NATO Group Catfished Soldiers on Facebook to Discover Troop Movements

Occam's razor: No. That serviceman was looking for an affair. That's it. :)

Back in the early days of smartphones (back when it was just blackberries) I worked for a company where we provided service (rarely, but it happened) to a site where no electronics were allowed aside from what you needed to do the job past the front gate... and even the you were told not to bring anything in the car you couldn't afford to loose at the front gate. We were told to expect to leave the site with nothing but you, your clothes, and the keys to your car that they'd give back at the gate.

Any phone wasn't even returned if you parked at the front gate and left it there (they searched all vehicles). It was also very clearly stated that you do not try to hide anything if you accidentally brought your phone and to just accept it was gone, it was considered very bad form to hide anything.

Anything you took in (laptop...) was carried by solders until you needed it, and nothing electronic ever left the site.

It was extreme but to some extent.... the most sure fire security I ever saw. I suspect it is the best policy for sensitive sites. Maybe not civilian friendly, but then again who knows where we end up eventually.

Basically almost anything was considered a security risk... decades later they're still right.

Somebody should give them a medal. I suspect that this sort of thing is an underutilized avenue of attack against terrorists and gangs. The surface area of attack has grown exponentially since e.g. the kind of thing seen in The Wire, and the general public is mostly ignorant of opsec.

It did not end so well for them, apparently defrauding ISIS is still fraud.

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/25710/1/t...

In military/spy discussions, “open source” means “doesn’t require a spy to collect” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence ).

I assume you are referring to this bit. > The researchers discovered that you can find out a lot from open source data, including Facebook profiles and people-search websites

It had me wondering too.

Open Source is used here in the same sense as in "OSINT," Open Source intelligence, which is gathering publicly available data to infer information that your targets likely wouldn't volunteer directly.

I remember bellingcat covering the Trident Juncture exercise, they were able to find a lot of deployment info by just looking into public posts.