Lawmakers say Pentagon must act after smartphone data used to target U.S. troops
The ability of adversaries to use commercial location data from smartphones to find and target U.S. troops in the Middle East is a “five-alarm fire” that demands immediate action, a group of bipartisan lawmakers said Thursday.
In a letter to Kirsten A. Davies, the Defense Department’s chief information officer, the members of Congress urged the Defense Department to take multiple steps to address the growing threat posed by what’s known as “ubiquitous technical surveillance.” UTS refers to the trail, or what military officials call “digital exhaust,” produced by modern smartphones.
That includes location data collected by smartphone apps, which an adversary can easily purchase from so-called data brokers in the same way that companies buy the data in order to track consumer behavior and tailor advertisements to specific individuals.
In the letter, the lawmakers cited past examples of how commercial data was used to track phones from U.S. military bases, including at least one incident involving special forces personnel in Syria.
U.S. Navy Adm. Frank M. Bradley …
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“DoD officials have not treated this counterintelligence and force protection threat as a five-alarm fire,” reads the letter, signed by 14 lawmakers, ranging from liberal senators such as Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to conservative Republicans such as Reps. Pat Harrigan of North Carolina and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.
“DoD has known about this threat for over a decade, yet have failed to take meaningful steps to protect our men and women in uniform,” the letter reads. “That is simply unacceptable. DoD must immediately adopt common-sense cyber protections to prevent the sale of location data that can undermine national security and risk the lives of U.S. personnel.”
SEE ALSO: The danger of digital footprints: How ‘ubiquitous technical surveillance’ threatens U.S. military
Mr. Wyden also pointed to written answers from U.S. Central Command, in response to questions from his office, which confirmed that the issue is at play in the Mideast, where U.S. troops have carried out operations against Iran.
“CENTCOM has received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater,” CENTCOM said in its response to Mr. Wyden.
The group of lawmakers urged the Pentagon to disable advertising identification on all Pentagon-issued smartphones; implement a new policy mandating that advertising ID be disabled on all phones brought onto military bases or on overseas deployments; remove web browsers “designed to facilitate data collection by Google,” such as Google Chrome; and take other steps.
Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, told an audience at the recent Special Operations Forces Week convention that UTS is a serious concern for his personnel.
“We now fight in a space of pervasive surveillance, a ubiquitous information environment driven by technical surveillance. Exquisite information is no longer the guarded property of governments or of the state. It is increasingly crowdsourced, exploitable and available to anyone with the will to look,” he said in his May 19 speech to the conference in Tampa.
“We accept this passive surveillance as background in today’s modern societies,” he said. “But take that same commercial technology and apply it to the battlefield — that same tracking, the open-source data, the digital exhaust from your web searches — and drop it into that contested battlefield environment. Suddenly, that digital footprint you’ve created doesn’t generate a targeted ad. It generates a grid coordinate for a precision munition.”
