Pentagon Says US Military Personnel Targeted Using Commercial Location Data (msn.com)
- Reference: 0183473090
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/05/30/2233210/pentagon-says-us-military-personnel-targeted-using-commercial-location-data
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ar-AA24gzwD
Reuters calls it "an illustration of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield."
> In a [2]letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden , an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had "received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater." The message, sent on April 14, offered no further specifics, but Centcom's area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where U.S. forces are facing off against the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz.
> The disclosure was the first official confirmation that U.S. forces had been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of legislators said in a letter sent on Thursday to the Pentagon. "Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes," the letter warned.
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> Wyden said in a statement that it was time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat."
"The letter from U.S. lawmakers to the Pentagon said that, given what military officials know about the trade in location data, they should have acted faster to protect their personnel," the artiles adds, "for example by disabling the unique advertising ID attached to military-issued devices, automatically turning off location sharing on smartphones in the field, and steering staff away from Google's Chrome web browser toward more privacy-focused alternatives."
Thanks to Slashdot reader [3]JoeyRox for sharing the article.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ar-AA24gzwD
[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28167310-department-of-defense-letter-to-ron-wyden/
[3] https://www.slashdot.org/~JoeyRox
Congress fails again and blames others (Score:4, Insightful)
Congress blames the military for not trying pitiful work-arounds like using "privacy-focused alternatives" to Google's Chrome because they failed to solve the problem at the root like other countries have and pass privacy legislation. Nice attempt at misdirection, guys. How about protecting Americans from mass surveillance and tracking by doing your job instead of big business's bidding?
Re: (Score:1)
This. Society doesn't need commercial location tracking firms (e.g., that track the general population). Ban them and require due privacy protections for digital products that use location data.
Re: Congress fails again and blames others (Score:2)
The government wants this, as its a great way to sidestep that pesky constitution and engage in warrantless mass surveillance.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the military should be more cost conscious too before you blame everything on Congress? Right now they're spending in excess of $1B per day blockading the Straight of Hormuz. Seems excessive. All these bombing campaigns that Trump is threatening other nations with also need to be planned way more efficiently, imho. Enhancing privacy for soldiers is nice, but not the biggest cost of the war.
Easy to fix! (Score:2)
This is easy to fix! Pentagon should just publish the list of the assets that they want satellite companies to avoid taking pictures of. To make it easier, they can provide bounding boxes and maybe tag them to make sure companies blur the images enough to not be recognizable.
Flock (Score:2)
So which is it, does the government love Flock data or hate it? I've lost track at this point.
The timeline is of note. (Score:2)
It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how coul
"Loose Lips Sink Ships" (Score:3)
Lessons once learned and now forgotten must be re-learned in the modern age.
Re: "Loose Lips Sink Ships" (Score:2)
Congress wouldnâ(TM)t pass legislation ensuring troops could repair their own equipment in theater, what makes you think that they will take action on this given the amount of money at stake?