Pentagon · Google · Wired · U.S. · U.S. Central Command · Wired
A year later, WIRED found the same kind of data flowing through Google's own advertising platform
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The Irish Council for Civil Liberties investigator said he expected to have his cover story tested.
Key facts
- Researchers at Duke University—working under a grant from the US Military Academy at West Point— set out to buy data on American service members the way a foreign adversary
- The Defense Intelligence Agency disclosed to Congress in 2021 that it uses commercially purchased phone location data—including on Americans—without a warrant, taking the position that none
- In 2023, the Army paid to have the threat spelled out
- For as little as 12 cents a record, with almost no vetting, they purchased names, home addresses, health conditions, and financial details on active-duty troops
Summary
For nearly a decade, the Pentagon was warned—by its own contractors, analysts, and intelligence agencies—that anyone with a credit card could buy a map of where American troops sleep, work, and store nuclear weapons. A newly disclosed letter shows the warnings went unheeded: US Central Command now confirms it has received “multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater”—the first official acknowledgment that the data-broker economy is being used to hunt American forces in the Middle East. The targeting was first reported by Reuters, which obtained the Centcom letter. For the better part of a decade, US lawmakers have heard the same alarms about the dangers of commercially available location data that the Pentagon did—from the same intelligence assessments, from witnesses, from their own colleagues. One of the earliest warnings came in 2016.