Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok
warisboring.com
warisboring.com
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.
>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%
Yet the author demands that people should be punished for merely using TikTok, not all social media, even if its use doesn't compromise OPSEC in any way.
1. https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2021-04/27/2...
Maybe they could have been more explicit in the way they worded their reply. But I think given the question they were responding to and the typical audience of this forum, it should have been obvious to most people that the GP wasn’t trying to imply pictures can be deleted from the internet. Or at least obvious to anyone that read the OPs question and the source article.
Don't all the social media companies make it hard to scrape their sites, especially in bulk? It's definitely impossible to contain something once it's all over a bunch of blogs like this, but it might be possible to contain some things if caught early enough.
There's also the private message angle: something shared through PM on a US social network may be able to be contained to the US, while anything shared on a foreign network may be able to be accessed by a foreign intelligence service, regardless of sharing settings.
When you can throw unlimited developers and real humans at it, it's not so hard to scrape. I'd be willing to bet money that there are Chinese affiliated agents (possibly based in the USA or other countries) in every military related Facebook group.
In fact there's dozens of tools just like it. I'm not sure whether they're scraping the platforms or get legitimate access. But whichever it is, it's dozens of companies to infiltrate and get a link into their feeds. Trivial for a nation state actor.
Now I wonder if every large US social media company also has employees who are intelligence assets of US agencies. I'm not going to say 'safe to assume', theoretically America likes to think of itself as having that kind of domestic secret policing, but I wonder.
They might not have full-time undercover spies, but they almost certainly have assets.
Solve the problem of people posting this to social media and it won't matter if the company is US owned and operated or foreign owned and operated because neither will have anything to work with.
If you aren't posting top secret data, you also aren't sharing it with enemies on accident.
If the app is made by an adversary, you don't need to post it publicly for there to be a problem. The app has the ability to send it directly without you even knowing.
In that respect, whether it's TikTok or any other social media makes little difference. If it's use of apps like that is prohibited, then it's either not a problem or it's a personnel following policy problem.
That said, if people really think TikTok is a problem they should be worried about some other app that's ties are far less known that might get far less public scrutiny and do far more. By the time we're nitpicking which specific social media platform is the worst to have posted to in this case, we're so far down the path of problematic behavior that we're in absurdist territory. The fact that someone's walking around with the equivalent of a video camera taking movies of what appears to be top secret material is the problem, and whether they put it up on TikTok or YouTube, or sell to the Washington Post or to RT is just bikeshedding mostly irrelevant details.
The solution to this all is probably along the lines of "don't allow smartphones in secure areas" or only allow smartphones that have been vetted by security.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/a15912407/s...
The app needs to be open and in the foreground for it to take photos. On Android at least.
My point is, the problem is posting to social media, or using a device that's insecure. There's plenty of apps that a user could be tricked into installed that are much worse than TikTok and that will have much less public scrutiny.
That TikTok is affiliated with the China in some way is a red herring. There's no reason to solve the problem of TikTok if you solve the general problem of people using unapproved applications (which all social media would obviously be unapproved in secure areas) or insecure devices.
Otherwise what you'll find is that Facebook as some Cambridge Analytica type situation going on, and some Chinese shell company ends up using it to get special access and details, and the same thing as this happens through Facebook and China has special additional info and "TikTok fix" helped solve exactly nothing.
Bringing up that TikTok is associated with China in the article is useful in showing people some of the ramifications of the problem. Focusing on that as the problem leads people to think banning TikTok is the answer, when it clearly is not, since it doesn't go nearly far enough in combating the problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
Removes certificate pinning from apk files for mitm inspection.
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.
That said, it's pretty obvious the bias the source has:
- "and posted it to the Chinese government-affiliated platform."
- "social media platform tied to America’s top adversary"
The problem here is people sharing stuff publicly which they are obviously not supposed to. The rest is just theater, even if technically somewhat worse. If you solve the root problem, the variation that makes it slightly worse this time is solved at the same time.
