The thing providing the location of the device is the phone… how are military allowed to carry personal phones?
I’ve worked in Top Secret facilities and holy shit no you are not allowed to bring phones inside. How is an active duty ship less controlled?
Because of this incident, the Dutch authorities now ban electronic greeting cards, which, unlike packages, weren’t x-rayed before being brought on the ship.
Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to allow unchecked electronics into a sensitive area like a navy ship?
The Dutch postal service treats letters and packages differently, and electronic greeting cards are processed as letters. They probably didn’t formally recognize letters could contain electronics.
Dutch bureaucracy also tends to have a lot of tolerance/leeway (gedoogbeleid), where rather than fix bad policies everybody just sort of agrees to do things a “reasonable” way. Attempting to fix bad policies can be seen as an expression of mistrust, a threat to whatever people have been getting away with so far, or general narc/snitch behavior. So even if someone realized that electronic greeting cards could be a threat vector, it would have been rude/socially isolating of them to bring it up and deny everybody on board their cute electronic greeting cards from back home.
Tbf, Im sure packages marked as electronics were scanned - but they didnt think to scan regular pieces of mail.
Also, similar to fitness apps leaking ship locations.
@remington I didn’t notice how this trick was discovered.
Wait, what is the range of Bluetooth?
Denmark and Norway. Not sure what he wants with the Netherlands, though.
The science behind this one confuses me. Bluetooth is short range, and gps is too low power to penetrate. There’s no way a gps will get lock from inside a ship, and someone would need a compatible app and internet to relay it out.
The issue isn’t the tracker, it’s the person with their personal phone and the app that relayed the position of the tracker while they were in cell range of the shore.
Stories like this always feel like misdirection efforts to deflect blame from the actually responsible devices and organizations. The amount of normalization of openly-broadcasting-at-all-times cellphones in our society can’t really be explained with anything less than an overwhelming multi-level propaganda campaign.
Who needs spies anymore when you can just convince everyone, even military personnel, to carry around an always-on camera and microphone with onboard power and various long-range wireless options (and get them to willingly keep it continuously charged for you!)
WTF are we doing to ourselves and why anybody tolerates this nonsense I have no idea.
Yes!
An diplomats/CEOs using Teslas!
- Optical cameras are mandated at Musk’s insistence, despite lidar being better.
- Built in cell modem for “over the air updates”.
- Massive processing onboard for “interpreting the cameras”.
- Microphones and cameras inside to “ensure the driver is paying attention”.
- Big ass batteries for driving and keeping sky kit running.
- Get the targets to pay for the spy gear themselves.
Comment below explains it very well
Yep, which terrifies me about apple devices because of its mesh system. All devices bounce from one to the next until one gets internet and it pings the location
But decades of media has conditioned people to believe that most tech and IT stuff is basically magic, and that seems to nowadays include tech-centric journalists.
So they simply don’t think about actual feasibility and just report omitting details because “look, tech wizard did tech-wizardry”.
Thanks for writing this for me. This seems implausible without other failures happening in concert.
How does the tracker communicate its position?
In general:
- The tracker sends out low-energy Bluetooth announcements including its unique id
- a nearby iPhone hears those announcements
- the iPhone uses its current location
- the iPhone sends the tracker id and the location back to Apple via WiFi or cell
- Apple notifies the owner of the tracker where the tracker was seen
I can’t believe any military operation allows the use of unsecured phones by personnel. Always blows my mind.
Article indicates it was one of those electronic popup type birthday card things, not what I would consider a postcard (a 4" x 6" really flat single sheet of card stock) which would be unable to hold any sort of device.
I propose a solution. Invest in unmanned surface vehicles to carry duplicates of mail and require every piece of mail sent to sailors to have a duplicate of which randomly is selected the actual copy of mail to send to the real navy ship. Collect duplicates of the mail and send it on unmanned surface vehicles to sail around and pretend to be navy ships while gathering surveillance data.
Then even if someone thinks they have planted a tracker on a ship successfully they will still be second guessing themselves over whether they are tracking the real ship or not.
