American troops in the Middle East are still posting their workouts to Strava, leaving their movements and daily routines available to anyone who bothers to look.
That includes Iran.
An investigation found more than 1,300 Strava users sharing thousands of workouts from U.S. military installations across the Middle East. Most were posting under their real names. The data included exact routes and times, movements between bases and, in some cases, activity at installations that aren't even labeled on public maps.
One of the more alarming examples came from Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan.
Before the war with Iran began, personnel posted hundreds of workouts from across the base. The posts stopped when fighting started in February, then resumed during the April ceasefire. But the routes had changed. Seventy-six percent of the new workouts began or ended near barracks on the eastern side of the base, effectively indicating where personnel had been relocated.
A publicly accessible workout was posted from the base on July 16. Iran attacked those barracks the next day, killing three American soldiers.
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There is no evidence that Iran used Strava to select the target. But the information was publicly available one day before the attack.
RedState reported on the attack and the American deaths at the time.
A Navy contractor assigned to the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain, also regularly posted runs from the naval base. About a week before the war began, the posts stopped. Two days later, his Strava account showed him running laps around the courtyard of the Crowne Plaza hotel, where military personnel had been relocated.
Six days later, Iran bombed the hotel during attacks on the naval base. Two Pentagon employees were reportedly wounded. Again, reporters found no evidence that Iran followed the contractor's account. The account nevertheless provided a publicly accessible trail from the base to the hotel before Iran struck it.
Eighteen service members have been killed since the war began.
The Pentagon knew it was happening. USCENTCOM reportedly has "received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater."
Other users repeatedly posted routes from bases in several countries. Some uploaded photographs showing people in Army physical fitness clothing or military-style equipment. One geotagged activity included a photograph taken inside a base fitness area.
The Pentagon has known about the problem for years.
In August 2018, after Strava's global heat map exposed activity around military installations, the Deputy Secretary of Defense prohibited personnel from using geolocation features on government-issued or personal devices while in designated operational areas.
These geolocation capabilities can expose personal information, locations, routines, and numbers of DoD personnel, and potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission.
And yet, the problem persists.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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