A very popular site used to share physical activity data online reveals, in a high level of detail, the location and movements of thousands of soldiers engaged in some of the most dangerous war zones in the world, and could jeopardize the their safety. Strava.com gives its subscribers the ability to share running data (on foot or by bike) collected from their sports devices: trackers which usually include a GPS tracker to reconstruct the route followed during each session. The data collected by the site are then entered anonymously on a map, where the most followed routes are “illuminated” and made evident. In large cities the map is a tangle of roads in evidence, while in desert areas such as those of the Middle East it is almost completely dark, except for the areas around military bases where soldiers, mostly Americans, are active.
The “Global Heat Map” was released by Strava late last year and includes hundreds of millions of sports activities, uploaded by its users between 2015 and September 2017. Taken as a whole, the map is extremely bright in Europe and the rest of the world. United States, where the spread of trackers for sport is increasingly high, while it is almost completely off in a large part of Africa and the Middle East. Yet, if you look carefully at some geographical areas, such as Iraq and Syria, you can see isolated points, often far from the cities, where the presence of some activity is evident. It is that of soldiers who train around military bases, or who use trackers to count their steps over the course of a day. In some cases, the map highlights areas where secret bases have been built, the exact location of which is not communicated by the United States military or its intelligence services.
Nathan Ruser, a 20-year-old Australian who studies international security and deals with the Middle East, was among the first to notice data on bases and other military activities. Over the weekend he reported the matter on Twitter, prompting other users to analyze the paths indicated on the map in search of the most well-known military bases, or those of which there is only a vague knowledge because they are secret. The discoveries have been numerous and of various kinds: from activities on a beach in Mogadishu, Somalia, where a CIA base has long been hypothesized, to a missile system in Yemen. Still others have detected activity and movement near bases for humanitarian purposes, such as those of the United Nations, and training centers of various armies around the world.
Strava released their global heatmap. 13 trillion GPS points from their users (turning off data sharing is an option). https://t.co/hA6jcxfBQI… It looks very pretty, but not amazing for Op-Sec. US Bases are clearly identifiable and mappable pic.twitter.com/rBgGnOzasq
– Nathan Ruser (@ Nrg8000) January 27, 2018
The problem is not in itself related to the possibility of easily identifying military bases on a map – considering that their geographical position is almost always known – but to the fact of being able to observe the paths that soldiers follow most frequently outside and sometimes within the bases. This data could be used to conduct targeted attacks or to reconstruct the activities that take place within a base before carrying out an assault.
The map of Afghanistan, for example, seems to indicate not only the training of soldiers, but in many cases also the paths followed to patrol the territory between one US base and another. Something similar is taking place in some regions of Syria, where the United States has bases on which official information has never been released. The more “lighted” areas in a base could also indicate the points where most of the personnel are concentrated, for eating or sleeping, offering a more precise target to possible attackers. In other cases, the map indicates activities around specific geographic areas where a new base is likely to be set up.
The problem concerns US soldiers in the first place, also because in recent years the Pentagon has encouraged, and in some cases financed, the purchase and use of trackers to induce its personnel to move more and exercise. However, activity around the barracks and bases of many other armies around the world is evident on the map. The transmission of data to Strava is of course optional, and it should be up to the sensitivity of each user to decide whether or not to share the route of a ride. Sharing, however, allows you to have some more services and to better compare your results with those of other people who use Strava, which also has a large section similar to a social network to keep track of your workouts and those of friends.
Following numerous reports over the weekend, the Pentagon confirmed that it will address the issue, but it is not yet clear what steps it will take to mitigate the problem. Strava released a brief statement recalling that the data it makes public is anonymous and aggregated and excludes “activities that have been indicated as private or in areas with a certain level of privacy”. However, the system is optional and evidently not used by soldiers, so many have proposed to deactivate the map near the bases, which Strava could do by receiving information from the institutions involved, which however should implicitly admit the existence of bases on which they prefer not to give official news.
