Analysis: since August 2020, 100+ warships from 16+ countries have had GPS-based location data faked to make it look like they crossed into disputed territory
The latest weapons in the global information war are fake vessels behaving badly. — ON SEPTEMBER 17 last year … Tweets: @essexcanning and @brbarrett Tweets: Stephen Canning / @essexcanning : The latest weapons in the global information war are fake vessels behaving badly. https://www.wired.com/... Brian Barrett / @brbarrett : Someone's been faking the locations of aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and more to make it look like they crossed into disputed territory—even though they're hundreds of miles away in real life. Wild scoop from @meharris https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The falsification of warship locations did not come out of nowhere. Earlier research documented more than 9,800 GPS spoofing instances since 2016, mostly shielding sensitive military and VIP movement in Russia, and thousands of ships in Shanghai caught unexplained spoofing at the world's busiest port. What the Wired analysis adds is intent: since August 2020, over 100 warships from 16+ countries were not accidentally lost — their AIS tracks were edited to place them inside disputed territory.
That shift from defensive masking to offensive narrative-making was confirmed two years on, when US officials said sanctioned countries were manipulating AIS to evade international law, and the blast radius has since widened well past navies — an analysis found roughly 40M people living with unreliable GPS for at least half of six months.
First-order effects
- Any state or analyst relying on AIS tracks to attribute warship movements in disputed waters now has to treat every position as potentially fabricated — the named navies whose locations were faked are being placed in confrontations they never physically entered.
Second-order effects
- Verification work migrates from public ship-tracking feeds to corroborating sources such as radar, satellite imagery, and military statements, raising costs for insurers, journalists, and governments that built monitoring on open AIS data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, GPS-based systems stop functioning as neutral shared infrastructure: location data becomes a contested information-war surface, pushing states toward hardened alternatives and eroding trust in any single-source positioning claim.
The trend: GPS and AIS are shifting from trusted global utilities into instruments and targets of information warfare, with spoofing spreading from protecting military movements to manufacturing false provocations.