Exclusive-Pentagon says US military personnel are reportedly being targeted using location data
By Raphael Satter
WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) – U.S. forces deployed to war zones were targeted using commercially available location data, according to reports provided by military officials; This is an example of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield.
In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had “received numerous threat reports of hostile exploitation of commercial location data to target or spy on U.S. personnel in attack.” The message sent on April 14 did not provide further details, but Centcom’s area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where US forces are confronting the Iranian military on the Strait of Hormuz.
Wyden and a bipartisan group of lawmakers said in a letter sent to the Pentagon on Thursday that the announcement was the first official confirmation that U.S. forces were targeted in an active war zone.
“Commercial location data can be used to determine where U.S. troops are concentrated and their lifestyles, which can be used by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, and for counterintelligence purposes,” the letter said. Wyden said in a statement that it was time to “start viewing the adtech industry as a national security threat.”
The Pentagon did not respond to messages seeking comment. Efforts to obtain more information from military officials about the reported targeting were unsuccessful, the lawmakers said in their letter.
LOCATION DATA TRADING RAISES PRIVACY CONCERNS
Location data is widely used in digital advertising, a major source of revenue for many technology companies. This type of data is typically collected from: smartphones or by applications or service providers before other devices are sold to data brokers who collect and resell data, sometimes through complex networks of intermediaries.
Although the threat to privacy of selling details of people’s daily movements on the open market has long been a matter of public debate, its potential to be a national security risk has also recently raised concerns.
In 2016, a U.S. defense contractor was able to leverage commercially available location data to track special operations forces from their U.S. base to a sensitive outpost in Syria, according to an account first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
More recently, journalists at Wired and two German news outlets leveraged billions of coordinates collected by a data broker to reveal detailed inflows and outflows of people stationed in or around 11 U.S. Military and intelligence centers in Germany.
Two groups representing digital advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, did not respond to emails seeking comment.
The letter from US lawmakers to the Pentagon stated that, given what military officials knew about the trading of location data, they needed to act faster to protect their personnel; for example, by disabling the unique advertising ID added to military devices, automatically turning off location sharing on smartphones in the field, and directing personnel from Google’s Chrome web browser to more privacy-focused alternatives.
One of the signatories of the letter was U.S. Rep. Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican who was previously a U.S. Army Special Forces officer. Harrigan said browsers like Chrome were “built from the ground up to collect and share user data” and that “every day they remain on government-issued devices” is “another day we give our enemies a weapon against our own troops.”
Alphabet’s Google said in a statement that Chrome has “industry-leading security.” The company added that it has “long advocated for stronger rules and protections against data brokers.”
(Reporting by Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
