An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military,
It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud.
If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phones (or smart glasses or camera enabled watch or whatever other personal surveillance people choose to carry) near whatever you're trying to protect.
>It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud.
There's an additional layer here that's often ignored: that specific piece of information that leaked is the same regardless of what platform it was released on, but if it was released on a foreign government controlled platform, that government might start monitoring aspects of data being collected by TikTok that aren't being posted for the user or look at historical data if it's being collected. More detailed location data, who their friends are, where they typically go, and so on. Not all of that additional data is probably going to be available to them on Facebook, just the video. The information in the video may be more valuable when it's incorporated with a series of other data points that may be attainable from TikTok for that now closely monitored account.
Sharing this information to begin with isn't good but it's even worse if you're now potentially leaking additional data unknowingly. Maybe the guy who recorded that begins taking photos at some specific base, maybe their TikTok friends include some coworkers that include some videos in on a boat in the South China Sea... it's possible to start linking more information together that could be valuable to an adversary.
The slant I picked up on is that Chinese authorities operating TikTok is the problem because the president can’t just dial Zuck and say “take that shit down immediately or else”. But in general I agree and find the slant annoying. I do think there is some discussion point buried in here about whether or not it’s strategic for the US to build dependencies on foreign software services… but… not sure if it’s a productive one at the moment. It is really kinda orthogonal to OPSEC.
The TikTok app may have camera access and location access. It could capture images and send them to China when it detects its on a military base without the user even knowing. It’s so annoying to see “what about X” comments on every story with almost no thought put into the response.
TikTok is singled out here because it was where it was shared. The author would likely also agree to other social media use being banned in the military.
>If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phones (or smart glasses or camera enabled watch or whatever other personal surveillance people choose to carry) near whatever you're trying to protect.
Do they anywhere? My neighbor works at a government facility for building and repairing … machines and he surrenders his phone every morning. Something smells weird here, but I suppose not everywhere has perfect security all the time. I just wouldn’t want to be the person that proved that.
There's also no indication from this article that the video came from a service member. You can hear other heavy equipment vehicles in the background and the truck driver is definitely not driving anything owned by the military so also likely a contractor. Angry old man FB vibes from that article
Completely unbased in facts, I know nothing factual, but… as a hypothesis…
The government whose laws govern a media sharing service could certainly say "All content generated in this list of geofenced areas must be flagged to the legal observing authority XYZ, even if geotags are not a part of the ultimately published content."
Country A would probably care a bit less about services governed by their own laws. Even if such a secret law existed it wouldn't be used against them.
Whereas Country A might care more about services in adversarial Country B where it can be used to turn an intractable search problem into a targeted search.
Yeah, I am not sure why cameras are even allowed in this area. It doesn't make any sense. It is common in companies with sensitive information to ban the use of snapchat glasses and google glass in their offices.
That's something that has always amazed me. Even visiting an embassy you are not allowed to have any kind of electronics, and in secret/confidential operations you can take your personal phone?
This seems short-sighted to me. In my fiction, in 10-20-30yrs we'll all have eye implants ala Black Mirror and we'll be so dependent on them that telling people they have to turn them off will be untenable.
Anytime I see "no photography" signs I can't help but think "living in the past". For example the immigration line in nearly every Airport says "no photos" and yet everyone in line is on their portable camera, um, I mean smartphone. It's like the people that wrote the sign are stuck in the 1970s and haven't bothered to look up at what people around them are actually doing.
It's the same in museums, sometimes there's an area "no photography allowed" and you can see them trying and utterly failing to enforce what is effectively unenforcable. If there are only a few patrons and they have a guard in every room they might stop 80%. But on a crowded day I doubt they catch 30%. It's ridiculous to see them try.
Because the US Tech industry wants to shore up its protectionism.
Remember when Zuckerberg wanted the Trump admin to ban TikTok completely?
It's crazy that the EU follows suit for so much of this stuff (against Huawei, etc.) and then end up with no industry at all with all the high-paying jobs in the US.
It looks like a radar target. They mount them on sticks out in the desert and fire radar at them to study and tune stealth shapes. They are mounted on single sticks so they can be rotated/tilted to various angles. That's what the single central mount thing is, the 2" thick triangle bit with the two bolt holes. The leading edge of that mount also has a classic curve associated with some radar target mounts. It prevents direct reflections by the mount.
