Le Monde reports that confidential movements of powerful leaders like Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could be tracked through a fitness app used by their bodyguards.
And I agree that maybe they should be using something else. Though one risk with using something that few others are using is that it can also be used for targeting and tracking. Like if someone knows the bodyguards use shortwave communicators and that there’s an event at some location, they could have drones set up to just target those frequencies when they see them.
It’ll always be an arms race, at least if the players realize they are in an arms race and don’t just willingly carry tracking devices.
They’d probably just use whatever bands the local police use, and those communications are encrypted as well. So to an outside observer, they could see that someone is chatting on the police bands, but they wouldn’t know if it’s the local police or something more interesting.
And these types of events typically establish a no-fly zone large enough that an attacker wouldn’t know where they’re coming from, even if they knew the exact location of the event (i.e. a campaign rally). It’s still possible, but there’s a lot that the Secret Service can and does do to mitigate tracking risks.
Thanks for the detail!
And I agree that maybe they should be using something else. Though one risk with using something that few others are using is that it can also be used for targeting and tracking. Like if someone knows the bodyguards use shortwave communicators and that there’s an event at some location, they could have drones set up to just target those frequencies when they see them.
It’ll always be an arms race, at least if the players realize they are in an arms race and don’t just willingly carry tracking devices.
They’d probably just use whatever bands the local police use, and those communications are encrypted as well. So to an outside observer, they could see that someone is chatting on the police bands, but they wouldn’t know if it’s the local police or something more interesting.
And these types of events typically establish a no-fly zone large enough that an attacker wouldn’t know where they’re coming from, even if they knew the exact location of the event (i.e. a campaign rally). It’s still possible, but there’s a lot that the Secret Service can and does do to mitigate tracking risks.