Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking US Soldiers and Spies to Nuclear Vaults and Brothels in Germany

Nearly each weekday morning, a instrumentality leaves a two-story location adjacent Wiesbaden, Germany, and makes a 15-minute commute on a large autobahn. By astir 7 am, it arrives astatine Lucius D. Clay Kaserne—the US Army’s European office and a cardinal hub for US quality operations.

The instrumentality stops adjacent a edifice earlier heading to an bureau adjacent the basal that belongs to a large authorities contractor liable for outfitting and securing immoderate of the nation’s astir delicate facilities.

For astir 2 months successful 2023, this instrumentality followed a predictable routine: stops astatine the contractor’s office, visits to a discreet hangar connected base, and a lunchtime travel to the base’s eating facility. Twice successful November of past year, it made a 30-minute thrust to the Dagger Complex, a erstwhile quality and NSA signals processing facility. On weekends, the instrumentality could beryllium traced to restaurants and shops successful Wiesbaden.

The idiosyncratic carrying this instrumentality apt isn’t a spy oregon high-ranking quality official. Instead, experts believe, they’re a contractor who works connected captious systems—HVAC, computing infrastructure, oregon perchance securing the recently built Consolidated Intelligence Center, a state-of-the-art installation suspected to beryllium utilized by the National Security Agency.

Whoever they are, the instrumentality they’re carrying with them everyplace is putting US nationalist information astatine risk.

A associated probe by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US companies legally collecting integer advertizing information are besides providing the satellite a inexpensive and reliable mode to way the movements of American subject and quality unit overseas, from their homes and their children’s schools to hardened craft shelters wrong an airbase wherever US atomic weapons are believed to beryllium stored.

A collaborative investigation of billions of determination coordinates obtained from a US-based information broker provides bonzer penetration into the regular routines of US work members. The findings besides supply a vivid illustration of the important risks the unregulated merchantability of mobile determination information poses to the integrity of the US subject and the information of its work members and their families overseas.

We tracked hundreds of thousands of signals from devices wrong delicate US installations successful Germany. That includes scores of devices wrong suspected NSA monitoring oregon signals-analysis facilities, much than a 1000 devices astatine a sprawling US compound wherever Ukrainian troops were being being trained successful 2023, and astir 2,000 others astatine an aerial unit basal that has crucially supported American drone operations.

A instrumentality apt tied to an NSA oregon quality worker broadcast coordinates from wrong a windowless gathering with a metallic exterior known arsenic the “Tin Can,” which is reportedly utilized for NSA surveillance, according to bureau documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Another instrumentality transmitted signals from wrong a restricted weapons investigating facility, revealing its zig-zagging movements crossed a high-security portion utilized for vessel maneuvers and unrecorded munitions drills.