But in these (dis?)information games, it wouldn't be difficult to setup a fake scenario like this just to make one's opponents feel really underpowered.
Imagine the fun of building a nice cool futuristic mockup, putting in on a trailer, and then leaking it to tiktok. It would cost so little and be so fun.
This is obviously comical speculation, but anything is possible.
Tricking your adversary into spending a huge R&D budget studying ESP is money well wasted: it’s unlikely to yield anything of value that can be weaponized against you.
If a SciFi weapon would break the laws of physics, and you can prove the equations unsolvable, leaking documents suggesting you solved them is money well wasted: your adversary is unlikely to get anything of value out of pursuing that weapon.
Pretending your stealth tech is better than it is… Is tricking your adversary into trying to be competitive with stealth tech you yourself aren’t competitive with. That’s a…questionable move. You might trick your adversary into developing better stealth tech than you.
Comical speculation? Pretend weapons were invented in the Second World War (and probably prior). I agree, it would cost fuck all and be a right laugh. Next week they're going to do the Millennium Falcon.
I'm surprised that there's only one other person in this thread discussing the possibility that this is a deliberately coordinated release of information by the military. I've never worked for the US military, however I doubt that if you're working in close proximity to classified hardware they just let you loose with a smartphone in your hand. The person filming this would surely have been easily identifiable, and subsequently punished. Even the most ignorant civilian contractor would surely have understood the full ramifications of their actions doing this. I think it seems to contrived.
it's kind of funny how concerned people are about secrecy and data storage when people just pull out their phones and put that stuff out in the open. Reminds me of the military base that was exposed through strava heatmap data a few years ago. One really has to wonder how far OSINT can go.
The area where the video was taken looks like it was from a construction site (trenches, rebar, and 2x4s visible). Was it taken by a contractor that was part of a crew pouring concrete and saw something cool?
Also, given it was out in the open in broad daylight, I'm assuming a spy satellite could have gotten a picture.
I wonder if one way to deal with this is just make a lot of plausible cool-looking decoys.
I may be underestimating our adversaries but I’d imagine we know exactly where all of their satellites are at all times and could just wait to pull it out until a window of clear skies (I don’t think they have 24/7 coverage of the entire United States)
There are already restrictions on our civilian satellites taking high res pictures of our military installations.
Not just on TikTok, I saw it on YouTube clips from outside the USA. I've know people who've worked on such bases and have heard how strict they were with orders to stop and look away or at the ground when an alarm went off. Well I was pretty surprised to see it and like others, the thought crossed my mind that it wasn't an accident. Furthermore, it looked familiar...I think I saw another diagram picture about a year ago, possibly on a military-tech YouTube channel, possibly by an eastern-european creator. There was discussion at the same time that the next generation was not just approved but already created.
The open source arms control people over at arms control wonk[1] regularly talk about using Russian social media as a place to learn about base layout, details, etc. It's very hard to check that every person within vision range isn't going to snap a photo.
> An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military
This could have happened with literally any social media platform.
Yet the consequences demanded out of this apparently solely focus on "Chinese government-affiliated platform" and how people in the military should be punished for merely using it.
How is that gonna fix the actual problem? Right, it wouldn't, even with TikTok banned from the phones of all military personnel, they have literally dozens of alternatives with which they can do the very same OPSEC oopsie.
This is completely useless to our adversaries. The US runs disinformation campaigns so that in the case of an actual leak, the enemy would have no idea whether what they’re looking at is real or fake. They have to either disregard it or risk spending vast amounts of time and money chasing a decoy.
Whoever posted this (plus all their friends) are gonna be closely monitored, server-side, by the CCP.
Not just the buddy list, but also phone contacts, people who have send them TikTok videos using links (links to videos on TikTok include info about the sender), and people associated by IP address.
I suspect the various comments about "better OPSEC" miss the underlying point - we as citizens realise there is no such thing as privacy, but governments have not caught on there is no such thing as secrecy.
