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Russian troops are proving that cell phones in war zones are a very bad idea:
It’s been a nightmare scenario for U.S. commanders for years: An amphibious readiness group sails stealthily towards its objective, one reckless Marine or sailor goes topside and uses a personal cell phone to check Facebook, revealing the position of the assault ship. The Chinese or Russians quickly detect the cell phone signal in the middle of the ocean and realize they can’t miss. The enemy fires its anti-ship ballistic or cruise missiles at Pfc./Seaman Schmuckatelli as he posts a meme and suddenly the entire ship along with thousands of sailors and Marines are lying on the ocean floor.
To some, this type of scenario may seem as hyperbolic as warnings that wearing white socks in combat could give away your location to the enemy, but Russian troops in Ukraine have shown the perils of using cell phones in modern-day warzones.
The Ukrainians claim to have killed 12 general Russian officers since late February, in part because the Russians have resorted to using cell phones when their communications systems break down.
“It is not hard to geo-locate someone on a phone talking in the clear,” retired Army Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army Europe, told the New York Times.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hopdevil on Monday May 16 2022, @07:14AM (4 children)
This is probably one of many articles being pushed onto the internet/major news outlets in order to divert attention away from the intel provided by the US Intelligence Community
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 16 2022, @07:56AM
Just goes to show what an idiot you are.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pkrasimirov on Monday May 16 2022, @08:37AM
It may come as a surprise to you but the US Intelligence Community is gathering data from phones too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 16 2022, @08:40PM
I believe the primary misdirection is its still classified how effective this scheme is:
... But he's actually 100 miles away because they're GPS spoofing his location or outright hacking a phone emulator or just risk shitposting and running for it. Now they turned a $50 android phone into a $5M smoking hole in the ground. Repeat that enough times and you win the economic/logistics war.
The other strategy is self defense. Say you know for a fact that 0.1% of privates are morons whom will shitpost on tindr or grindr or whatever while out in the field. Fine. You got herds of cloud computer power, generate, say, ten times as much fake traffic via emulated shitposting. Eventually the enemy will stop drilling grindr shitposts when 9/10 are fake.
Can you imagine working in counterintel in 2022 and being told you job is to post dick pics using Pvt Schmuckatelli's cell phone while it sits in its faraday cage surrounded by SDR generated spoofed GPS transmitters? Meanwhile you're posting dick pics but your bunkmate has the shittier job of paying for posted propaganda claiming "all location data is 100% true all the time"
posted from my iPhone at coordinates 50.4501° N 30.5234° E 100% honest trust me no bullshite thats my coordinates uh huh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2022, @04:13AM
It's probably old news for the Russians as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Assassination [wikipedia.org]
And others: https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/03/03/kill-the-messenger/ [foreignpolicy.com]
Probably still works though. Also many of those at the top get used to their immunity to rules but haven't built enough immunity to missiles and bombs.