I believe PLA uses its assets within Google, and other American dotcoms to the fullest extend, and they already pulled every info they can through their Android Store accounts on them.
Even a running meme of spy agency, the Saudi Army intel wing managed to have their men operate within Google for years. Imagine now what Chinese could.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Letting people transmit GPS coordinates while walking around a military facility though? Yeah, maybe that's not a good idea.
For example you can easily guess everything about ones family members, his work schedule, browsing history, ruffle his personal email/facebook — stuff that often gets mixed with work correspondence, financials, home location, other gadgets, other people in his first circle — people often meet with other servicemen off duty.
A lot in other words.
Do you have a source for this? I spent a while searching, but I couldn't find anything that would corroborate your claim
Aside from the OPSEC issue, which is understandable, why does the author - and I guess it's a widespread view - considers China as America's utmost adversary? Can't there exist two rich and prosperous countries? Why does the author uses such jingoist terms? How should other countries consider America, then?
Also makes it sound more dramatic, especially with the Air Force General "looking impressed" hot take. The fact of the matter is that it would be a bigger problem if a top secret aircraft was sitting outside exposed to the sky in full daylight in the first place, where Gen. Kelly's and presumably everyone else's surveillance satellites could count the rivets on the thing.
We're not quite to a point yet where you have continuous ultra high resolution satellite imagery of the ground where you could feasibly record these things and eventually find them. Chances are you just don't have the data unless you know all the places to look. In the not too far off future it might be a bit more difficult. We're getting closer to that point for sure given export controls on AI software used in geospatial imagery analysis:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/06/2019-27...
Part of this I suspect is geared at stifling an adversary from utilizing lower resolution imagery data to identify targets of interest to point higher resolution imagery or other sensors and agents at to collect intel.
Presumably, if it actually requires some level of security clearance, either it should have been covered for transport, or the yahoos with smartphones should have been cleared of the area to at least reduce the chance of something silly like this.
Not a whole lot you can do if you need to fly it and it's going to be in or around public areas, nor much you can do about satellite imagery, but that doesn't mean ignore all opsec.
And because China (as far as I know?) is the only country threatening to invade a US ally (Taiwan).
If the US military did not consider China a potential adversary it is not doing its job.
Threatening nuclear attack on Japan
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202107/1228036.shtml
Border standoff with India
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192872.shtml
Threatening Australia with nukes
China has a "no first use" policy on it's nuclear weapons, and therefore has publicly committed not to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear state like Japan. (The US, in contrast, has a policy of allowing first-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.) For details on China's policy, you can see e.g.: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2018.1...
Anyway the original message was much more colorful. This video from Chinese military channel https://youtu.be/7vKf5SXnsHA
Yes they pulled it after 2 million views. The Japanese exception to no first use message was delivered pretty clearly though.
When was the last time PBS or NPR called for expanding nuclear capabilities 10x? In China it was last year.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1187766.shtml
CCPs no-first-use is just window dressing on the MAD status quo of the world. Perhaps it makes them think they look moral? Their cavalier way of discussing it is disgusting.
Seems like a practical move to make sure they have solid rocket motors and warheads not in storage. That guarantees MAD regardless of who the US elects, thus all generals on both sides will truthfully say any nuclear confrontation is unwinnable.
Over the past decade China has also been making increasingly brazen land grabs along and near the Indian border. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_border_dispute and, most recently, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/china-bhutan-border-vil... Relative to the South China Sea that's slightly less of a concern geopolitically (ignoring the potential for another full blown war between India and China), but does evidence China's actual (not simply rhetorical) aggression.
Finally, North Korea is a protected state of China. The only reason North Korea has nuclear weapons is because China prevents military and, to a lesser degree, economic retaliation. China permitting North Korea to develop and possess nuclear weapons is a violation of China's role as a nuclear super power, especially in light of the proliferation risk North Korea poses. By contrast, the U.S. killed Taiwan's nuclear program the moment it was discovered, and strongly opposed both the Israeli and Pakistani programs up until they were already an accomplished fact. (Note that the U.S. had far more leverage with Taiwan--it could threaten to retract its defense umbrella, which would have passively permitted immediate Chinese invasion--whereas with Israel and Pakistan the only viable options would have required direct retaliation.)
