ago they found where Swedish politicians were through the Strava apps of their bodyguards. Clearly we're not learning from our mistakes...

BenGosub 7mo ago

I don't understand, why is it hard to track or find such a large ship?

daliliu 7mo ago

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notepad0x90 7mo ago

I am more surprised at the concept of something the size of aircraft carrier being expected to have some level of location privacy. I would think the general area of the world it's operating at could be deduced easily from its last port of call and other things, a cheap amateur home-made radar can have a general idea within a few sq-km resolution by pinging from any littoral up to a few hundred km. I would also have thought, anyone that would care about targeting an aircraft carrier that's at a greater distance away from a coast would also have access to satellite imagery and high-altitude UAV. I have seen more concerning things being revealed like locations of secret bases, and even internal building maps by looking at troops' WiFi. but those are secret places.

fnordfnordfnord 7mo ago

They're huge. Also, it's never a secret where they're being sent. That's the whole point of an aircraft carrier.

jwsteigerwalt 7mo ago

I disagree with the characterization that this is a security flaw unaddressed by Strava. Does anyone (French military in this case) really want Strava to be responsible to decide if the data is from a sailor on a military ship vs. a tourist on a cruise ship. Its operational security and the French military alone is responsible for polices and processes that maintain its security. The idea that the public profile is the problem is ludicrous. The French military should have a problem with any geolocation data about its deployed sailors ever leaving its own networks.

23david 7mo ago

So many astroturf comments here.. the moderation here is out of control terrible :/

scm7k 7mo ago

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pugchat 7mo ago

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