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Comment by ribasushi | Hacker News Reader

I have a close friend with the US military, who was deployed to Germany in 2017. Their brigade was moving various equipment from base to base.

Their only means of communication with superiors was a bog-standard cell phone with a US-number SIM-card.

Forget the tracking implications: orders were texted, often via SMS.

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Yeah people on HN and elsewhere really have this warped view about how secure things are. They don’t understand that militaries and intelligence agencies are run by normal people with normal beauracies and dumb rules and shortsights. Look at the Snowden leaks, these people are not magical space wizards.

No, we understand that. We're just continually surprised that world's largest and most expensive army keeps shooting itself in the foot like this.

It's a trade-off, I think. I doubt there's much actionable intel for an enemy to be found in logistics orders of a base in Germany.

Maybe not now, but in a war there definitely is.

Use your imagination. Having a scrap of inside knowledge is a great asset for recruitment. You establish yourself as an insider and the target is more likely to spill some beans.

“Yeah, getting all those Foo widgets to that secret storage place was a real pain, I know! It was bunker X9, I think.. that’s the worst, am I right?"

More importantly, it's a bit harder to find (or operate) a reliable fully secure US owned communication system in Germany. Especially when compared to reliability and scale of the civilian GSM system.

Why do you say that? They are/have been a major reconnaissance/aggressive drone hub.

There's people who are smart enough to design TEMPEST standards and a private global network, you'd think they could design something sufficiently idiot-proof to send military orders with ease. For fuck's sake, a basic messaging app hosted on military servers would do the trick, and it would be no different for users (rather than the Messages app, use the military app).

The same way people believe that crypto-exchanges holding hundred of millions of dollars in coins must have James Bond movie kind of security, when in fact many times they just store the coins online on a computer connected to the internet.

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