“The steps the Defense Department has taken so far, Wyden said, “have not been effective at neutralizing this threat.”
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Every Branch of the U.S. Military Tells Ron Wyden It Has Switched Off the Advertising Trackers on Its Devices — Months After Foreign Adversaries Began Buying Commercial Location Data to Target American Troops in the Middle East
September 4, 2026
On Friday, September 4, 2026, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) released letters from the Air Force, the Army, the Navy and U.S. Special Operations Command confirming that each had disabled the advertising identifiers on the phones and computers its personnel use — the persistent codes that feed the commercial location-data market. The letters are the Pentagon’s answer to a bipartisan warning Wyden and Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-N.C.) delivered on May 28, 2026, when they and twelve other members of Congress revealed that foreign adversaries were buying commercially available location data to track U.S. servicemembers deployed in Middle East hotspots and using it to aim attacks. The Air Force said it had turned the identifiers off two months earlier; Special Operations Command said it had done so "recently"; the Army said advertising IDs had been blocked on its Windows computers since before 2021 but were only disabled by default on Android and Apple mobile devices as of February 2026. Wyden and Harrigan were not satisfied. The same day, they asked the Pentagon to investigate whether the Defense Department had ever properly countered the danger — with the war against Iran in its seventh month and U.S. bases in Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates having taken Iranian missile and drone fire in the preceding weeks.
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Statements Recorded
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2 Statements
“Enemies of the United States “should not be able to pull out a credit card and buy information that helps them track American troops.”
Background (1)— earlier statements that set the stage▸
“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. That foreign adversaries are still able to buy location data collected from the phones of U.S. personnel serving in military hotspots is a direct result of DoD leadership’s failure to prioritize this threat and implement commonsense cyber defenses recommended by federal cybersecurity experts.