The science behind this one confuses me. Bluetooth is short range, and gps is too low power to penetrate. There’s no way a gps will get lock from inside a ship, and someone would need a compatible app and internet to relay it out.
The issue isn’t the tracker, it’s the person with their personal phone and the app that relayed the position of the tracker while they were in cell range of the shore.
But decades of media has conditioned people to believe that most tech and IT stuff is basically magic, and that seems to nowadays include tech-centric journalists.
So they simply don’t think about actual feasibility and just report omitting details because “look, tech wizard did tech-wizardry”.
Stories like this always feel like misdirection efforts to deflect blame from the actually responsible devices and organizations. The amount of normalization of openly-broadcasting-at-all-times cellphones in our society can’t really be explained with anything less than an overwhelming multi-level propaganda campaign.
Who needs spies anymore when you can just convince everyone, even military personnel, to carry around an always-on camera and microphone with onboard power and various long-range wireless options (and get them to willingly keep it continuously charged for you!)
WTF are we doing to ourselves and why anybody tolerates this nonsense I have no idea.
Yes!
An diplomats/CEOs using Teslas!
- Optical cameras are mandated at Musk’s insistence, despite lidar being better.
- Built in cell modem for “over the air updates”.
- Massive processing onboard for “interpreting the cameras”.
- Microphones and cameras inside to “ensure the driver is paying attention”.
- Big ass batteries for driving and keeping sky kit running.
- Get the targets to pay for the spy gear themselves.
Thanks for writing this for me. This seems implausible without other failures happening in concert.
Yep, which terrifies me about apple devices because of its mesh system. All devices bounce from one to the next until one gets internet and it pings the location
Comment below explains it very well
Because of this incident, the Dutch authorities now ban electronic greeting cards, which, unlike packages, weren’t x-rayed before being brought on the ship.
Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to allow unchecked electronics into a sensitive area like a navy ship?
The Dutch postal service treats letters and packages differently, and electronic greeting cards are processed as letters. They probably didn’t formally recognize letters could contain electronics.
Dutch bureaucracy also tends to have a lot of tolerance/leeway (gedoogbeleid), where rather than fix bad policies everybody just sort of agrees to do things a “reasonable” way. Attempting to fix bad policies can be seen as an expression of mistrust, a threat to whatever people have been getting away with so far, or general narc/snitch behavior. So even if someone realized that electronic greeting cards could be a threat vector, it would have been rude/socially isolating of them to bring it up and deny everybody on board their cute electronic greeting cards from back home.
The Polder Model strikes again!
Tbf, Im sure packages marked as electronics were scanned - but they didnt think to scan regular pieces of mail.
Also, similar to fitness apps leaking ship locations.
The thing providing the location of the device is the phone… how are military allowed to carry personal phones?
I’ve worked in Top Secret facilities and holy shit no you are not allowed to bring phones inside. How is an active duty ship less controlled?
They probably weren’t dark. If they go dark and want to actually not be tracked people do turn off their phones.
And while I dunno about Dutch ships, from talking to people who have served on Norwegian ships, they do in fact go around with detectors to verify that the ship is actually dark when they go dark and you do get severely punished if you didn’t turn your phone off.
I am guessing that it’s different because they spend weeks and months on the ship. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be too keen to enlist in the navy if it required not having my personal phone for months on end. They gotta make some concessions in policy to keep everyone sane.
Or maybe they’re banned but people sneak them in anyway.
Edit: then again, if they just snuck them in, they wouldn’t have any connection. They need wifi. So it’s probably allowed.
How does the tracker communicate its position?
In general:
- The tracker sends out low-energy Bluetooth announcements including its unique id
- a nearby iPhone hears those announcements
- the iPhone uses its current location
- the iPhone sends the tracker id and the location back to Apple via WiFi or cell
- Apple notifies the owner of the tracker where the tracker was seen
I can’t believe any military operation allows the use of unsecured phones by personnel. Always blows my mind.
Military personnel are people too. Regular people. And most of the stuff the do is boring and uninteresting to adversaries. Putting too hard restrictions would just lower morale and risk future recruiting.
So like in any organization you rely on infosec training and hope that it will work. Like in any organization the human factor will cause it to occasionally fail.
No amount of infosec training will make your civilian iPhone secure. All I’m saying is that it’s weird not to issue secure phones to personnel.
So you would have governments spend tax money on secure phones for personell to make Instagram posts and browse Pornhub?
I wouldn’t have governments do anything, except disband and decommission all military assets, but if I were somehow in that position then yes I would recommend providing secure devices. The cost is insignificant - just buy one less fighter jet.
Sounds great. But I suspect the reality is they would be provided by the MIC at €/$10000 a piece, while they can for sure not buy fewer jets. They will happily slash your welfare though to afford it :)
Article indicates it was one of those electronic popup type birthday card things, not what I would consider a postcard (a 4" x 6" really flat single sheet of card stock) which would be unable to hold any sort of device.
Wait, what is the range of Bluetooth?
It’s a tracker like an Apple Airtag, which basically just needs a compatible phone in range (I guess about 10 metres).
Apple made it so any iphone can detect this without any user interaction or setup. If the iphone detects a nearby tracker, it will just send the location to the user the tracker is registered to.
I don’t use an iphone, but I’m fairly sure that’s how it works. Not even sure if it can be disabled. Android has similar things, but they usually require an app to be installed.
Denmark and Norway. Not sure what he wants with the Netherlands, though.
Made me laugh anyway.
I propose a solution. Invest in unmanned surface vehicles to carry duplicates of mail and require every piece of mail sent to sailors to have a duplicate of which randomly is selected the actual copy of mail to send to the real navy ship. Collect duplicates of the mail and send it on unmanned surface vehicles to sail around and pretend to be navy ships while gathering surveillance data.
Then even if someone thinks they have planted a tracker on a ship successfully they will still be second guessing themselves over whether they are tracking the real ship or not.
You’d also need to send along an iPhone and android phone, as well as make sure they have appropriate apps installed (tile for instance) and they never die.
@remington I didn’t notice how this trick was discovered.
