You know, Herman, I was looking at some footage from a conflict zone the other day, just scrolling through a news feed, and it struck me how much our instinct to document everything has changed the nature of the home front. We have this almost reflexive need to pull out the phone the second something extraordinary happens. It is like we are not fully experiencing an event unless we are viewing it through a five-inch screen and hitting the upload button.
Herman Poppleberry here. And you are absolutely right, Corn. It is a fundamental shift in human behavior that has happened in the blink of an eye, historically speaking. We used to be spectators, then we became chroniclers, and now, in this year of twenty twenty-six, every citizen with a smartphone has the potential to be an unintentional intelligence asset for the opposing side. It is a concept called participatory intelligence, but without the consent or often the awareness of the participant. Today's prompt from Daniel is about exactly that, focusing on the critical importance of Info Sec and Op Sec—that is Information Security and Operational Security—for the average citizen during wartime.
It is a heavy topic, but a necessary one, especially given the global climate right now. Daniel specifically mentioned the directives we see here in Israel about not publishing the locations of interceptions or missile strikes. Most people hear those warnings on the news or see the pop-ups from the Home Front Command and think, okay, I should probably not do that. But they might not fully grasp the why behind it. They might think, well, the enemy already knows where they fired the rocket, they have the coordinates, so what does it matter if I post a video of it landing or getting blown up in the sky?
That is the big misconception right there, Corn. It is the "Perfect Knowledge" fallacy. People assume the enemy has perfect, real-time vision of the battlefield or the city they are targeting. In reality, especially with long-range fire, the attacker is often working with a significant degree of uncertainty. They have the launch coordinates, and they have the intended target coordinates, but they do not necessarily have a high-resolution, real-time confirmation of where that projectile actually hit. They are essentially firing into a black box and hoping their math was right.
So, when someone posts a video on Telegram or X, formerly Twitter, or even a quick story on Instagram that shows a strike hitting the corner of two specific streets, what is actually happening on the other side? Are they literally sitting there with a map, adjusting their aim based on a teenager's viral video?
In many cases, yes. It is a process called Battle Damage Assessment, or B D A. In traditional warfare, you would send a scout plane or a high-altitude drone to see where your artillery shells landed so you could correct the fire. If you are a few hundred meters off to the north, you adjust the coordinates for the next round. But if you are a non-state actor or a military force firing into a city from a long distance, you might not have a drone over the target because of air defenses. You are blind.
But you do have millions of people with smartphones and high-speed internet who are more than happy to show you exactly what happened.
Exactly. You have a distributed network of millions of high-definition sensors. If I fire a salvo of ten rockets and I can see from social media within ninety seconds that five were intercepted over a specific neighborhood and one hit an open field three hundred meters short of a power station, I have just received the most valuable gift an artillery officer can get. I have confirmation of the accuracy of my weapons and, perhaps more importantly, I have just mapped the current coverage and density of the air defense systems.
That is a point I think people miss. It is not just about where the rocket hits; it is about where it gets intercepted. If I post a video of an Iron Dome or an Iron Beam interception—which we are seeing more of lately—I am basically telling the enemy, hey, there is a battery active right here, and it is capable of covering this specific trajectory at this specific altitude.
Precisely. You are revealing the geometry of the defense. If the enemy sees that interceptions are consistently happening at a certain altitude and location, their A I-driven analysis tools can start to calculate the blind spots or the saturation points of that defense system. They can say, okay, if we fire from a slightly different angle or at a lower trajectory, we might bypass that specific battery. Your thirty-second video of a cool explosion in the sky is actually a vital data point in a very lethal geometry problem. By twenty twenty-six, the speed at which this data is processed is staggering. An image posted on a public channel can be geolocated and fed into a targeting algorithm in under three minutes.
Daniel also brought up an interesting point about the parameters of this information. When does it stop being sensitive? We see this happen all the time. A building gets hit, it is under a gag order or military censorship for a few hours, and then suddenly, the news is allowed to show it. The reporters are standing right there. What changes in those few hours?
It is a matter of tactical utility versus public record. Information has a half-life. Its value to the enemy is highest in the seconds and minutes immediately following an event. That is when it is actionable. If they know they just missed a high-value target—say, a specific command center or a piece of infrastructure—by fifty meters, they can try to fire again immediately before the target moves or the defenses are reinforced. But three hours later? The target is gone, the first responders have already cleared the area, and the tactical window has closed. The information has moved from the realm of "intelligence" to the realm of "history."
So the censorship is not necessarily about hiding the fact that something happened, because you cannot hide a smoking building in the middle of a major city. It is about delaying the confirmation. It is about starving the enemy of the "Real-Time" aspect.
Right. It is about introducing friction into the enemy's decision-making loop. We call it the O O D A loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. By denying them real-time social media confirmation, you are forcing them to rely on slower or less reliable forms of intelligence. You are making them wait. And in war, waiting can be the difference between a successful follow-up strike and a wasted one. It gives the defense time to reset, to move assets, and to prepare for the next wave.
