AD-VERSARY DENIED: Per Reuters, the Air Force has disabled advertising identifiers on military computers and mobile phones, while U.S. Special Operations Command has done the same on Windows devices. The Army says it disabled mobile advertising IDs earlier this year after reports that commercially available location data has been used to track (and target) U.S. forces in the Middle East. Apparently, there’s a booming industry for data brokers who collect location information from phones and apps and then sell it (no pun intended, of course).
THE SPY WHO GAMED TOO MUCH: Russian intelligence is apparently trolling for recruits in Denmark. It's looking for people who spend time on social media and gaming platforms. According to Reuters, Denmark's intelligence service, PET, says Russian operatives are recruiting ordinary Danes for reconnaissance missions, including taking photos of defense companies and infrastructure. PET says those pictures could be used to plan sabotage operations against Danish defense firms with ties to Ukraine. Some of the recruiting is happening through gaming platforms. In other words, which tells us that Moscow seems to have figured out that if you want somebody to photograph a sensitive facility, you don't necessarily need a trained spy. You need somebody who owns a phone and spends too much time online. PET says it is "extremely serious" when ordinary Danes assist Russian intelligence, whether deliberately or unwittingly. Russia's ambassador to Denmark denies the allegations and instead accused Copenhagen of creating security risks by supporting Ukraine. Hmmm. Still, it seems like vetting new friends online is a little more important than we once thought.
SPYING ON THE CHEAP: If Beijing is outsourcing espionage to college students, it may not pay very well. According to CBC News, a University of Waterloo undergraduate student is accused of taking assignments from a mysterious Chinese contact to photograph specific airplanes and FedEx facilities in Toronto and Chicago. The alleged pay: $20 to $30 per accepted photo, with the student telling investigators that he'd made somewhere around $500 total over 18 months (accounts vary on the exact figure, and a couple put it closer to $74). At Chicago's O'Hare Airport in April, security cameras allegedly caught him hanging around a FedEx employee lot, photographing aircraft, trying to open a delivery truck and shipping container, and climbing onto a forklift to get a better camera angle. Prosecutors say he initially told U.S. border officials that he was simply an aviation enthusiast taking pictures for a flight-tracking website. After several rounds of questioning, prosecutors say he admitted that a Chinese contact had assigned him specific planes and tail numbers, and that he suspected the man worked for a Chinese security service. But he later allegedly told the FBI that the plane photos were a cover story his handler gave him. The actual assignment: interior photos of the FedEx facility itself, along with details on freight logistics, bus routes, and train schedules. The student has been charged not with espionage but with making false statements to federal officials. At a court hearing on Tuesday, he agreed to remain in custody and hasn’t yet entered a plea of guilty or not guilty. If any of this is proven in court to be true, it seems that Beijing got a pretty good deal.
FREIGHT, MEET SIGINT: The shipping giant COSCO is not to be confused with the Kirkland-hawking warehouse chain. According to Reuters, two senior Trump administration officials say the Chinese state-owned firm has been quietly outfitting its container ships with concealed signals-intelligence gear, hoovering up military communications and encryption data near the coasts of the U.S. and other target countries. All the while, the same vessels haul sneakers and refrigerators into American ports on a completely legitimate commercial schedule. COSCO didn't respond to Reuters requests for comment. China's embassy called the claims "totally baseless" and said they would NEVER ask any company or individual to “collect or private data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws.” The Pentagon flagged COSCO as a Chinese military company in January 2025. The designation doesn't impose sanctions, although it does bar the company from doing business with the Defense Department and its contractors. COSCO's commercial operations, meanwhile, have continued. So apparently, if one wanted to, one could be barred from doing business with the Pentagon while also sailing into American ports collecting intelligence on the Pentagon. That’s if one wanted to, of course. That sounds like a pretty good deal. Better than a $1.50 Costco hot dog.
THE CIA'S DRONE DOOR-OPENER: Want to break into the U.S. defense market? It looks like it helps to have a CIA-connected venture capitalist backing you. Reuters is sharing the story of a German drone maker that got an early foothold in the United States with help from In-Q-Tel (IQT) - the investment firm created by the intelligence community. Quantum Systems co-CEO Sven Kruck says IQT and other U.S. investors helped the company open doors in Washington and land work with both the CIA and the FBI. That work reportedly didn't make Quantum Systems flush with funds by itself, but according to the reporting, it did deliver credibility and connections in the world's biggest defense market. The German company is now valued at roughly $8 billion and is one of Europe's biggest defense startups, supplying reconnaissance drones to Germany, Ukraine and others. If Europe is now on the cutting edge of drone technology, it seems the U.S. is still on the cutting edge of cash.