Even with Office of Personel management, wikileaks etc, the vast amounts of data poured out pibkically over the past two decades should tell anyone watching who got their avionics engineering degrees, where they celebrated their house warming party, which retirement lunch they were at with five other avionics engineers, which construction company won which contract ... this sort of stuff should be bread and butter for all intelligence agencies and A struggle to see how anything much can be kept secret in this world.
Apart from the special interest for TikTok, the article has very carefully misleading wording: there is no actual evidence of military projects, military facilities, military personnel, secrets, and violation of secrets. It is only suggested.
The marked "video viewpoint" looks like a generic parking lot/courtyard, accessible to any visitor; the object could be a radar-only Lockheed experiment, not a next-generation USAF project; the "OPSEC violation" is probably placing guards close to interesting things in the buildings instead of severely bothering visitors at the entrance to keep cameras out.
This reminds me of what happened with Strava's global heatmap many years ago, that exposed military bases and where staff moved most frequently.
Strava at the time was high aggressively told they were at fault for "leaking" this information. But this is a problem more so with staff clearly using Garmin, Fitbits, Apple watches, mobile phones etc to log their activity and upload it to publicly available sites.
Strava also excluded the GPS activities from the heatmap where users marked the activity as private or opted out for data sharing.
I heard on reddit that some thought it could potentially be the fuselage for the new B-21 Raider, the replacement for the B-2 bomber that already kinda looks like a pretty futuristic aircraft.
[+] [-] Johnny555|4 years ago|reply
It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud.
If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phones (or smart glasses or camera enabled watch or whatever other personal surveillance people choose to carry) near whatever you're trying to protect.
[+] [-] Frost1x|4 years ago|reply
There's an additional layer here that's often ignored: that specific piece of information that leaked is the same regardless of what platform it was released on, but if it was released on a foreign government controlled platform, that government might start monitoring aspects of data being collected by TikTok that aren't being posted for the user or look at historical data if it's being collected. More detailed location data, who their friends are, where they typically go, and so on. Not all of that additional data is probably going to be available to them on Facebook, just the video. The information in the video may be more valuable when it's incorporated with a series of other data points that may be attainable from TikTok for that now closely monitored account.
Sharing this information to begin with isn't good but it's even worse if you're now potentially leaking additional data unknowingly. Maybe the guy who recorded that begins taking photos at some specific base, maybe their TikTok friends include some coworkers that include some videos in on a boat in the South China Sea... it's possible to start linking more information together that could be valuable to an adversary.
[+] [-] dcow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kindle-dev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellow_lead|4 years ago|reply
>If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phones (or smart glasses or camera enabled watch or whatever other personal surveillance people choose to carry) near whatever you're trying to protect.
100%
[+] [-] tclancy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trenning|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jws|4 years ago|reply
Completely unbased in facts, I know nothing factual, but… as a hypothesis…
The government whose laws govern a media sharing service could certainly say "All content generated in this list of geofenced areas must be flagged to the legal observing authority XYZ, even if geotags are not a part of the ultimately published content."
Country A would probably care a bit less about services governed by their own laws. Even if such a secret law existed it wouldn't be used against them.
Whereas Country A might care more about services in adversarial Country B where it can be used to turn an intractable search problem into a targeted search.
[+] [-] brian_herman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta988|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarsinge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asiachick|4 years ago|reply
Anytime I see "no photography" signs I can't help but think "living in the past". For example the immigration line in nearly every Airport says "no photos" and yet everyone in line is on their portable camera, um, I mean smartphone. It's like the people that wrote the sign are stuck in the 1970s and haven't bothered to look up at what people around them are actually doing.
It's the same in museums, sometimes there's an area "no photography allowed" and you can see them trying and utterly failing to enforce what is effectively unenforcable. If there are only a few patrons and they have a guard in every room they might stop 80%. But on a crowded day I doubt they catch 30%. It's ridiculous to see them try.
[+] [-] BatteryMountain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alana314|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 23B1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|4 years ago|reply
FTFY. Don’t understand why militaries don’t.
[+] [-] marcos100|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nivenkos|4 years ago|reply
Remember when Zuckerberg wanted the Trump admin to ban TikTok completely?
