Pentagon Acknowledges Commercial Location Data Poses Security Risk to Troops, Senators Urge New Restrictions

U.S. service members in war zones. In an April 14 response to questions from Oregon Sen.

U.S. personnel in theater.

The Threat Fusion Cell identified, tracked, and disseminated these threats through the USCENTCOM Threat Working Group and to component force protection personnel. S. troops congregate and their pattern of life.

Adversaries can exploit this information to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes. The Pentagon's responses did not provide details on any specific incidents. -Israeli war on Iran, two DOD officials were wounded in an Iranian drone strike on a Crowne Plaza hotel in Bahrain.

After the strike, a senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Iran had built a target bank of both American and Israeli personnel. The official said the building of the target bank began after the 2025 12-Day War. The vulnerability was identified at least 10 years ago.

In 2016, tech contractor Mike Yeagley briefed the Joint Special Operations Command on how enemies could exploit commercially available phone location data to create pattern of life profiles of individual service members. S. bases that house special operations soldiers to an abandoned cement factory in Syria, which they were using as a forward operating base near an ISIS stronghold in Kobane.

The JSOC officers immediately relocated the briefing to a better-secured room. 6 billion coordinates on upwards of 11 million mobile advertising IDs in Germany over a two-month period. Analysis revealed granular location data from up to 12,313 devices that appeared to spend time at or near at least 11 military and intelligence sites.

U.S. Army's European headquarters at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne. On Thursday, Wyden and a bipartisan group of 13 other senators sent a letter to the Defense Department's chief information officer.

U.S. military personnel from the serious counterintelligence and force protection threat posed by the collection and sale of personal information, including cell phone location data, by data brokers. The senators stated that DOD officials have not treated this threat as a five-alarm fire and that DOD has known about this threat for over a decade yet failed to take meaningful steps to protect service members.

The senators urged the Defense Department to disable advertising ID on all DOD-issued smartphones. They also urged ordering service members to disable the advertising ID on personal phones taken onto military installations or on overseas deployments.

The senators called for the Pentagon to remove browsers designed to facilitate data collection by Google and other advertising companies, such as Google Chrome, from DOD unclassified computers and smartphones.

They posed five follow-up questions with a due date of June 26. At least 13 American service members have been killed in the undeclared war on Iran, and approximately 400 have been wounded in action.