Foreign policy and military analysts in the U.S. and, I would assume, China understand that the global economic tussle between the U.S. and China are distinct from the geopolitical security issues. (Strongly related, of course, but the calculus nonetheless significantly different.) The masses and certain political factions in each country don't tend to draw such distinctions, though.
Does the US desire peaceful coexistence with China or not? Reading some of the hawkish, cold war style jingoism coming out of US media makes one wonder?
That is the main struggle
But in international relations, they’ve traded been trading with liberal democracies for decades. So what’s the incompatibility?
Also China is continuing to carry out a genocide that is unparalleled in this century.
In the US a Genocide has been underway for decades. The cost of healthcare will break people. A trip to the doctor can easily wipe out life savings, what little there is for most people. Considering more than half the US population lives paycheck to paycheck to nearly paycheck to paycheck lifestyles, its easy to see how Most Americans are nothing more than slaves that go to work and back home in a endless cycle. That is not freedom. And sure they can quit, and live out in the streets if they wanted. Its a shit life.
Americans are so caught up in thinking the government is the bad guy here. No the real bad guy is the companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Exxon, Verizon, ATT, Capital one, Chase, any CC company, plus the many Pharma companies. The list can go on and on.
With no protection for allowing people to get into 10-20k+ worth of CC debt at 22-28% APR, People will always be slaves.
Honestly its easy to see the USA as a Cancer. I dont blame China for wanting to break away from the ideals of the western world. Now they have made a lot of bad choices. But at the same time the USA is largely responsible for keeping the middle east a 3rd world society.
Americans enjoy living in a bubble, They love to think they are free. They are not free!
I'm an American, and I'm just as much of a slave to the system as the rest of you. The system is so rigged that any true free speech is easily spun around. Just look at all the crazy trump supporters, Slaves not only to unchecked capitalism but to also propaganda labeled as factful free speech.
Again, we're not perfect, but we hear about almost every drone strike that harms civilians, or the abuses our prisoners of war face in Guantanamo bay. Does anyone in China rebuke the government for stealing land from neighboring countries[1] and building on it?
[1]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/china-bhutan-border-vil...
Among other things, we're allowed to discuss what the US has done with Julian Assange on this here US-based website without much fear of a dawn raid by the FBI over it.
China is an authoritarian dictatorship with their own flavour of communism I guess. Blaming everything they do on commmunism as a whole is very uninformed.
Add that to the tankies I've met personally and their beliefs, and yeah, communism sucks.
Don't get me wrong, I can't really stand uber-authoritarian Communism. But I don't see how communist/marxist theory is bad as a whole. Would certainly help erase a lot of issues we have on our earth. Unfortunately, people at the top always start to misuse their power to stay there. But that's also the case in capitalist America, so then again, why is communism such a problem for many americans?
We don't have a defense treaty with Taiwan so it's not like we'd have to intervene to the degree we would if Egypt decided they wanted to have a go at Israel or something, but we've had a standing agreement since the 1970s to arm them as the situation dictates, so we're not entirely detached from it.
Jingoism is definitely present and infuriatingly becoming more financially viable for media companies pitching towards those parts of the populous, but it is important to recognize that that is the minority. Anecdotally, most people in my area, a college town in a republican state, are apathetic by means of being unaffected and uninformed. Even the chinese and korean people I've spoken with pretty frequently don't seem to particularly care or be informed. It is kind of weird, because it freaks me out and I follow it very closely; worrying about ww3.
Opposition to Xi Jinping in the executive branch is widespread, that is also definitely true. I think our hawks and their wolf warriors have created a feedback loop.
Yes, and the same can be said from Chinese state media...
Or the close neighborhood of the Philippines, a major US ally with a mutual defense pact. Or Taiwan, a major US ally and trading partner. Or Vietnam, a growing trading partner. There are ongoing disputes between and among those groups.
