Almost every weekday morning, a device leaves a two-story house near Wiesbaden, Germany, and makes a 15-minute trip down a major highway. Around 7 a.m., he arrives at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne, the U.S. military’s European headquarters and a key center for U.S. intelligence operations.
The device stops near a restaurant before heading to an office near the base that belongs to a major government contractor responsible for equipping and protecting some of the country’s most sensitive facilities.
For about two months in 2023, this device followed a predictable routine: stops at the contractor’s office, visits to a discreet hangar on the base, and a lunchtime trip to the base dining hall. Twice in November last year, he made a 30-minute trip to the Dagger Complex, a former NSA and intelligence signals processing facility. On weekends the device could be traced to restaurants and shops in Wiesbaden.
The person carrying this device is probably not a spy or high-ranking intelligence official. Instead, experts believe, it is a contractor working on critical systems: HVAC, IT infrastructure or possibly securing the newly built Consolidated Intelligence Center, a state-of-the-art facility suspected of being used by the National Security Agency.
Whoever they are, the device they carry with them everywhere puts the national security of the United States at risk.
A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) and Netzpolitik.org reveals that American companies that legally collect digital advertising data are also providing the world with a cheap and reliable way to track the movements of American military and intelligence personnel in the abroad, from their homes. and their children’s schools to airplane shelters inside an air base where American nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.
A crowdsourced analysis of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based data broker provides extraordinary insight into the daily routines of US service members. The findings also provide a vivid example of the significant risks that the unregulated sale of mobile location data poses to the integrity of the U.S. military and the safety of its service members and their families overseas.
We tracked hundreds of thousands of signals from devices inside sensitive US facilities in Germany. That includes dozens of devices inside suspected NSA signal monitoring or analysis facilities, more than a thousand devices at a sprawling U.S. compound where Ukrainian troops They were being trained in 2023and nearly 2,000 more people at an air force base that has crucially supported American drone operations.
A device likely linked to an NSA or intelligence employee transmitted coordinates from inside a windowless building with a metal exterior known as a “Tin Can,” which is supposedly used for NSA surveillance, according to agency documents. leaked by Edward Snowden. Another device transmitted signals from inside a restricted weapons testing facility, revealing its zigzag movements through a high-security zone used for tank maneuvers and live ammunition drills.