Your Phone Is Targeting You | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS
6/11/202658 min
Mike Yeagley joins me to break down how mobile devices, ad tech, commercial location data, and data brokers create major OPSEC risks for service members, case officers, and anyone working in national security. He explains how adversaries can buy or exploit pattern-of-life data, why privacy settings often don’t go far enough, and what the future of tradecraft looks like in an age of ubiquitous technical surveillance.
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00:00 — Start / Mike Yeagley joins Eyes On Geopolitics
00:25 — Mobile devices, ad tech, and the OPSEC risk to operators
03:14 — Commercial location data and how adversaries can target U.S. personnel
04:57 — Why privacy settings don’t actually protect your data
07:12 — Ad IDs, GPS toggles, and how apps still resolve your location
10:33 — Could Iran use commercial data to target U.S. troops?
14:19 — How adversaries buy data through brokers and proxies
19:25 — Why regulating the data economy is so difficult
22:10 — How commercial data erodes tradecraft and operational ambiguity
29:24 — What case officers and operators can do to reduce digital exposure
36:17 — Ubiquitous technical surveillance and the future of human intelligence
41:45 — Russia and Iran using gaming platforms, crypto, and gig-style tasking
47:24 — Near-real-time data buys, pattern-of-life tracking, and final thoughts
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDee· Host0:00
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Eyes on Geopolitics. I'm here with Mike Jaeggli. Uh, Mike has had an extensive career, a pretty interesting one, I'd say even a novel one when it comes to, like, you know, national security. Uh, Mike worked with a, you know, bunch of tier one units, JSOCSOCOM and stuff like that, working on, um... I mean, what would you say you worked on? Uh, you would be able to describe it better than I can.
Mike Yeagley· Guest0:25
Yeah, um, novel is, is definitely a way to describe it. Um, I mean, the, the, the, the problem that we were focusing on that has, that has reemerged with, with attention and vigor is the risk to operational security from the mobile devices that we all carry. And the intent and design of these mobile devices is fundamentally to collect data about the user and model them into a cohort that, uh, advertisers can sell stuff to. Now, what, what shifted is it's not just advertisers that are sort of monetizing the data. The conversion metrics are different when you're talking about an adversary. But the intent and, and the behavioral patterns, whether you're trying to sell or target, uh, roughly the same. And it's, if you think about this low-cost