I want to go back to the visual aspect Daniel mentioned. He talked about how groups like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps often blur the horizon in their launch videos. He even wondered if cloud formations could be used as actionable information. That sounds like something out of a spy novel, Herman. Is it actually possible to geolocate someone based on the shape of a cloud?
It sounds like science fiction, Corn, but it is very much science fact. It falls under the umbrella of G E O I N T, or Geospatial Intelligence. There are communities of open-source intelligence researchers—O S I N T—who are incredibly skilled at this. They use a technique called shadowgrammetry, where they look at the length and angle of shadows to determine the exact time of day and the latitude and longitude of a photo. They can look at the reflection in a soldier's sunglasses to see the layout of a base.
Okay, but clouds? They move. They change every second.
They do, but if you have a video of a rocket launch and you can see a specific, unique cloud formation, an analyst can compare that to high-resolution satellite imagery from that exact time. Satellites are constantly taking pictures of cloud cover for weather and surveillance. If the cloud pattern in your video matches a pattern seen by a satellite over a specific ten-square-kilometer area at ten fifteen A M, the search area for that launch site just narrowed down from an entire country to a single hillside.
That is incredible. And honestly, a bit terrifying. It means there is no such thing as a "generic" background.
Exactly. And it is not just clouds. It is the silhouette of a mountain in the distance, the specific type of vegetation, the way the power lines are strung, or even the reflection in a window. If you take a picture of a missile interception from your balcony, you might think you are just showing the sky. But if the edge of your neighbor's roof is in the frame, or a distinctive streetlamp, someone can use Google Street View or more advanced twenty twenty-six mapping tools to find your exact apartment. Now they know exactly where that interception took place relative to a fixed point on the ground. They have just turned your balcony into a survey marker for their artillery.
This brings up the safe shelter issue Daniel mentioned. This one feels particularly dark. He suggested that the locations of safe shelters might be sensitive information to prevent sabotage. But beyond sabotage, there is the risk of what we might call civilian density mapping.
That is a very grim but accurate way to put it. If an adversary is looking to maximize casualties or cause psychological terror, knowing where people congregate during an alarm is high-value intelligence. If every time the siren goes off, people in a certain neighborhood head to a specific underground parking garage or a community center, and that information is shared or documented online, that location becomes a high-priority target. You are essentially telling the enemy where the highest concentration of people will be at the exact moment their missiles arrive.
It turns a place of safety into a vulnerability. It is the ultimate betrayal of the community's security.
Exactly. Operational security for a civilian is not just about protecting military secrets. It is about protecting the patterns of life that keep you safe. When we talk about information security, we often think about passwords, two-factor authentication, and encryption. But in a conflict, your location and your movement patterns are your most sensitive data. If you post a photo of your kids in a shelter, you might be intending to show resilience, but you are also broadcasting a vulnerability.
I think we should address the psychological side of this, which Daniel touched on. There is this natural instinct to document and chronicle. We are living through history, and we want to record it. For some, it is a way of processing the trauma. For others, it is about showing the world the reality of what they are facing—the "look what they are doing to us" factor. How do we balance that very human need with the cold, hard requirements of operational security?
It is a difficult tension, Corn. We have been talking for years on this show about how social media has gamified our attention. The hit of dopamine you get from a viral post or a hundred likes is a powerful motivator. In a high-stress situation like a war, that need for validation or connection can be even stronger. You want to say, I am here, I saw this, I am alive, and I want you to see it too.
And there is also the feeling of powerlessness. You cannot stop the rockets, you cannot change the geopolitics, but you can capture them on film. It feels like you are doing something, even if that something is actually making the situation more dangerous for everyone around you. It is a false sense of agency.
Right. It is a form of agency in a situation where you have very little. But we have to reframe what it means to be a responsible citizen in the digital age. In World War Two, the slogan was "Loose Lips Sink Ships." It was a simple, catchy way to remind people that seemingly harmless talk in a pub could have lethal consequences. Today, we need a digital version of that. Maybe, "Loose Posts Cost Lives"?
It does not quite have the same ring to it, but the sentiment is identical. I think part of the problem is that the consequences are so abstracted. If I post a video and then two days later a building three blocks away gets hit, I will never know if my video contributed to that. There is no feedback loop for the person posting the information, only for the enemy receiving it. You never see the direct line between your "upload" and the enemy's "fire" command.
That is the insidious nature of it. It is a one-way street of intelligence. And it is not just about the big, dramatic things like missile strikes. It is also about the small things. Moving military equipment on the highway. A group of soldiers eating at a local restaurant. A photo of a temporary checkpoint. All of these things are pieces of a puzzle. An individual piece might look like nothing—just a photo of a tank on a trailer—but when an adversary's intelligence unit aggregates thousands of these posts using A I and machine learning, a very clear, real-time picture of troop movements and strategic priorities begins to emerge. They can see where the weight of the military is shifting before the generals even finish the deployment.
We have actually seen this in other recent conflicts, right? Where soldiers themselves were posting to TikTok or Instagram and inadvertently giving away their positions. It is not just the civilians; it is the professionals too.
