356
French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle tracked via Strava activity in OPSEC failure (securityaffairs.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
51 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 94 points 6 months ago (21 children)

As funny as that is, something tells me it’s not that hard to spot an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 21 child comments
    •
  • [–] 69 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (19 children)

    You have to be in visual range, or radar range if you have one, which is the horizon plus a bit more depending how high above sea level your are and how tall your target is.

    If you're on a ship, unless you're using an advanced radar that bounces signals against the ionosphere or you have a meteorological phenomena called an inversion which can curve your radar energy over the horizon a little bit, your radar horizon is surprisingly short, something around 12 nautical miles give or take. And the sea is big and Iran is quite far.

    This is one big reason why aircraft are used for surveillance at sea. They can go much higher than any ship's radar antenna mast every could be which significantly expands their radar horizon. They can also scan a huge area relatively quickly as they can travel much faster.

    Because if this fuck up, Iran now has the intel that the French carrier is approaching without even having to send an aircraft out to look for it. If they even still have the ability to do so at this point.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 19 child comments
    •
  • [–] 34 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    So satellites can see my truck's plate but an aircraft carrier and it's escrow fleet are too... Small?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
    •
  • [–] 36 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    Sort of. Satellite resources are surprisingly scarce, so a lot are focused where people are, i.e. land. Plus, for the imagery sats that are focused on the ocean, ships are also tiny in a literal ocean of blue. It's just a spec. While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec. That's why most countries use signal collection to locate vessels at sea. (I'm over-simplifying a lot, but you get the picture)

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

    While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec.

    Seems like an simple but tedious job. Something that a computer can do.

    Object detection algorithms are incredibly fast and can learn to tell the difference between an aircraft carrier and an ocean.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    There are a surprising amount of false positives when using object detection on maritime imagery. While a carrier is a spec, there are a ton of specs in the ocean that can look similar enough. Plus, weather has a huge hand to play. If it were always perfectly clear, then it's an easier problem, but one cloud can really mess up the detection. Ultimately, ship detection is a difficult problem (not intractable but still hard).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    False positives are fine, you assign 1, 10, 50, 100 analysts to review hits. You only need to find it once, then the search area becomes incredibly small for each subsequent satellite pass.

    I'm not saying that it is easy, just that you don't need to have a surface ship within 15 nm in order to see it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    I'm not saying that it is easy

    It kind of sounds like you're saying that. Anyways, there's a reason submarines exist

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    It is simple, it is not easy.

    'Take a picture of the entire ocean and look for ships' is simple, but executing that plan is not.

    It requires hundreds of millions of dollars of reconnaissance satellites, and an entire branch of personnel to operate and digest the information.

    This is why the US operates carrier battle groups instead of just sailing their carriers everywhere with a small escort. They can't hide, but they can pack enough offensive and defensive power into a tiny area to make most attacks infeasible.

    Anyways, there’s a reason submarines exist

    True, and even they're vulnerable when they surface (if they're moving), the v-shaped wake is also very detectable from space where satellites can detect wave heights within 3cm. It's not easy for humans to find, but with billions of dollars to spend on computers, these kinds of things are very much within the reach of sovereign nations.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I agree with the premise of "simple but hard". However, I still want to underscore that large areas of the ocean will at any given time be covered in clouds or fog. Sure, once you find the ship the first time, you've narrowed your search radius significantly, but a ship that can move at 30 knots can move around 1500 nautical miles (2800 km) without being seen under just 48 hours of cloud cover. That means any intel on the position of a ship carrying weapons that can easily strike at ranges of 500-1000 km is fresh produce. Just a day after you spotted that ship, it can have moved almost 1500 km, and if you lose track of it under clouds during your next satellite pass, it can suddenly be 3000 km from where you last spotted it.

    What this means is that the "hard" element here is significant. Even the "simple" element becomes complicated by stuff like night time and cloud cover. All this taken into account, there are very few countries in the world with enough surveillance satellites and processing capacity to actually keep a pin on a ship at sea over any significant period of time.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    You still need to know where to point that spy satellite's camera at. If you take picture that covers hundreds of square kilometers then you don't have enough resolution to spot the ship but you can't zoom in much either because you don't know where to zoom.

    It's different with buildings because you know where they are.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 20 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    why don't ships at sea simply disguise themselves as a rock or shrubbery?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

    Or as a duck if they need to move.

    BTW sweden have some cool ship disguises.

    Edit: went looking for it, couldn't even find a photo.

    Yeah, that's how good they are.

    Found an old, not very effective but fun one:

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    The Swedish Navy's ships do have some bonkers designs, like massive barcodes printed on the side. It's so that when they get back to port they can scan the navy in.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    Because if this fuck up, Iran now has the intel that the French carrier is approaching without even having to send an aircraft out to look for it.

    It wasn't exactly a secret, France publicly announced it was being moved to the eastern med

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent