The Pentagon Knew Enemies Could Track Troops’ Phones for Years. Now They Are
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. Now the bill has come due in a war zone. 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. But the confirmation lands atop a record that is longer and more damning than the single document suggests. 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. Yet comprehensive privacy legislation has repeatedly stalled in Washington, and the one …
