They are bringing smart phones into combat? Power off the phones, put them in a heavy metal box. Even with tracking crap disabled the phone is emitting signals. Anyone that objects cleans the portable latrines.
All this sigint and no one is scanning and managing friendly RF [edit: data] leakage. Wild.
Edit: @bigyabai Corrected my incomplete thought and comment. My thought was not just RF, but also "these devices are reporting location and the US military must have some leverage to disempower data brokers from collecting this data for service members." The US gov knows who these brokers are, they buy from them [1] [2] [3] [4]. Mandate a process to provide device identifiers to disallow in data broker ETL data flows and punitive civil and criminal repercussions for not complying. Use national security as the justification if one must.
Well, hold on a second. A lot of these people aren't in active combat, they're troops stationed in places like Syria or Jordan, and then shuffled away from their bases when they're legitimately threatened: https://www.newarab.com/news/iran-threatens-target-syrian-ho...
Those people will be carrying around their phones, browsing TikTok and texting loved ones. That creates a lot of commercial advertising data that can be trivially filtered to create a rough targeting fix. It's not even RF leakage in many situations.
How much could it possibly cost to give every servicemember a dumbphone or even a hardened smartphone like their officers are required to use? Was the option of taking away an 18-year old's personal cell phone determined to impact recruitment numbers too much?
"Join the army! but no Instagram" might actually cause young men to say no in 2026.
If no phone is such a risk then use war powers to seize any company tracking any cell phone anywhere. Liquidate it. Use half of the funds for pizza for the troops. Use the other have as incentive to make this happen. If the company is out of reach of the US or not cooperating, bring democracy to them and liberate their resources.
In the last war the US troops were targeted at bases located in friendly countries, not exactly in combat. The upside here is that this is a really good way to get this industry regulated
Edit: @bigyabai Corrected my incomplete thought and comment. My thought was not just RF, but also "these devices are reporting location and the US military must have some leverage to disempower data brokers from collecting this data for service members." The US gov knows who these brokers are, they buy from them [1] [2] [3] [4]. Mandate a process to provide device identifiers to disallow in data broker ETL data flows and punitive civil and criminal repercussions for not complying. Use national security as the justification if one must.
[1] https://www.eff.org/issues/location-data-brokers
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cong...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
[4] https://epic.org/government-ai-is-coming-for-your-data/
Those people will be carrying around their phones, browsing TikTok and texting loved ones. That creates a lot of commercial advertising data that can be trivially filtered to create a rough targeting fix. It's not even RF leakage in many situations.
"Join the army! but no Instagram" might actually cause young men to say no in 2026.