US forces deployed to war zones have been targeted using commercially available location data, according to reports fielded by military officials, an illustration of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield.
In a letter shared with Reuters by US Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, opens new tab, US Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theatre.”
The message, sent on April 14, offered no further specifics, but Centcom’s area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where US forces are facing off against the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz.
The disclosure was the first official confirmation that US forces had been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of legislators said in a letter sent on Thursday, opens new tab to the Pentagon.
“Commercial location data can be used to identify where US troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes,” the letter warned.
Wyden said in a statement that it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”
The Pentagon did not return messages seeking comment. The lawmakers said in their letter that their efforts to obtain more information from military officials about the reported targeting had been unsuccessful.
Location data is widely used in digital advertising, which is a key source of revenue for many tech companies. Such data is typically collected from smartphones or other devices by apps or service providers before being sold to data brokers who collate and resell the data, sometimes via complex networks of intermediaries.
Although the threat to privacy inherent in selling the details of people’s day-to-day movements on the open market has long been a matter of public discussion, its potential as a national security risk has recently drawn concern as well.As far back as 2016, one US defense contractor was able to leverage commercially available location data to track special operations forces from their bases in the United States to a sensitive staging post in Syria, according to an account first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal.
