The Pentagon Knew Enemies Could Track Troops' Phones for Years. Now They Are

The US military has long known that cheap fixes could stop location data from exposing its troops. It adopted almost none--and now says adversaries are using the data to target soldiers during a war. For nearly a decade, the Pentagon was warned--by its own contractors, analysts, and intelligence agencies--that anyone with a credit card could buy a map of where American troops sleep, work, and store nuclear weapons. Now the bill has come due in a war zone. A newly disclosed letter shows the warnings went unheeded: US Central Command now confirms it has received "multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater"--the first official acknowledgment that the data-broker economy is being used to hunt American forces in the Middle East.