Fitness Tracking App Accidentally Reveals Secret US Military Bases, CIA “Black” Sites

An interactive online fitness tracking map published in November of 2017 which compiles a running history of the location and routes of 27 million fitness-device users has unwittingly revealed the location, staffing, patrol routes and layout of U.S. and foreign military bases around the world.  

San Francisco based fitness company Strava posted their “global heatmap” to their website, containing two years worth of fitness data across several fitness devices such as Jawbone and Fitbit. The map is not live, rather, it is a composite of overlapping routes. 

In most urban areas such as major cities such as New York, Strava’s map appears as solid neon lights following just about every road on which one might exercise. 

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New York, NY

Remote locations, however, such as deserts in places like Syria and Iraq are almost entirely dark – aside from clandestine locations where military personnel using fitness trackers are stationed.  Personnel in some of the US government’s most sensitive facilities have been unwittingly been broadcasting sensitive information up to and including underground tunnels. 

At a site in northern Syria near a dam, where analysts have suspected the U.S. military is building a base, the map shows a small blob of activity accompanied by an intense line along the nearby dam, suggesting that the personnel at the site jog regularly along the dam, Schneider said.

“This is a clear security threat,” he said. “You can see a pattern of life. You can see where a person who lives on a compound runs down a street to exercise. In one of the U.S. bases at Tanf, you can see people running round in circles.” –WaPo

Air Force Col. John Thomas, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said Sunday that the U.S. military is looking into the issue.

FBI Academy:

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FBI Academy, Stafford, VA

NSA Headquarters:

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NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, MD

(more on that one here)

The man who discovered the phenomenon is Nathan Ruser, who is studying international security and the Middle East. 

“I wondered, does it show U.S. soldiers?” Ruser said, before zooming in on Syria. “It sort of lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Since Nathan’s discovery, dozens of other internet sleuths have taken to Twitter to post their findings. Be sure to click the tweets and check out the replies to see even more; 

More Strava maps:

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Location unknown

Burning man

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Chernobyl:

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Antarctica:

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Unidentified island:

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Strava issued a statement effectively telling users to mark their activities private if they don’t want to broadcast locations: 

“Our global heatmap represents an aggregated and anonymized view of over a billion activities uploaded to our platform,” the statement said. “It excludes activities that have been marked as private and user-defined privacy zones. We are committed to helping people better understand our settings to give them control over what they share.”

Talk about first world problems…

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