Pentagon Knows Adversaries Can Track Military Phones For Years Now They Are

For about a Ten years ago, the Pentagon was warned – by its contractors, experts, and intelligence agencies – that anyone with a credit card could buy a map of the location of the American military. sleeping, working, and storing nuclear weapons. Now the bill has come because of the war.

A a new letter shows the warnings were not heeded: the US Central Command has now confirmed that it has received “several threat reports about adversaries using commercial location data to monitor or track US personnel in the theater” – the first acknowledgment that commercial assets are being used to target American soldiers in the Middle East.

The goal was it was first reported by Reuterswhich received Centcom’s letter. But the confirmation reaches a much longer and more dangerous level than the single document suggests.

For ten years, US lawmakers have heard the same warnings about the dangers of commercial data that the Pentagon did—from the same intelligence studies, from witnesses, from colleagues. Yet privacy laws have repeatedly stalled in Washington, and the narrowest fix that was made — the requirement that information shared with military contractors not be resold — left a major project untouched.

One of the first warnings came in 2016. At the Joint Special Operations Command compound in Fort Bragg, California, a government engineer informing senior government officials showed how commercial data—purchased, not hacked—could track calls from Fort Bragg and MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, the most elite American destination, through Syria, where they are operating in northern Syria. The same was available to any marketer or foreign intelligence service.

Although the Pentagon has been warned that the data-space market is putting its people at risk, parts of the department are eager to become its customers. The Defense Intelligence Agency revealed to Congress in 2021 that it uses the location data of commercially-purchased phones—including Americans—without consent, assuming that there is no requirement. A few months ago, Motherboard reported that the US military was buying land harvested from popular shopping programs.

In 2023, the Army paid for the threat to be reported. Researchers at Duke University—working with the support of the US Military Academy at West Point—he set out to buy American members’ information as a foreign enemy would do. They crawled hundreds of data broker websites and found thousands of listings for military information, including listings called “Military Families Mailing List” and “Hard Core Military Families.”

The researchers started shopping. For just 12 cents a record, without voting, they bought names, home addresses, health, and financial information for active duty soldiers. Acting as buyers working in the Singapore-based area, they also found the same type of data that was stored at Fort Bragg, Quantico, and other installations. One seller offered to skip his check if he paid by wire.

After one year, WIRED has found it the same type of data flowing through Google’s advertising platform. Working with information provided by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties – in which the researcher obtained the US broker’s list of listeners on behalf of a fake company – WIRED identified “sections” of advertising on Google’s Display & Video 360 that selected US government employees who appear to be “decision makers” who work “mainly in the national security forces” missiles, aerial vehicles, and hidden systems that protect confidential data.

A researcher for the Irish Council for Civil Liberties said he hoped his cover story would be tried. “When I signed up, there were no questions asked,” he told WIRED at the time. “I could be anyone.”