‘Five-alarm fire’: Lawmakers say Pentagon must act after smartphone data used to target U.S. troops

The Washington Times  |  Ben Wolfgang

A bipartisan group of lawmakers warned that adversaries' ability to use commercial smartphone location data to find and target U.S. troops in the Middle East constitutes a “five-alarm fire” demanding immediate action. In a letter to Defense Department CIO Kirsten A. Davies, 14 members of Congress urged the DoD to address “ubiquitous technical surveillance” (UTS), or “digital exhaust,” which includes location data easily purchased from data brokers.

Past incidents involved tracking special forces in Syria, and U.S. Central Command confirmed multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to surveil U.S. personnel in the Mideast, where operations against Iran occur. Lawmakers criticized the DoD for failing to act on this decade-old threat, proposing measures like disabling advertising identification on Pentagon-issued phones, mandating this for all phones on bases/deployments, and removing data-collecting web browsers. U.S. Special Operations Command head Adm. Frank M. Bradley also considers UTS a serious concern.

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