Paris, France:
Officers and crew aboard a French nuclear submarine have accidentally blown their cover as well as their location and schedule by recording their runs and jogs on a fitness app. The nuclear submarine scheduled for Russian patrol has risked leaking crucial data such as location, position, and patrol schedule to Moscow.
The mobile and smartwatch app in question is the Strava app, which allows its users to share their fitness activities and achievements online and monitor their progress worldwide. The app has a feature which includes publishing the data on a map with the accurate location where the user completed his/her/their exercise or achieved their fitness goal.
The location where the faux pas happened was the Ile Longue submarine base in Brest Harbour in France’s Finistere. The base is reportedly home to four French nuclear submarines, each carrying 16 nuclear missiles, with an explosive intensity roughly a thousand times as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Photo Credit: X / @AComprime
Out of the four nuclear submarines, nicknamed ‘black boats’, at least one of them has always been on patrol on a rotational basis since 1972. According to the doctrine they follow, called ‘permanence at sea’, their role is to disappear in the oceans such that they are in a position to launch a nuclear attack anywhere in the world within seconds of an order from the French President.
The base is home to about 2,000 military personnel and is a top secret military zone in France. It is guarded like a fortress with round-the-clock camera surveillance, continuous land and sea surveillance by drones, biometric scanners at regular intervals. Mobile phones are prohibited in the area. They must be switched off and kept in signal-proof locker facilities, which are available at check points throughout the base.
In spite of such heavy security arrangements, a careless oversight led to the sensitive information leak. The reason – smartwatches with third-party applications, used to keep health and fitness checks, could pass security without raising an alarm.
According to a report in UK’s Daily Mail, an investigation after the leaks revealed that in the last ten years, more than 450 Strava users – all from the French military – have been active in the top secret nuclear base.
In another report in French newspaper Le Monde, its journalists found that many of the military personnel did not even use pseudonyms or aliases, keeping their real identities public on the fitness app. Moreover, they even kept their profile public – effectively being visible globally.
In one of the instances, an officer went for a run along the docks where the nuclear submarines were moored. This was in January and February of 2023. He recorded these runs on 16 occasions, on different dates. On February 3, 2023 he even recorded his timing and location on the app. His account then went quiet and his usage of Strava went off radar for over a month. His activities on the app resumed again on March 25 that year.
Similar cases were recorded of two other officers who also recorded their fitness details on Strava on the same dates as the officer mentioned above. They too went off radar between February 3 and March 25 that year. This made it amply clear that all three men went on patrol aboard a nuclear submarine between those dates.
Adding to the embarrassment, one of the officers even chatted on the fitness app upon his return, saying “It’s tough to get back into sport after more than two-and-a-half months in a poo box.” He posted the message with emojis of bubbles and a scuba diving mask.
According to Le Monde’s StravaLeaks investigation, bodyguards of the French, American, and Russian Presidents also use the Strava fitness app, and the Presidents’ movements and trips could be anticipated and tracked through the bodyguards’ Strava accounts.
