American Special Services Learn To Track Putin's Movements

How did this become possible?

The US military and intelligence services can track the movements of Russian President Vladimir Putin using mobile phone data from his entourage. This is stated in an excerpt from American journalist Byron Tau's book "Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State", published in the Wired magazine.

In his book, Tau talks about a programme created in the United States, which makes it possible to track the movement of almost any person in the world using data from his mobile phone. This is the mechanism by which advertisers distribute targeted advertising.

Tau writes that each owner of an iPhone or Android phone is given an "anonymous" advertising ID by Apple or Google. This number is used to track a person's actual movements, their online behaviour, the apps they install on their phone, and more.

"Faced with a commercially available data repository so rich and detailed, governments around the world are increasingly opening their wallets to buy up this information from everyone, rather than hacking it or obtaining it under secret court orders," he said.

According to Tau, the CIA was interested in software that could analyse and understand the geographical movement of people and things, so the CIA's venture capital arm invested in relevant companies.

"After getting a dataset about Russia, the team realised it could track phones in Russian President Vladimir Putin's entourage. The phones were moving everywhere Putin went," the author of the book claims.

As Tau notes, the devices in question probably did not belong to Putin himself, but to drivers, security officers, political aides and other support staff surrounding the Russian president.