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Comment by mandevil | Hacker News Reader

Cell phone tracking is better at surveillance than the best stuff the military has.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/22/... has a fun story about a time at Fort Irwin (US Army laser tag in the desert) one side couldn't figure out how an attack helicopter got through their defenses, until they did some queries on a commercial cell phone tracking database and found the cellphone moving across the desert at 120mph. Hole identified, plugged for the next round.

And also talks about how the Ukrainians and Russians are having a great deal of trouble with cell phone OPSEC even after years of shooting war.

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Cell phone tracking _is_ what the military has.

Seeing through walls with WiFi is better. Or slurping up the main pipes and decrypting it. Which they also have.

An old coworker used to work on what is basically a Stingray for air platforms with some sort of directional finding capability. Presumably, you'd strap it to a drone and fly it over villages where you suspect bad guys are. Do this every few days and in multiple locations and you'd establish patterns of movements and links between networks of people.

Or where journalists or doctors are. The technology is neutral, after all.

All to often "bad guys" are just a fig leaf for the absolute worst guys.

“Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.”

- Hannah Arendt

For anyone else struggling to understand this initially, they were able to tell the flight path of the attack helicopter as it evaded detection by looking at the historic path of a phone of a person that was on the helicopter.

It wasn’t a helicopter spoofing itself as a phone or something crazy like that.

Probably not better than the best stuff the military has... Still really good, mind.

And, yeah, unintended uses are usually prime locations for security breaches. For a long time (maybe still?) metadata on pictures that people post would reveal far more than people meant. Thumbnails of cropped pictures, even.

>Probably not better than the best stuff the military has...

Military tech is always a decade ahead of civilian, that's why the US has easily won every armed conflict they've entered into in the past 50 years

I’m not sure this has been true since the advent of the internet. I don’t believe there’s an entire shadow sphere of academia that is decades ahead of what’s openly published.

For nuclear energy, this might be true. But for nearly any other topic I’m very skeptical.

> has easily won every armed conflict they've entered into in the past 50 years

That's just false. Ok, maybe you don't count Vietnam, because the US "entered" there in the '60s, but Afghanistan was a sure loss and I'd say the same for Iraq (seeing how it's now in Iran's sphere of influence, which it wasn't under Saddam). Yes, they might have won some tactical battles, most probably all of them, come to think of it, but the wars themselves were lost.

> That's just false.

Read like sarcasm to me.

I think you’re right, sorry for having missed it in that case.

I know for a fact that swaths of critical military infrastructure sit in AWS, so I personally doubt this is true.

Have they though?

People don't like hearing this, but military tech and civilian tech move more-or-less in lockstep. We see this in Ukraine, where both sides are using Consumer-off-the-shelf drones for violent means with minimal modification. You could argue that Ukraine's defense is an even more novel form of warfare than what the United States is comfortable dealing with.

When two armies fight each other, what determines who gets power-gapped is the way each military operationalizes new technology. The United States defense sector does an excellent job of staying on top of new advancements, but when you examine the Cold War and WWII, most of America's tech is civilian-grade but implemented with world-class logistics and command/control.

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