Practically each weekday morning, a tool leaves a two-story residence close to Wiesbaden, Germany, and makes a 15-minute commute alongside a serious autobahn. By round 7 am, it arrives at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne—the US Military’s European headquarters and a key hub for US intelligence operations.
The gadget stops close to a restaurant earlier than heading to an workplace close to the bottom that belongs to a serious authorities contractor accountable for outfitting and securing a few of the nation’s most delicate services.
For roughly two months in 2023, this gadget adopted a predictable routine: stops on the contractor’s workplace, visits to a discreet hangar on base, and lunchtime journeys to the bottom’s eating facility. Twice in November of final yr, it made a 30-minute drive to the Dagger Complicated, a former intelligence and NSA indicators processing facility. On weekends, the gadget could possibly be traced to eating places and retailers in Wiesbaden.
The person carrying this gadget seemingly isn’t a spy or high-ranking intelligence official. As an alternative, specialists consider, they’re a contractor who works on essential techniques—HVAC, computing infrastructure, or probably securing the newly constructed Consolidated Intelligence Middle, a state-of-the-art facility suspected for use by the Nationwide Safety Company.
Whoever they’re, the gadget they’re carrying with them all over the place is placing US nationwide safety in danger.
A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US corporations legally amassing digital promoting information are additionally offering the world an affordable and dependable option to monitor the actions of American army and intelligence personnel abroad, from their houses and their kids’s faculties to hardened plane shelters inside an airbase the place US nuclear weapons are believed to be saved.
A collaborative evaluation of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based information dealer gives extraordinary perception into the each day routines of US service members. The findings additionally present a vivid instance of the numerous dangers the unregulated sale of cell location information poses to the integrity of the US army and the security of its service members and their households abroad.
We tracked lots of of 1000’s of indicators from units inside delicate US installations in Germany. That features scores of units inside suspected NSA monitoring or signals-analysis services, greater than a thousand units at a sprawling US compound the place Ukrainian troops have been being being skilled in 2023, and almost 2,000 others at an air pressure base that has crucially supported American drone operations.
A tool seemingly tied to an NSA or intelligence worker broadcast coordinates from inside a windowless constructing with a metallic exterior often known as the “Tin Can,” which is reportedly used for NSA surveillance, based on company paperwork leaked by Edward Snowden. One other gadget transmitted indicators from inside a restricted weapons testing facility, revealing its zig-zagging actions throughout a high-security zone used for tank maneuvers and reside munitions drills.