Heat map unwittingly reveals government top secret black sites
A new online fitness tracking app, which compiles routes of 27 million runners, have unwittingly revealed the locations and layouts of top-secret CIA underground military bases around the world.
The fitness company, Strava, which is based in San Francisco, published their “global heat map” to their website revealing two years of fitness across fitness devices such as Jawbone and Fitbit.
The showed a composite of overlapping routes including New York (see below).
Other more remote locations such as Syria and Iraq are complete dark apart from clandestine locations where military personnel using fitness trackers are stationed. Personnel in some of the Us governments, ultra-sensitive facilities have accidentally broadcast top secret information including underground tunnels.
According to Zerohedge: 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.
The man who discovered the phenomenon is Nathan Ruser, who is studying international security and the Middle East.
You can literally spend less than a minute on Stravas new data service and find sensitive sites. Nice patriot position you have there pic.twitter.com/eYS8TOuT0F
— Lost Weapons (@LostWeapons) January 27, 2018
Cross-referencing @mjranum‘s recent post about using Google Maps to identify CIA “Black” sites in Djibouti, with the #Strava heat-map, appears to offer corroboration https://t.co/PfXDqRIvSS pic.twitter.com/GlxWOoKWcj
— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) January 28, 2018
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
Fitness and social media company Strava releases activity heat map. Excellent for locating military bases (h/t to @Nrg8000). https://t.co/n5RWcI7BJF pic.twitter.com/7zzNcYV42e
— Tobias Schneider (@tobiaschneider) January 27, 2018
hmmm i wonder whats at this random heavy route in what looks like a mountainous and remote area of libya. Oh look some bunkers that were targeted in 2011 pic.twitter.com/gg5VFIPVQZ
— Lost Weapons (@LostWeapons) January 27, 2018
“I wondered, does it show U.S. soldiers?” Ruser said, before zooming in on Syria. “It sort of lit up like a Christmas tree.”
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.”