Ready for the understatement of the year? The United States military has lots of secrets. Many of them we understand, and kind of know about already. Like the fact that there is a jet that can go higher, faster, and blow more stuff up than the most advanced jet you know about. That’s the jet that’s still top secret. Eventually, it will get out and they’ll have something else secret waiting in the wings ready to take its place.
What you’ve got to understand about military secrecy is, it isn’t always about pulling off nefarious deeds on the public. Sometimes it is but conventional military secrecy is not about giving sections of the population Lyme Disease. Conventional military secrecy is just about having a weapon that the enemy in any given situation doesn’t know about. It gives the armed forces the ability to turn up the heat on an enemy just a few degrees higher than they can stand at a critical moment when it will turn the tide of a battle.
Okay, that said, there are a ton of US military bases all over the world that no one except authorized persons are supposed to know about. Well guess what… we know about them now. All of them! Why?
Because personnel on these bases have been using FitBit trackers to monitor their workouts and FitBit publishes the routes that the users of their products run.
Did your brain just flip over inside your head? Ours did when we found out about this.
What’s FitBit, you say? We’re glad you asked. FitBit is a very, (stress on the word ‘very’) popular fitness tracking service. They sell and provide service for wearable mobile devices that have kinetic sensors that track the user’s activity whilst exercising and during other activities as well.
Part of the FitBit value proposition is the ability to map, measure, track, and time yourself on specific routes that you create and run yourself. Users can also see the performance of other people who have run the same course as you and other courses. You can look at the courses people are setting up for themselves all over the world… no matter where they are. Yes, even on secret military bases.
Alright, so this is where it gets funny.
Military personnel working on secret military bases all over the world have been using these GPS enabled wireless, Internet-capable fitness trackers. If you went on the FitBit website, before the images were taken down, you could find courses people ran in spots like Antarctica, right in the middle of areas that are blacked out. The courses outlined by the service clearly trace streets inside bases and their perimeters.
So the military went into total panic mode over this. Suddenly, their super-secret bases were not secret anymore. They did not see this revolution in mobile fitness tracking tech basically giving the whole world schematic images of their top secret bases. But it has, and now they don’t know what to do.
The locations of some of the most sensitive military bases outlined by FitBit equipped runners include Iraq, Syria, North Africa, and others. Of course, the one in Antarctica is especially interesting for a host of reasons.
But wait, there’s more. The FitBit revelations were a big deal. By and large, the military understood that it was a mistake. The maps were taken down although, certainly people hostile to the US military recorded the info first and some people were disciplined. FitBit devices were banned on US bases and everybody assumed the problem was solved.
Except it wasn’t solved, because it happened again. This time the service involved was Polar Flow. Practically identical to FitBit, Polar Flow revealed even more detail and even more bases. But it does more. According to a Dutch news site, the app and devices “let anyone find names and addresses for thousands of soldiers and secret agents.”
In an official response to the story, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence said, “The use of personal fitness and similar devices by individuals engaged in US Government support is determined and directed by each agency and department.”
Naturally, the military wants to portray themselves as having complete control over the situation. Maybe they do…now. But they will certainly have to institute some solid measures to stop these kinds of devices being used by troops on bases in the future. Anything less would be the same as handing tactical information to our enemies all over the world.
~ American Liberty Report
