[santamarias]

A bit of context for non-Norwegians: The government owned media NRK bought location data from Tamoco worth approximately 3,400 USD.

The NRK subsidiary NRKbeta has "connected the dots" from that data set. In this article they present how they could track down military personnel visiting restricted military sites in Norway, including the disputed radar installation in Vardø, close to the Russian border.

[SiempreViernes]

This reminds me of this rumour about how someone used tinder to triangulate opponent units during an exercise and arty them to shit. Supposedly Finns outwitting Norwegians, but is a anon text so who knows: https://imgur.com/gallery/bySUH

[csiegert]

Reminds me of a story I heard: In a conflict, Russia sent SMS to the mothers of Ukrainian(?) soldiers, informing them of their son’s death (pretending to be the Ukrainian government/military). The mothers, distraught, called their son’s cellphone. The increased, clustered cellphone activity near the frontline gave away the unit positions. Shortly after, Russian bombs dropped.

[ISL]

Went looking for citations:

https://www.ausa.org/articles/russia-gives-lessons-electroni...

https://mwi.usma.edu/text-messages-hell-restraint-informatio...

[eloff]

That's some next level evil genius. Pretty scary.

[runarb]

Russian intelligence was also able to counterfeit an app used by Ukrainian artillery forces to track them: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2016/12/22/russia-u...

[dependenttypes]

Non-amp link: https://fortune.com/2016/12/22/russia-ukraine-app/

[rezeroed]

If the russians could get the mother's phone numbers, why not the sons? If you're able to identify the location of call activity, why aren't you able to identify the cell while not on a call, when as far as I am aware there is still communication?

[Ma8ee]

Maybe they couldn’t and just sent the SMS to a lot of random numbers. Those that belonged to mothers at the frontline naturally tried to call their sons.

[rezeroed]

Right. Still curious about monitoring cell activity only during calls. Thinking if you can monitor the cells, just look at the front line cells for comms.

[jinglebells]

They didn't know where the front line was?

[matt_the_bass]

This is sinister genius. Do you have a citation link? I’d love to read more.

[williamscales]

Is it typical that soldiers carry mobile phones? It seems like it would open them up to all kinds of possible problems, and I can't think of a reason you would need a cell phone in a conflict when you have a radio, right?

[flurdy]

From the volume of photos and videos from US, UK, etc that were based in Afganistan, Iraq etc you can deduce a smartphone is quite normal in those forces, so I would assume the same in Ukrainian forces.

They might not wear them out on patrol or manoeuvres, but back at their tents/barracks, I would assume some if not all have their personal phones. You only need a couple to track them.

I also read once Strave/Fitbit type trackers was rife at army bases and used to work out patrol routes.

[skocznymroczny]

"Hot missile silos in your area are waiting for you"

[Spooky23]

There have been alot of stories about stuff like this. One of the public ones I remember was if you were looking for US forces in unusual places, you'd find their running paths on Strava.

[thinkmassive]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

[emilfihlman]

Yeah that'd be Finns and Exercise Trident Juncture 2018

[SiempreViernes]

Got any details? The story is plausible, but it is also only told by a imageboard greentext as far as I can tell.

[Foxboron]

A bit context on NRKbeta from their website.

"NRKbeta is NRKs sandbox for technology and media. We write about media, the internet and new technology with a focus on you as the user, and what we at NRK do in this field. We call it a sandbox because we want to test things out, be curious and find out how things change. And bring you, the users, with us on this journey."

https://nrkbeta.no/

EDIT:

I also think it's important to contextualize this journalism with the current debate around the Norwegian contact tracing application.

The application has been heavily criticized for the collection of GPS data for research usage and track behaviour when new guidelines are announced. They claim this data is going to be "anonymized", but alter clarified it would only be "pseudonomized".

It is also unclear if the data collected is going to be deleted in December, when the app is set for deletion by the current regulation from Stortinget.

[hhjinks]

They picked a dumb name. As a Norwegian, I was under the impression that they've actually got a beta version of some supposed new site functionality for the longest time.

[SiempreViernes]

Is december a realistic end date for the epidemic control it is supposed to provide? Herd immunity by vaccination at that point is extremely unlikely...

[Broken_Hippo]

If you are using it for data instead of control, well, that's months of data about how people move around with varying restrictions. It is enough to refine policies and note how different sorts of restrictions change people's behavior. For example, if no one really follows x mandate, well, you either drop the mandate, change it, or come in with some fairly heavy-duty force.

Now, other uses might require more time. If you really need to see where the person has infected others and this is your tool, it might not be enough time. It is too early to tell, though, and I'm not sure how well phone inspections would go here in Norway nor how many people would download the app. It would make me more likely to leave my phone at home if, you know, I had much life outside of home.

[belorn]

It is surprising that this is not illegal. It should be illegal under GDPR as sufficient anonymized data should not allow you to connect the dots to do anything like tracking military personnel. Transporting sensitive military information over the Norwegian border sounds also very illegal under Norwegian law.

Back when Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary, I wonder what would have happened if rather than a whistleblowers we would have people buying data collected from soldiers smartphones in order to reconstruct the material. It should be pretty easy to identify colaborators by which smartphone gets into contact with someones else smartphone thus reconstruct who is working with who.

[santamarias]

perhaps useful to replace the wording "track down" with "identify"?