I just thought about the fact that now, in the time of social media, you constantly see footage of the current ongoing wars. Scrolling through my feed constantly see images and videos form Israel and Ukraine. And other than in older wars, the footage is not only carefully crafted propaganda, but also things normal soldiers shot on their phones. So the question came up which impact this new source of intel has on the actual ongoing combat. How many people have died because of social media posts? Have there been IRL stream snipes?
Yes, during the first few months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine there was an airstrike on a school gymnasium that was serving as a muster point for volunteer troops. One (likely more) of the people posted a tik-tok of the gym and even hashtagged it so it was easily found and geolocated.
you’ll have to forgive me for being short on sources off the top of my head (and I don’t care enough to go looking for them again) but I can remember a few different instances of this happening in recent memory. One being a fitness tracking app showing soldiers doing laps around the perimeter of a secret military base, another being either Russians or Ukrainians (probably Russians) being morons with their smartphones and getting an airstrike called on them for it. I recall, also, that (I think) ISIS once posted a video of a training camp and within a couple days 4chan had identified the location of it based on the geographical features shown and got it bombed.
I don’t care enough to go find the sources, this is just what I remember reading about, someone who gives more of a fuck will have to verify for me; but in short: yes. Perhaps not exactly “stream sniping” in the sense of actively livestreaming your position as an attack comes in, but certainly, modern technology has made it easier than ever for your OPSEC to be absolute utter dogshit.
steam snipes
Not relevant to the question itself but this phenomenon is called stReam sniping because it took off when live streams of videogames became popular.
Oh, true. It seems like my phone keyboard messed that up
In the US Gulf War in 1991 they had journalists embedded with soldiers broadcasting live as the attacks were launched. There was a fairly well-known incident (which I can’t seem to find anything about just now) in which some dumb-ass on CNN said where the group he was with was and what they were about to do on live TV and there was a big stink about it. I dunno if anyone was actually hurt as a result, but the potential was definitely there.
It has an impact. There was a case a couple of years ago about a large Russian contingent of new arrivals to the front line getting HIMARS’d due to a social media post revealing their location. SBU are efficient in this regard.
I’d qualify this statement as IRL literal stream sniping because I’d call things like people stalking IRL streamers to show up on camera “stream sniping” as well.
