Pictures from smartphones contain the GPS coordinates of the location where they were taken by default. The passion of the US military for self-photographing and the immediate publication of the photo on some kind of Facebook became fatal for many of them. According to the official US Army website, Iraqi and Afghan resistance fighters have used this to spot potential targets for their mortar batteries firing from concealed positions.
That is how, for example, in 2007, in just one fire raid, four AH-64 helicopters were destroyed - right on the take-off site. But this is where the dangers of social media for regular army soldiers only begin.
The fact is that today many social networks such as Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, Shopkick, Loopt and Whrrl (thousands of them!) Use geolocation to constantly reflect the location of one or another of their members. Even if your smartphone is not equipped with GPS navigation … yes, even if it is not a smartphone at all, but, say, Nokia 1100, it does not mean that you are safe.
Location-based service (LBS) allows you to establish your location using ordinary cellular base stations - the very red towers that surround you (look around!) From all sides.
As we can see, progress cannot be stopped: in 2006, specialists of the relevant Iranian services (IRGC radio intelligence) had to work hard to, using cellular base stations, "determine the assembly points of Israeli units for subsequent transmission to Lebanon", that is good fellows from Hezbollah. The development of social networks has made such works redundant: American organizations are responsible for calculating the location of the JI and bringing them to the attention of the widest masses.
According to Steve Warren, deputy head of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Fort Benning Training Center, the most massive source of information on the exact location of American troops was, of course, the photos posted on Facebook. It's just that the distribution of Foursquare and others is not yet so massive - which means there is less information there. And so - any helicopter pilot or paratrooper arriving at a new duty station considers it his duty to be photographed against the background of a helicopter taking off, after which the Iraqis can only go 4-5 kilometers to the runway and aim the immortal BM-37 model of the same year by GPS- the coordinates of the Facebook photo. Now the army leadership is directly telling the soldiers to turn off the geotagging option in the smartphone camera when photographing.
Let us allow ourselves a bit of healthy skepticism: the entire Second World American Army strictly ordered soldiers to use the sight of their main weapon, the M1 Garand rifle, but General J. Patton rightly noted: “Of the hundreds of officers I interviewed, only three or four said that they met a soldier who used a diopter sight in battle . Note that he himself did not see such soldiers. So, in all likelihood, up to a complete ban on smartphones (which is hardly possible), one should not hope for the systematic implementation of this instruction. Do you dare, Hezbollah?
Social networks like Foursquare or Google Lattitude, of course, have even more potential. But here only the total selection of telephones from the military will help, which, of course, will not happen either. Well, of course, not only the Stars and Stripes suffer from this scourge: as we know, in recent years, the use of cell phones by privates, including unauthorized ones, has also taken place in our army.
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By the way, it is a mistake to attribute these actions to the "budgetary cyberwar" waged by the Iraqi and other rebels, as the US military department does. In fact, all these Middle Eastern peoples simply took open data that the Americans themselves posted on the Internet. All this is the same "cyberwar" as the use by Japanese artillerymen of detailed photographs of Russian fortifications near Port Arthur, published in Novy Krai, the main newspaper of the fortress, right during the siege. Neither then nor in the 21st century will it be possible to fight with ordinary slovenliness and irresponsibility with nothing but strengthening discipline.
