Enemies Are Exploiting Unregulated Data Broker Location Data To Target And Kill U.S. Troops

from the corruption-kills dept

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn’t pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this privacy dysfunction to dodge domestic surveillance warrants.

If we imposed safeguards on consumer data, everybody from app makers to telecoms would make billions less per quarter. So our corrupt lawmakers pretend the vast human harms of our greed are a distant and unavoidable externality (unless the privacy issues involve some kid tracking rich people on their planes, of course, in which case Congress moves with a haste that would break the sound barrier).

I’ve warned about this for the last decade here at Techdirt, and the check is coming due. The Pentagon is steadily coming to realize that enemies are using location data purchased from unregulated data brokers to target and kill U.S. troops overseas:

“In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.” 

Poor Ron Wyden. The guy has been warning about this outcome for longer than Techdirt, and his reward is generally an apathetic congressional body too corrupted by greed to function.

This should surprise absolutely nobody.

Two years ago, Wired released an excellent report documenting how it was relatively trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany. And for much of the past decade cellular providers had been found to be collecting user movement data, selling it, and either not telling consumers or outright lying about it.

If foreign governments can’t get your sensitive location data from a litany of apps that track your every movement, they can get it from data brokers or the wireless carriers themselves.

When the FCC tried to fine wireless carriers like AT&T for spying on and monetizing consumer movements, the fines were vacated by Trump’s Fifth Circuit appeals court. Wyden had previously revealed how right wing extremists were able to easily purchase the location data of abortion clinic visitors and then target them with dangerous health care disinformation. The congressional response: bupkis.

It’s not subtle: the U.S. is too corrupt to function. Instead of fixing that problem, Republicans, “free market” Libertarians, and many centrist Democrats spend most of their time figuring out new ways to lobotomize our regulators, pre-empt meaningful privacy legislation, and completely defang what’s left of corporate oversight. You know, because we just love free market innovation so much.

In his latest letter to the Pentagon, Wyden once again makes the case that the ad tech industry, as currently formulated, poses a direct national security threat:

“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 letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it ​was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”

Of course, it’s not just the ad industry that poses a national security threat, it’s corruption. It’s the mindless deregulation of industry by bad faith actors. It’s lax government privacy and security oversight of private companies (and their executives). It’s regulatory capture at the hands of corrupt, weird zealots. And it’s a government obsessed with hyper-scaled domestic surveillance with no meaningful guardrails.

Filed Under: data brokers, defense, deregulation, dod, location data, national security, pentagon, privacy, ron wyden, security, troops