American military forces stationed in combat zones have faced targeting by enemies using commercially available location information, defense officials have confirmed in reports that highlight how the worldwide data surveillance industry is impacting modern warfare.
According to a correspondence shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command reported it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.” The April 14 communication provided no additional details, though Centcom oversees operations in the Gulf region, where American forces are confronting Iranian military forces near the Strait of Hormuz.
This revelation represents the first official acknowledgment that American troops have been targeted in an active combat zone, according to Wyden and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers who sent correspondence on Thursday to the Pentagon.
“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. 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 correspondence cautioned. Wyden stated it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”
Pentagon officials did not respond to requests for comment. The legislators noted in their correspondence that attempts to gather additional details from military leadership regarding the reported targeting have been unsuccessful.
Location information plays a significant role in digital marketing, serving as a major revenue source for numerous technology firms. This data typically comes from mobile phones or other devices through applications or service providers before being purchased by data brokers who compile and redistribute the information, often through complicated networks of middlemen.
While privacy risks from selling details about people’s daily movements in open markets have been publicly debated for years, its potential as a national security concern has recently gained attention.
Dating back to 2016, one American defense contractor successfully used commercially available location information to monitor special operations forces traveling from their domestic bases to a classified staging area in Syria, according to reporting first revealed by the Wall Street Journal.
In recent developments, reporters at Wired and two German publications used billions of coordinates obtained from a data broker to reveal detailed movements of personnel at or near 11 American military and intelligence facilities in Germany.
Two organizations representing digital marketing professionals, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawmakers’ correspondence to the Pentagon argued that given military officials’ knowledge about location data trading, they should have moved more quickly to safeguard their personnel, including disabling unique advertising identifiers on military-issued equipment, automatically deactivating location sharing on field smartphones, and directing staff away from Google’s Chrome web browser toward more privacy-focused options.
Among the correspondence signatories was U.S. Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican and former U.S. Army Special Forces officer. Harrigan stated that browsers like Chrome “are built from the ground up to collect and share user data” and that every day they remain on government-issued equipment “is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops.”
In response, Alphabet’s Google stated that Chrome maintained “industry leading security.” The company added it had “long advocated for stronger rules and safeguards against data brokers.”
