Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking U.S. Soldiers and Spies ⇥ wired.com

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, Wired:

A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US companies legally collecting digital advertising data are also providing the world a cheap and reliable way to track the movements of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, from their homes and their children’s schools to hardened aircraft shelters within an airbase where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.

A collaborative analysis of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based data broker provides extraordinary insight into the daily routines of US service members. The findings also provide a vivid example of the significant risks the unregulated sale of mobile location data poses to the integrity of the US military and the safety of its service members and their families overseas.

Yet another entry in the ongoing series of stories documenting how we have created a universal unregulated tracking system accessible to basically anyone so that, incidentally, it will make someone slightly more likely to buy a specific brand of cereal. This particular demonstration feels like a reversal of governments using this data to surveil people with less oversight and fewer roadblocks.

The FTC is apparently planning to address this by, according to these reporters, “formally recogniz[ing] US military installations as protected sites”, which is a truly bananas response. The correct answer is for lawmakers to pass a strong privacy framework that restricts data collection and retention, but doing so would be economically costly and would impede the exploitation of this data by the U.S. and its allies. Instead, the world’s most powerful military is going to tell scummy data brokers not to track people within specific areas all over the world.

Reporters and researchers, meanwhile, will continue to point out how this mass data collection makes everyone vulnerable. It feels increasingly like splitting hairs between the surveillance volunteered by U.S. industry, and that which is mandated by more oppressive governments. I recognize there is a difference — the force is the difference — but the effect is comparable.