A huge amount of shipping goes through the South China Sea, including most oil for S. Korea, Japan and the US West Coast. Meanwhile, goods bound for Europe and the Suez from those places also go through there. Something like 10% of the worlds shipping. Letting China just call "dibs" on international waters and set up a chokehold would be weird to allow.
I don't think anyone is urging war with China. But stopping their advance in it's tracks.
Meanwhile, China has been aggressively expanding its influence worldwide, in South America, Africa and Afghanistan.
In contrast to the U.S.? When other countries did this in the past and present, it was ok, but not for China? The U.S. can invade and occupy countries on the other side of the world, but it's aggressive for China to occupy an unoccupied island off its own coast?
I'm not thrilled with China's behavior, but the U.S. needs to stand down until they can act from the high moral ground. They have a lot of work to do to rebuild a working compass. Until then, nobody can trust their navigation.
Invading countries with a diplomatic alliance like NATO behind you is as close to "okay" as you can get. A small country got beat up, but there was no risk of WWIII. And there was an attempt to install a democracy in place of a dictatorship and get out.
China claiming the territory owned by their neighbors is about slowly stealing land (and sea) and making them part of China. It's completely different.
But really, the US's moral high ground is a distraction. This thread is about whether China is taking actions that could be a threat to the United States.
Tell that to Puerto Rico or Guam.
Or did you miss:
>> But really, the US's moral high ground is a distraction. This thread is about whether China is taking actions that could be a threat to the United States.
This thread is about the U.S. producing a war plane. Somehow China is threatening the U.S. just by knowing about a weapon produced by the U.S.? China is the threat?
The same could be said about the US vis-a-vis Israel.
While this is true, the US had a hand in helping the DPRK obtain the necessary tools to do so way back in 1994:
In 1994, President Bill Clinton agreed to a deal with North Korea aimed at curbing their desire to develop a nuclear weapon, an agreement which the networks at the time hailed as a sign that “the Cold War is really over.”
Under the 1994 framework, which North Korea eventually violated, the U.S. helped the rogue regime build a new nuclear reactor that would not be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for international access to its nuclear facilities, although the United States caved and the inspections would not start for several years.
Crucial inspections are being delayed five years while the rest of the deal is implemented. American officials say the delay is a small price to pay for getting North Korea to shut down its entire nuclear program
But Kim Jung Il’s regime gets to keep what intelligence experts believe it already has, at least one bomb. And it does not have to permit inspection to nuclear waste sites for 5 years.
The very framework designed to prevent the DPRK from obtaining a nuclear weapon actually laid the groundwork for them to not only obtain nuclear technology, but to fast track their program to produce even more nukes.
European here, so this may be caused by selective reporting in different regions of the world, but here news is equally often about US military presence in the South China Sea. Looking at a globe and seeing the distance between US homeland and the South China Sea, I wonder who gave the US a mandate for military manoeuvers near the coast of another country? And how this makes China the aggressor?
Nevertheless the facts themselves also tend to get reported, e.g.:
https://www.wienerzeitung.at/nachrichten/politik/welt/206683...
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Deutsche-Fregatte-wird-auf-...
The US has every tight to sail however it wants in international waters, so do the Chinese.
So it would be ok (in theory) to have a warship 25 miles off the coast provided it wasn't fishing or drilling for oil
“But Mr. President, we already have our missiles in Turkey”.
Nowadays those missiles are much closer to Moscow than ever before.
The US navy presence is a reaction to that, and very welcome by almost all of the states on the coast except China, given that without the promise of US opposition, they would all rapidly become members of the Greater Chinese Coprosperity Sphere like Hong Kong and Macao did.
By navigating international waters against China's wishes, the US is demonstrating to the international community that China does not control access to those waters. This prevents China from making claims that those waters should no longer be international and instead be China's.
So this isn't the US going off to provoke China (or if you still wish to see it so, at least not for no reason). This is the US exercising rights granted by international treaties in order to prevent China from making effectively false claims to those waters under those same treaties.
