U.S. forces deployed to war zones "have been targeted using commercially available location data," reports Reuters, citing "reports fielded by military officials." Reuters calls it "an illustration of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield." In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had "received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater." The message, sent on April 14, offered no further specifics, but Centcom's area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where U.S. forces are facing off against the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz. The disclosure was the first official confirmation that U.S. forces had been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of legislators said in a letter sent on Thursday to the Pentagon. "Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes," the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it was time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat." "The letter from U.S. lawmakers to the Pentagon said that, given what military officials know about the trade in location data, they should have acted faster to protect their personnel," the artiles adds, "for example by disabling the unique advertising ID attached to military-issued devices, automatically turning off location sharing on smartphones in the field, and steering staff away from Google's Chrome web browser toward more privacy-focused alternatives." Thanks to Slashdot reader JoeyRox for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's difficult to know the true state of the Russian economy, both because the country's financial reporting is sparse and because official figures are unreliable. But things probably aren't great.

This week, Sweden's minister of foreign affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard, shared her country's assessment that the Russian economy has likely contracted over the last five years amid the war in Ukraine. Inflation is also high, and international sanctions have cost Russia $450 billion since the onset of the war in February 2022. Russia's economy is currently smaller than that of Texas, Stenergard said.

By most measures, then, the economy is not in tip-top shape. Moreover, the war is draining a large amount of the country's financial resources, with defense spending reaching a post-Soviet record of about 7 percent of government spending.

Read full article

Comments

© Roscosmos

One super PAC is allied with Anthropic. The other is tied to OpenAI. They’re both spending millions to influence this year’s elections.

What an A.I.-generated video of the former reality TV star teaches us about the future of political ads.

There is a certain kind of discomfort that comes from flipping through old magazines from the 1960s and 1970s. Not because they feel foreign, but because they don’t, entirely. The clothes changed. The hairstyles changed. The alcohol ads, though, reveal something rawer about that era than almost anything else on the page. They were weird […]