U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging - Connor Norton

A few months back the GPS tracking company Strava, using data from such hit technologies as the Fitbit exercise watch, published an interactive "Global Heat Map" showing bright red lines where users have been jogging or at least fast-walking. This is all good fun when people look at residential America, at this point just giant blobs of red where multitudes of people have been running around for months while wearing fitness trackers; this becomes a problem, however, when you look on the map at less-industrialized countries (the citizens of which can't afford or don't want Fitbits). This is because, as the Pentagon was no doubt shocked to find out, people can find secret US military bases in the Middle East by looking for the little red lines. An Australian first pointed out this out when he was looking at the map and was able to draw an outline of the Kandahar Air Base, and although this base was already known about by the public, it turned out to reveal a little too much information: not only did it mean ordinary people can find secret bases, it also means looking for lines drawn out around the bases in a loop or in straight lines could show patrol or trade routes! This is ubiquity pf watches is partly due to the popularity of said fitness watches, but is also because of a military agenda pushing Fitbits into the hands of soldiers in an attempt to promote personal fitness; but in the end it left the military vulnerable to the growing publicity of information that's become a hallmark of this day and age.

This kind of event is a powerful reminder that people and the institutions they run have to adopt to the changing times and the technologies they bring, or else they face being put at a disadvantage or even at risk. Here that risk is in the form of giving possible enemies a wealth of sensitive information in an era in which it has never been easier to share such info, but such a technological disadvantage has happened before; for example, during the Second World War, the Allies were sharing information via an old and outdated system of codes that the Germans were easily able to crack; this put a lot of people in danger and was a terrible strategic failure. Still, due to a rise in efforts to combat the Germans' superior communication abilities, the Allied powers were able to develop new and innovative codes to stump the Germans (see: the Navajo Code Talkers) and even break the unbreakable German codes themselves (see: the enigma machine, Bombe, and Alan Turing). Seeing the outcome of that war, it may be wise for the modern military to follow in its predecessor's footsteps (in this way at least).