That said, I believe your point is valid, but the comparison breaks down once you look at the nuance of the situation. If Mexico feels they can get a better deal by partnering with China to do joint fleet ops in the Gulf of Mexico then I’d say the US has done a very poor job of treating its neighbors correctly, and that needs to be reevaluated. It’s the same answer I have for China - Theyre doing a poor job of being a good neighbor to others in the region.
A more direct answer is that the US is doing the job on behalf of its traditional allies in the region who have claims over parts of the South China Sea which helps to maintain US soft power in the region.
You're misreading your news. The US is doing miliary manuvers in international waters specifically to asser that they are not near the coast of China and are free travel for all. Meanwhile, the Chinese are claiming islands that are no theirs (or building islands out of the sea floor) and putting military installations on those islands. They then claim that as part of China, and trying to assert more ownership of the ocean because of that. The US doing maneuvers near them is a statement that those claims are not recognized.
The British recently did the same thing in waters near Crimea to deny Russia's ownership.
Why don't they start with their own?
And other countries, especially those with any sort of rivalry that could turn into a war should be wary of the USA.
War and ideaology is mans worst attributes and will only lead to the cultures downfall.
That is why humans are stuck in a cycle of repeating mistakes from the past. Blinded by there own ego. In a constant battle of picking sides, where winners reinforce positions, rewrite history and loosers are always waiting to take the crown back at the slightest slip up. Like that will be the final staw, like they will be last king to end all kings.
Unfortunately for the US, China has used its own tactics against it. through the greed of capitalism it has lost grip of its influence and let its competitive advantage be exported.
When push comes to shove, i would rather be taking a blue pill for virility then then eating a tiger penis. The US detains only the illegals in there own countries, while China simply invades, moves in and purifies. The US gives lethal injections, while China sends you to concentration camps then sells your body parts highest bidder.
The lesser of two evils in this case is clearly the country with more diversity and acceptance for other points of view. No way a black person would ever be considered pure enough to lead China. China out-racists the US on every measure, as it does in systemic corruption.
No communist has ever lived in its final utopia. Just as no captialist ever has. Or ever will. After a certain point, every culture that defines itself on war will fade.
And thats that.
Two belligerents wrestling over which currency the world economy will use.
The history of humanity in a nutshell.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Because, leaving the US aside, China spends more on it's military than the next five largest countries combined (3/5 of which are US allies).
Meanwhile, China seems to be aggressively staking claims in the South China Sea (which is important for the US and it's Asian allies) and there's a perpetual risk of war over Taiwan. China is also growing it's influence in places like Africa and Afghanistan, as well as using Belt and Road money to intermesh themselves anywhere you can.
Maybe "rival" or "top potential adversary" would be a better phrase. But the idea is that there is a western block and a Chinese block (and a Russian block) exerting power on the world, and that's zero sum. It's not violent, but the competition is still there.
> How should other countries consider America, then?
Whatever else you think of America, with it gone or taking a step back from world affairs, there's a power vacuum that China and Russia will fill. At worst, they should think of it as the lesser evil. I would go further than that and call America good, but that seems offtopic at this point.
Edit: not X47
I think we need to arrange for an age in which great powers learn a lot about each other through internet services, similarly to how we had to arrange to satellite imagery becoming available of each other.
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.
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.
FTFY. Don’t understand why militaries don’t.
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.
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...
https://www.mvg-world.com/fr/products/antenna-measurement/ra...
Someone’s going to have the clearance revoked.
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-17867174
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/north-korea-re...
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/what-became-irans-qah...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank
"In one operation in September 1944, the British deployed 148 inflatable tanks close to the front line and around half were "destroyed" by fragments from German mortar and artillery fire, and by Allied bombs falling short."
Add in that a significant portion of the structures that affect radar cross section are 'subsurface'
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.
For example, I suspect Apple feinted Amazon into chasing voice assistant tech and products, distracting Amazon from more serious matters like ARM-based SoC and AR.
What you are "tricking" them is that you are flying over their airspace and they can't do anything about it. Secret projects are kept indoors longer, testing schedules are delayed, effort is put into hairbrained stealth detection tech, etc.
