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from the tracking-device-which-also-happens-to-make-calls dept.
Soldiers stupid and disobedient enough to carry their own tracking devices into the field on operations are teaching their units harsh lessons when entering combat. The Association of the United States Army, the U.S. Army's professional association and lobbying group, has an article on how mobile phones are used against soldiers carrying them in the field. This includes, but is not limited to, psychological operations, artillery strikes, monitoring, or all three at once. Given the lax discipline about leaving the mobile phones behind, the attacks built on phone info have been increasingly successful both physically and mentally.
[Ed Note: The second link details how Russian backed separatists are using advanced EW and psyops tactics against the Ukrainian Armed Forces]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday August 17 2018, @02:29PM
Three problems with that:
1) Transmitting reveals your location. In an age of GPS that's not so much of a problem if you're at a fixed base where the enemy knows you are anyway. But if you're in the field - they broadly know where you were then and may be now.
2) You can derive intelligence about communications without knowing the content. If you link a pattern between a transmission on a certain frequency that always happens before action X (an artillery barrage, air strike, troop movement), then you can start making predictions. This carries over to length of transmission. If every single day the transmission is five groups, and then on one day the transmission is fifty groups, I can induce that on that special day more information needed to be passed. I might not know what it is, but I can speculate something is up and look for specific correlations for activity.
3) Similar to #2 but specifically to your example, use constant code signs (or code signs that change on a regular basis) then I can start to build a database of what those terms might mean. Unless you're using one-time pad technology with proper communication discipline.
But the thing is, they still do that when appropriate. (And it could also be used for a disinformation / counterintel technique as well). That could be the encryped RTTY that was referred to above.
This sig for rent.