Russian Monitoring of Smartphones

There is a cute article in the Wall Street Journal about Russian monitoring of cellphones among the 4000 NATO troops in Eastern Europe.  I was kind of wondering if any of the NATO forces had ever had an OPSEC briefing, which focuses on security of a different kind - operational security.  This is the same kind of security that let the Vietnamese know when troop movements were about to happen.  They focused on service people around the military who could feed information that the troops were planning to move out.  Troops generally talk too much, and we all know that part.  That was before cellphones.

The difference is the Russians are monitoring cellphones and playing games with the troops who have them.  They specifically target some individuals in command.  They turned on the phone locator, deleted contacts, and generally let them know they were manipulating the devices to see where they were.  That is intimidation, a more subtle use of the principles used to gather intelligence from these kinds of devices.  NATO forces tried to ban cellphones but the troops worked around policy without realizing how much risk their was to their actions.  The military commander who gets a message that someone is trying to access his phone from Moscow is being acquainted with a problem he should already have been briefed on.  Anyone who takes personal electronics into combat is putting himself and his comrades at risk.  You can tell that to the Russian soldier who posted Facebook photos from both sides of the border in the Ukraine.  Soldiers are soldiers everywhere.

Most of us know the 1983 story of the US soldier who, during the invasion of Grenada phoned his operations center to get help.  Everyone thought that was the enterprising soldier adapting to a bad situation overcome it.  The officer was praised for it at the time.  He should know better today.  There are no secure cellphones.  They ride on networks built and maintained by Chinese and Russian network services.  They are too easily hacked, usually through application services that the phone maker does little to check out (Apple being the exception).  They are not combat communications, and even Apple can’t do that level of protection for a soldier.  A little OPSEC monitoring might help everyone here.  Find those phones before your enemy does.