Almost each weekday morning, a tool leaves a two-story residence close to Wiesbaden, Germany, and makes a 15-minute commute alongside a significant autobahn. By round 7 am, it arrives at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne—the US Military’s European headquarters and a key hub for US intelligence operations.
The machine stops close to a restaurant earlier than heading to an workplace close to the bottom that belongs to a significant authorities contractor liable for outfitting and securing among the nation’s most delicate services.
For roughly two months in 2023, this machine adopted a predictable routine: stops on the contractor’s workplace, visits to a discreet hangar on base, and lunchtime journeys to the bottom’s eating facility. Twice in November of final 12 months, it made a 30-minute drive to the Dagger Advanced, a former intelligence and NSA alerts processing facility. On weekends, the machine may very well be traced to eating places and retailers in Wiesbaden.
The person carrying this machine probably isn’t a spy or high-ranking intelligence official. As a substitute, specialists imagine, they’re a contractor who works on important techniques—HVAC, computing infrastructure, or presumably securing the newly constructed Consolidated Intelligence Heart, a state-of-the-art facility suspected for use by the Nationwide Safety Company.
Whoever they’re, the machine they’re carrying with them in all places is placing US nationwide safety in danger.
A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US firms legally gathering digital promoting information are additionally offering the world an inexpensive and dependable strategy to monitor the actions of American army and intelligence personnel abroad, from their houses and their youngsters’s colleges to hardened plane shelters inside an airbase the place US nuclear weapons are believed to be saved.
A collaborative evaluation of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based information dealer supplies extraordinary perception into the each day routines of US service members. The findings additionally present a vivid instance of the numerous dangers the unregulated sale of cell location information poses to the integrity of the US army and the protection of its service members and their households abroad.
We tracked lots of of hundreds of alerts from gadgets inside delicate US installations in Germany. That features scores of gadgets inside suspected NSA monitoring or signals-analysis services, greater than a thousand gadgets at a sprawling US compound the place Ukrainian troops were being being trained in 2023, and almost 2,000 others at an air drive base that has crucially supported American drone operations.
A tool probably tied to an NSA or intelligence worker broadcast coordinates from inside a windowless constructing with a metallic exterior often called the “Tin Can,” which is reportedly used for NSA surveillance, in line with company paperwork leaked by Edward Snowden. One other machine transmitted alerts from inside a restricted weapons testing facility, revealing its zig-zagging actions throughout a high-security zone used for tank maneuvers and stay munitions drills.