It's crazy that the EU follows suit for so much of this stuff (against Huawei, etc.) and then end up with no industry at all with all the high-paying jobs in the US.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdoms|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bordercases|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sandworm101|4 years ago|reply
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/15746/lockheeds-helend...
Lol, thedrive agrees with me: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42480/mysterious-steal...
[+] [-] blunte|4 years ago|reply
Imagine the fun of building a nice cool futuristic mockup, putting in on a trailer, and then leaking it to tiktok. It would cost so little and be so fun.
This is obviously comical speculation, but anything is possible.
[+] [-] r3trohack3r|4 years ago|reply
If a SciFi weapon would break the laws of physics, and you can prove the equations unsolvable, leaking documents suggesting you solved them is money well wasted: your adversary is unlikely to get anything of value out of pursuing that weapon.
Pretending your stealth tech is better than it is… Is tricking your adversary into trying to be competitive with stealth tech you yourself aren’t competitive with. That’s a…questionable move. You might trick your adversary into developing better stealth tech than you.
[+] [-] bdcravens|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-17867174
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/north-korea-re...
[+] [-] RantyDave|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SonicScrub|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army
[+] [-] avs733|4 years ago|reply
Add in that a significant portion of the structures that affect radar cross section are 'subsurface'
[+] [-] skunkworker|4 years ago|reply
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42480/mysterious-steal...
It's got some videos from the RCS testing and possible ideas on what it could be.
[+] [-] livinginfear|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42853072
[+] [-] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
Also, given it was out in the open in broad daylight, I'm assuming a spy satellite could have gotten a picture.
I wonder if one way to deal with this is just make a lot of plausible cool-looking decoys.
[+] [-] tw04|4 years ago|reply
There are already restrictions on our civilian satellites taking high res pictures of our military installations.
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, not even a tarp covering it.
Am I the only one that think it looks fake, like CG-fake?
[+] [-] darwingr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbennett|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pigbearpig|4 years ago|reply
Probably just some test model, but that doesn't make for clickbait.
Oh no! Look at all the "OPSEC" in this 2008 promo video of the same facility on youtube... https://youtu.be/0LIqRshUoPc?t=108
[+] [-] aeturnum|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/
[+] [-] freeflight|4 years ago|reply
This could have happened with literally any social media platform.
Yet the consequences demanded out of this apparently solely focus on "Chinese government-affiliated platform" and how people in the military should be punished for merely using it.
How is that gonna fix the actual problem? Right, it wouldn't, even with TikTok banned from the phones of all military personnel, they have literally dozens of alternatives with which they can do the very same OPSEC oopsie.
[+] [-] desertraven|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeckalpha|4 years ago|reply
By what definition of adversary is China America’s top adversary?
[+] [-] diebeforei485|4 years ago|reply
Not just the buddy list, but also phone contacts, people who have send them TikTok videos using links (links to videos on TikTok include info about the sender), and people associated by IP address.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|4 years ago|reply
Even with Office of Personel management, wikileaks etc, the vast amounts of data poured out pibkically over the past two decades should tell anyone watching who got their avionics engineering degrees, where they celebrated their house warming party, which retirement lunch they were at with five other avionics engineers, which construction company won which contract ... this sort of stuff should be bread and butter for all intelligence agencies and A struggle to see how anything much can be kept secret in this world.
[+] [-] HelloNurse|4 years ago|reply
The marked "video viewpoint" looks like a generic parking lot/courtyard, accessible to any visitor; the object could be a radar-only Lockheed experiment, not a next-generation USAF project; the "OPSEC violation" is probably placing guards close to interesting things in the buildings instead of severely bothering visitors at the entrance to keep cameras out.
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|4 years ago|reply
On a side note, somebody just got fired.
https://www.rumblerum.com/northrop-grumman-x-47b-uav/
[+] [-] NoPicklez|4 years ago|reply
Strava at the time was high aggressively told they were at fault for "leaking" this information. But this is a problem more so with staff clearly using Garmin, Fitbits, Apple watches, mobile phones etc to log their activity and upload it to publicly available sites.
Strava also excluded the GPS activities from the heatmap where users marked the activity as private or opted out for data sharing.
[+] [-] arthurcolle|4 years ago|reply