You are tricking them into thinking money spent on stealth is a better gamble than it is (but being a gamble, it might still pay off). That siphons money from other projects.
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.
> I showed this to Gen Mark Kelly, Air Combat Command chief. His immediate reply was that he had no idea what it was. And then he took my laptop and stared at it for about 20 seconds. His expression was (WARNING: my impression) somewhere between confused and impressed.
Idea: He was confused because it wasn't lensing. It's probably a target drone for craft which can lense, and which are dropped off at their destinations not by truck, but by theoretical gravity physics.
(The above is tongue in cheek)
0. https://twitter.com/TheDEWLine/status/1440806852560707587
There is nothing except for speculation by the media outlet who benefits from it being perceived as classified that there is anything classified in the picture.
Though it might not actually be anything particularly secret after all, the fact that somebody was hanging around taking phone pictures attests to this.
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.
There are already restrictions on our civilian satellites taking high res pictures of our military installations.
The previous generation Kobalt ones have been retired since 2015 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yantar-4K2M
China has quite a few Yaogan optical satellites in orbit but they are much smaller than the Russian and US ones and are about the same size as commercial EOSs and thus much more limited.
China does launch a fuckton of them tho often 3-4 at the time on a single rocket however I would bet that their military usefulness at this level of detail is rather limited. They are probably around the same class as the Israeli satellites which means that they’ll be sufficient for strategic intelligence about facilities and large developments but won’t have anywhere near the resolution that the space telescopes pointed downwards class satellites have.
Yeah, not even a tarp covering it.
Am I the only one that think it looks fake, like CG-fake?
It kind of looks sharper then the truck.
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
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.
Publicly they’ll condemn Tiktok.
By what definition of adversary is China America’s top adversary?
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.
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.
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.
On a side note, somebody just got fired.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7RRiU92zG2w/T6jnJ1e_QxI/AAAAAAAAA0...
The wingspan of the aircraft on that truck most definitely indicates a scaled model even if it uses a lifting body design.
So as others have mentioned it’s probably a shape test not an actual aircraft design.
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 thought the B-21 was going to be a pretty conservative program, so it's design will mostly follow the B-2's. It's a weird angle, but this doesn't really look like that to me.
I don't believe they need that for a movie prop...
Now that's pretty funny
The reality is that they're "attacking" in plain sight by having created one of the most viral apps ever to exist. Everybody has installed TikTok, and they're effectively running around recording information about everything and sending it back to China.
You could not make it up.
Long story short, they made sure the soviets found "updated schematics" with hidden flaws and design defects. [0]
Maybe someone is playing the same game here...
Maybe having the Soviets copy the Space Shuttle was enough to lead to the collapse of their economy.
More like let’s keep a bunch of Chinese analysts busy for a few days looking at low quality video. I’m pretty sure the US military can make sure ground troops don’t have camera phones at sensitive sites. Pat them down before they arrive on site, return their stuff after their shift ends. Done.
You didn't bring anything you weren't prepared to part with.
How smartphones or any electronics that don't belong to the facility are allowed at all is beyond me. They're perfect spying devices.
I'm curious how "secret" this aircraft is if any random base personnel can snap a pic in open air.
The TikTok TicTac!
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40003/the-worlds-most-...
To test in flight you'd need a functional aircraft as opposed to a cheap mockup. Further an aircraft in flight has to move quickly to stay aloft, and its exact position and orientation can't be precisely controlled. A model on a pylon stays put exactly where you want it for as long as you need it to.
Check your damn phone at the gate. What's so hard about that?
Having said that, there are way too many secrets out there. Maybe if the system was more open we'd have a fighting chance of cutting off waste, fraud and abuse before it metastasizes into a debilitating nightmare like the LCS. But then, I guess preventing any ebb in the flow of cash into the system is the whole point, isn't it?
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/481499210580508672/QL3y...
I remember when this issue came out on social media, we even had military checking in at bases all over, now its gps on fitbit exposing peoples locations on social media.