SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Strava, a smartphone app that tracks "athletic activity" using GPS, published an interactive heatmap of user activity around the world. That heatmap included some U.S. military bases:
Military personnel around the world have been publicly sharing their exercise routes online - including those inside or near military bases.
Online fitness tracker Strava has published a "heatmap" showing the paths its users log as they run or cycle. It appears to show the structure of foreign military bases in countries like Syria and Afghanistan, as soldiers move around inside.
The US military is examining the heatmap, a spokesman said. Air Force Colonel John Thomas, a spokesman for US Central Command, told the Washington Post that the US military was reviewing the implications.
Strava said it had excluded activities marked as private from the map. Users who record their exercise data on Strava have the option of making their movements public or private. Private data, the company said, has never been included.
The "private" option is for people who like to track their step count during sexual activity, not protecting the operational security of the military base you're stationed at.
Also at The Guardian, which contains more examples than the BBC for those who don't want to enable JavaScript to view the interactive one linked to above.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 29 2018, @06:35PM
Not bad, but a more realistic real time analysis would be something like long term observation proves on average 10% of soldiers wake up two hours before duty, whenever that is, and go jogging. So at any given instant you can predict the number of soldiers going outside the wire on patrol two hours from now fairly accurately, 24x365. So a tenth of a platoon worth of jogging soldiers at two hours before local sunset indicates exactly one platoon sized patrol going outside the wire at sundown, prep a platoon's worth of IEDs etc.
A more insidious app would be Creech AFB is where all the UAV pilots live, so analysis of exercise patterns indicates shift changeover time is 4pm, so if you're going to F around and try to get away with something, plan it around end of shift when the previous shift is tired and/or right at shift changeover time. Of course in the real world no one could possibly be that stupid so I'm sure the shifts are all staggered... right?
Somewhat more sinister is direct action, this graph shows the number of people out on the base exercise track per hour, here's the GPS coordinates of that track and some mortars, I'm sure the bad guys can figure out when to fire for maximum effect.
A real Hollywood plot is DISA/NSA/redacted already knows and 99% of those plots are disinfo. There's only 50 navy seals in theater, not even at that base, but 500 seal accounts uploading fake data, the whole battalion is just a vmware cluster of hosts uploading fake data? Huh. You could really mess with the enemies mind, until they figure it out. Oh look all the known exercise jock accounts for an entire infantry company has evacuated from the supposedly now deserted village, what could possibly go wrong if we visit the supposedly now empty village LOL then boom like fifty claymore mines go off and the preplan arty barrage starts LOL scratch one opfor unit?
The meta issue is its a lot simpler and cheaper to buy an airline ticket if necessary and sit in the Starbucks near the base main exit for a couple hours and put little tally marks in a paper notebook, oh look almost no traffic out the gates except its super busy 4:05pm to 4:15pm, huh I wonder when shift change is, maybe 4pm? It doesn't require much thinking or training or CS degrees or data mining nosql databases.