The New York Times was able to track President Trump's movements with leaked location data, showing how easy it is to spy on people via their phones
- The New York Times was able to track the movements of President Donald Trump using cellphone data.
- The Times used leaked phone data to track the movements of someone in his entourage, who believe is a Secret Service agent, as well as his name and home address.
- The Times said it replicated the exercise and identified workers at numerous sensitive sites in Washington, D.C., including the Pentagon, Supreme Court and Capitol Hill.
- The ease with which non-experts at the Times could do this shows the extreme vulnerability in location data. Hostile states are almost certainly able to do far more.
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The New York Times was able to track the precise movements of President Donald Trump by combining leaked location data with public information, showing the ease which which cell phone location data can be turned into a spying tool, potentially compromising national security.
The Times - which said it got the data from anonymous whistleblowers concerned about this vulnerability and a lack of regulations - said it took only minutes to turn a massive anonymized dataset into specific information on Trump.
The Times said it got data from 50 billion location "pings" from the phones of more than 12 million people in the US, relating to their movements in 2016 and 2017.
The Times said it was able to track Trump using just one of these phones, and it repeated the exercise with phones belonging to people across secure parts of the US government.
The Trump-linked phone belonged to a Secret Service agent in his entourage, the Times said. It pinged at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, before heading to two other golf clubs, and then back to Mar-a-Lago.
The locations matched public-domain information on Trump's activities at the time.
The Times said the phone also pinged at the nearby Secret Service field office and other events that involved elected officials.
This person's movements outside work hours could also be tracked, the Times said - leading to a home address, a name, and identities for family members. The Times did not publish this information.
The Times also said that it could track people in locations like the White House, Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon, military bases, and the FBI headquarters. This also led to verifiable home addresses and names.
The Times observed that such data could lead to potentially compromising information, like evidence of extramarital affairs, medical problems, and the like.
It said it identified one person who frequently in the Pentagon as someone who also made visits to a mental health and substance abuse facility.
Insecure security practices have been a hallmark of the Trump administration. His phone conversations have previously put national security at risk, and he did not use a secure phone to send tweet until months into his presidency. The Mar-a-Lago Club is also known to have lax security.
But the Times painted a picture of a problem that is not down to Trump's actions, but instead a nationwide (and indeed international) problem born of poor regulation, low public awareness, and unscrupulous private companies.
The result, the Times said, is that tracking and identifying people is easy - and there is no regulation to stop the exchange of sych data between different parties and companies for profit.
Experts warned the Times about the risk that such vulnerabilities could create for the US, or exploited by countries like Russia or China.