Sometimes the surveillance state works against the actual state. According to a report from Reuters, several branches of the military have now disabled advertising trackers on phones and computers after it was found that location information purchased through data brokers was used to target American forces in the Middle East.
Per the report, which cited a letter sent to the Department of Defense’s Inspector General by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the Air Force disabled advertising identifiers on all devices about two months ago, while Special Operations Command just “recently” disabled them on Windows machines and the Army first turned off the trackers on mobile devices earlier this year.
Wyden has been warning the military about the public availability of location data for months. Back in May, the Senator told the Pentagon in a letter that, “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.”
Wyden’s warnings follow several high-profile reports that highlight just how trivially easy it is to access data that can compromise the locations and behaviors of U.S. military members and contractors.
In 2024, Wired published a story in which it showed how commercially available data could be used to place military contractors in, among other places, German brothels. In 2021, The Wall Street Journal published a piece about how a US military contractor discovered it could track US military operations through the data generated by the apps on the phones of soldiers. Even as far back as 2018, almost a decade ago now, The Guardian was reporting on how data from the fitness app Strava could be used to identify secret U.S. military bases.
So hey, no better time than the present to fix a problem that has existed for years. Previous letters between Wyden and the military seem to suggest that US personnel in the Middle East were targeted using commercial location data.
Of course, Iran and other nations the US has been adversarial with don’t even need to spend their money on information from data brokers. Per a Reuters report from July, videos recorded and posted online by American military members in the Middle East also may have been used to identify the location of personnel, resulting in some deployed military members being asked to turn over their phones.
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