Oh, absolutely. The war in Ukraine was a masterclass in the dangers of poor operational security, and we are seeing those lessons being applied—or ignored—in twenty twenty-six. We have seen instances where a soldier's fitness tracker data was used to identify a secret base because they were running laps around the perimeter every morning at six A M. We have seen strikes called in on positions because a soldier posted a selfie with a recognizable landmark or even a specific type of tree in the background. It is a constant battle between the desire for personal expression and the basic need for survival.
So, if we are looking for practical takeaways for the average person, it seems like the first rule is: delay, delay, delay. If you must post, do it long after the event has passed.
That is a great rule of thumb. If you feel that burning need to share, wait twenty-four hours. Or better yet, forty-eight. By then, the tactical value of the information has likely plummeted. But even then, you should be careful. Ask yourself, what am I actually showing? Am I showing a street sign? A distinctive building? A military vehicle? If you are filming from your window, are you showing the view that could be used to triangulate your building?
And what about the metadata? We have talked about this before, but it is worth reiterating. Most smartphones embed G P S coordinates into the photo file itself.
Yes, the E X I F data. Most major social media platforms like X or Facebook will strip that data out when you upload the photo to protect privacy, but not all of them do. And if you are sending photos through messaging apps like Telegram or WhatsApp, that data might still be there depending on your settings. If you send a high-resolution image of a strike to a group chat, you might be handing over the exact G P S coordinates of the impact site—down to the centimeter—without even realizing it. You are basically doing the enemy's job for them.
It feels like the safest bet is just to not take the photo in the first place. But I know that is a big ask for people in twenty twenty-six. We are conditioned to document.
It is a huge ask. But think of it this way: when you are in a conflict zone, you are not just a private citizen anymore. You are part of a collective defense. Your information security is your neighbor's physical security. If we can shift the culture to where posting real-time combat footage is seen as socially irresponsible—like driving drunk or littering—we might see a real change in behavior. It needs to be a social taboo.
I like that analogy. It is a matter of public safety. And it is also about trusting the official channels. In Israel, the Home Front Command is very specific about what can and cannot be shared. They are not trying to be killjoys or hide the truth; they are trying to manage the information environment to keep people alive. They are trying to keep the "black box" as dark as possible for the enemy.
Exactly. They have a bird's-eye view of the intelligence situation that we simply do not have. If they say, do not post videos of interceptions, it is because they know that those videos are being used to calibrate the next salvo. It is a direct link between your social media feed and the next siren you hear. If you provide the B D A for the first rocket, you are essentially aiming the second one.
What about the role of the platforms themselves? We have seen some efforts to curb the spread of sensitive information, but it is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. Can the platforms do more?
It is incredibly difficult for the platforms to moderate this in real-time. By the time an automated system flags a video of a missile strike, it has already been seen, downloaded, and mirrored by thousands of people, including intelligence analysts who are specifically looking for it. The speed of the internet is simply faster than the speed of most moderation systems. That is why the responsibility ultimately has to rest with the user. You are the first line of defense.
You know, Herman, we have talked about this in the context of state actors, but what about the psychological impact on the population? When you see a constant stream of strikes and interceptions on your phone, even if they are not in your immediate area, it creates a sense of omnipresent danger. It feels like the whole world is exploding.
That is a very important point, Corn. This kind of raw, uncurated information feed contributes to a state of constant high alert. It is a form of secondary trauma. By following operational security guidelines, we are not just helping the military; we are also helping ourselves and our community maintain some level of psychological resilience. We are choosing not to amplify the chaos. We are choosing to wait for verified, contextualized information rather than reacting to every grainy video that pops up.
It is about reclaiming our attention and our sense of safety. Instead of being a passive conduit for the enemy's battle damage assessment, we can choose to be active participants in our own defense by simply staying off the phone and focusing on the immediate safety of our families.
Precisely. It is a form of digital discipline. It is not glamorous, it does not get you likes, and it does not make you feel like a "citizen journalist," but it is one of the most effective things a civilian can do during a time of war. It is the twenty-first-century version of turning off the lights during a blackout. You are making yourself and your city a harder target.
We have covered a lot of ground here, from the technicalities of geospatial intelligence and shadowgrammetry to the psychological drivers of social media use. I think it is clear that information security is no longer just for spies and I T professionals. It is a basic civic duty in the twenty-first century. It is part of the social contract now.
It really is. And as the technology gets more sophisticated, as A I becomes more capable of stitching together disparate data points—a cloud here, a shadow there, a streetlamp there—into a coherent, actionable picture, the importance of individual operational security is only going to grow. We have to be as smart as our smartphones. We have to realize that every byte of data we put into the world can be weaponized if it falls into the wrong hands.
That is a good line, Herman. We should probably wrap it up there before I start trying to come up with more slogans that do not rhyme.
Fair enough. But before we go, I want to reiterate how much we appreciate everyone listening and engaging with these topics. It is through these discussions that we can all become a little more informed and a little more prepared for the complex world we live in. Op Sec is not about fear; it is about empowerment through caution.
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Stay safe out there, keep your data close, and think before you post. Goodbye, everyone.
Goodbye!
