4 ms·

When I was in the military cell phones were extremely new, but I honestly don't see why most commands don't say "leave phones and other electronics at home when

by ok_dad 3y ago

When I was in the military cell phones were extremely new, but I honestly don't see why most commands don't say "leave phones and other electronics at home when coming to base" and then you just tell anyone who needs to contact you to call the command quarterdeck or whatever. Examples you just gave are good reasons to do this, much like how in the 90's during Desert Storm several people figured out (post-hoc, but still) that there were a buttload more pizza orders from government offices relating to the invasion of Iraq. I'm a former shithead officer, though, so it's easy for me to just say "ban the phones!" instead of trying to figure out a smarter solution. Maybe beepers will make a comeback, since you can't track a multicast, receive-only client?

mschuster91 3y ago
> When I was in the military cell phones were extremely new, but I honestly don't see why most commands don't say "leave phones and other electronics at home when coming to base" and then you just tell anyone who needs to contact you to call the command quarterdeck or whatever. Because soldiers will just go and take their phones anyway - they will want to keep in touch with their families. The solution to this problem is to kill off the targeted ads market in its entirety. Maybe national security is the only way to actually make that go through.
- mckn1ght 3y ago
  Seems like something the NSA should be in charge of, maintaining a custom Android ROM or even a fully custom built OS/device.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Just browsing the web is enough to deliver enough metadata to RTBs to make correlations possible.
    - mckn1ght 3y ago
      If I were the shot caller I’d have it tunnel to an NSA data center via a proprietary protocol. Then the data center makes the request with IP/HTTP, then serves the data back to the client again in the proprietary protocol.
- lukan 3y ago
  "Because soldiers will just go and take their phones anyway" When there is a military order - refusing is not an option. And you can check if people have smartphones with them without searching them - quite easy, how they do it in airplanes, emf meters. They are quite cheap. Also you don't have to ban them everywhere. But everywhere critial, yes. A ordinary mobile phone is basically a spying device in terms of security. I would not ask who maybe has access, but who has not. "The solution to this problem is to kill off the targeted ads market in its entirety. Maybe national security is the only way to actually make that go through." So I am sorry, but national security won't help get us rid of targeted ads, you probably also missed the part, where national security of course happily uses that data for themself. So for them it is way easier to just ban smartphones in more areas, than disrupt the internet ad market.
mandevil 3y ago
Because the 18 year old who really misses his girlfriend needs to have his phone on him? The operator's wife back at Bragg (excuse me, Fort Liberty now) wants to know that he's safe, to use the example from the original article about watching phones go from North Carolina to Syria and back. The article I linked to in WP talked about how difficult the Ukrainian army is finding cellphone discipline, at the beginning of their third year of high intensity war (and a decade of low-intensity combat operations). Because even in a real shooting war zone this sort of stuff is hard to police.
- kjellsbells 3y ago
  The Ukrainian situation is especially interesting because to my mind it is the first cellphone war. We've gone from cellphones being used as passive electronic switches (as in, detonation systems for roadside bombs) to it being the control interface for innovative weaponry and tactics such as drones against infantry. I dont know that irregular or inexperienced troops will ever give up this level of capability, and I'm not sure that wealthier militaries have figured out how to mutate consumer cellphones into equally powerful portable tools without essentially dumbing them down back to tetra radios.
acdha 3y ago
I think your instinct is well founded but at odds with the massive tech industry pushing the other way. This is the classic imbalance between offense and defense: for something like a building’s location, the defender has to do the right thing every time. You put out that order and most people follow it but over time someone’s going to make a mistake - they’ll forget their LTE AppleWatch counts as a phone, their spouse or kid will leave their phone in the car and Facebook will helpfully share that location belongs to people who like military pages, their cell provider helpfully links their vehicle’s integrated cellular device with the other devices on the account when selling data, etc. It feels like the solution might need to start with a significant data protection law making some of that data collection impossible and all of it requiring notification so someone could at least have the chance to know where they’d be breaking policy.

by ok_dad 3y ago

mschuster91 3y ago

> When I was in the military cell phones were extremely new, but I honestly don't see why most commands don't say "leave phones and other electronics at home when coming to base" and then you just tell anyone who needs to contact you to call the command quarterdeck or whatever. Because soldiers will just go and take their phones anyway - they will want to keep in touch with their families. The solution to this problem is to kill off the targeted ads market in its entirety. Maybe national security is the only way to actually make that go through.

mckn1ght 3y ago
Seems like something the NSA should be in charge of, maintaining a custom Android ROM or even a fully custom built OS/device.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Just browsing the web is enough to deliver enough metadata to RTBs to make correlations possible.
  - mckn1ght 3y ago
    If I were the shot caller I’d have it tunnel to an NSA data center via a proprietary protocol. Then the data center makes the request with IP/HTTP, then serves the data back to the client again in the proprietary protocol.
lukan 3y ago
"Because soldiers will just go and take their phones anyway" When there is a military order - refusing is not an option. And you can check if people have smartphones with them without searching them - quite easy, how they do it in airplanes, emf meters. They are quite cheap. Also you don't have to ban them everywhere. But everywhere critial, yes. A ordinary mobile phone is basically a spying device in terms of security. I would not ask who maybe has access, but who has not. "The solution to this problem is to kill off the targeted ads market in its entirety. Maybe national security is the only way to actually make that go through." So I am sorry, but national security won't help get us rid of targeted ads, you probably also missed the part, where national security of course happily uses that data for themself. So for them it is way easier to just ban smartphones in more areas, than disrupt the internet ad market.

mandevil 3y ago

Because the 18 year old who really misses his girlfriend needs to have his phone on him? The operator's wife back at Bragg (excuse me, Fort Liberty now) wants to know that he's safe, to use the example from the original article about watching phones go from North Carolina to Syria and back. The article I linked to in WP talked about how difficult the Ukrainian army is finding cellphone discipline, at the beginning of their third year of high intensity war (and a decade of low-intensity combat operations). Because even in a real shooting war zone this sort of stuff is hard to police.

kjellsbells 3y ago
The Ukrainian situation is especially interesting because to my mind it is the first cellphone war. We've gone from cellphones being used as passive electronic switches (as in, detonation systems for roadside bombs) to it being the control interface for innovative weaponry and tactics such as drones against infantry. I dont know that irregular or inexperienced troops will ever give up this level of capability, and I'm not sure that wealthier militaries have figured out how to mutate consumer cellphones into equally powerful portable tools without essentially dumbing them down back to tetra radios.

acdha 3y ago

I think your instinct is well founded but at odds with the massive tech industry pushing the other way. This is the classic imbalance between offense and defense: for something like a building’s location, the defender has to do the right thing every time. You put out that order and most people follow it but over time someone’s going to make a mistake - they’ll forget their LTE AppleWatch counts as a phone, their spouse or kid will leave their phone in the car and Facebook will helpfully share that location belongs to people who like military pages, their cell provider helpfully links their vehicle’s integrated cellular device with the other devices on the account when selling data, etc. It feels like the solution might need to start with a significant data protection law making some of that data collection impossible and all of it requiring notification so someone could at least have the chance to know where they’d be breaking policy.