YOU CAN CALL THIS A LAKE EFFECT – With the stroke of a pen just a few days ago, President Trump renamed Lake Ontario "Lake America," and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has dutifully complied, filing the change into its Geographic Names Server — which NGA's own release describes as the official U.S. repository for foreign geographic names. The Interior Department separately updated the domestic database, meaning it took two federal agencies and two different databases to relabel one lake that sits mostly in New York. Social media ran with bogus claims that Canadian customs was turning away boats with "Lake America" on their paperwork. Turns out, it wasn’t quite that juicy. The Washington Post found a Toronto charter captain shrugging that it's "a nonissue for us, other than watching the memes and enjoying the humor." Ontario Premier Doug Ford answered with a two-story sign reading "Lake Ontario. Now and Always." The new name is on the books in Washington. Everywhere else, it doesn’t seem to be holding much water.
THEY’LL LET ANYBODY IN THESE DAYS: The FBI has reportedly loosened some of its requirements for new applicants. CBS News reports that a June internal memo said background checks would no longer automatically disqualify applicants for things like: hiring sex workers; stealing from an employer; or committing bestiality. Yeah, you read that right. The new bar: no more than two instances of soliciting prostitution and none within the last decade, and theft older than three years is forgivable. Bestiality gets a pass, too — but only if it happened before the age 18 because kids will be kids, eh? The Bureau says the changes are intended to help better evaluate “the whole person.” Critics, though, might call it evaluating a shrinking applicant pool. Former officials note that the FBI lost more than 1,100 special agents last year and say recruiting has failed to keep pace. Director Kash Patel insists that standards are rising, not falling. We don’t really know but we imagine polygraph operators are probably developing a whole new set of pet questions.
THE INSIDER THREAT DIVISION HAD AN INSIDE MAN: Nathan Vilas Laatsch, 29, of Alexandria, Virginia, spent his DIA career in the agency's Insider Threat Division, the office whose entire job is catching people - well - like him. According to the Justice Department, Laatsch, who was arrested last year, pleaded guilty last week to transmission of national defense information to a foreign government. The FBI reportedly learned in March of 2025 that he'd offered classified material to a foreign government (still unnamed in court filings), then started corresponding with who he thought was a "foreign official" but was really an undercover FBI agent. Officials believe that Laatsch transcribed classified documents by hand at his desk over three days. ABC News previously reported that surveillance video caught him folding the notes into squares and stuffing them in his socks. A coworker separately spotted him tucking notebook pages into the bottom of his lunchbox. Laatsch eventually dropped a thumb drive at a public park in northern Virginia, telling his contact he'd packed in "a decent sample size" to show off "the range of types of products" he could access. The key to Laatsch’s betrayal wasn't cash, he said he wasn't "opposed to other compensation" but said he didn't need money; what he wanted was citizenship. A month later, he came back for round two, hid a fresh batch of notes in his clothing again, and was arrested at the handoff. He faces up to life at his sentencing hearing in January. That’s a long time. He’d better pack a lunchbox.
WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM FOR A WORD FROM OUR STATE SPONSOR OF MISCHIEF: CIA Director John Ratcliffe's now-well-known (but once secret) trip to Moscow produced the usual pileup of denials, non-denials and "semi-routine" dismissals. It also apparently gave Russia's most reliably monotonous piece of Cold War hardware a workout. UVB-76, Moscow’s shortwave numbers station nicknamed "Doomsday Radio," reportedly broke its trademark buzz at least 25 times the day after Ratcliffe left town, according to Ynetnews, citing The Moscow Times. Among the coded transmissions: the words "waitress," "spray" and "existence" — presumably meaningful to someone, somewhere. It was reportedly the station's busiest day since the last time Trump and Putin spoke by phone, which is either a coincidence or the closest thing Russian signals intelligence has to a mood ring. The Kremlin, meanwhile, decided this was the week to explain why it doesn't explain itself. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said intelligence services traditionally "work quietly," but diplomats are "obliged to say something" — which we interpret as either candor or the most Russian possible way of saying "no comment."
DIGGING UP SOME OLD SPY STORIES: Soviet spy Donald Maclean apparently didn't need a handler to protect him on his way out the door. He had his wife. That’s according to a story in The Telegraph, which gives juicy details about the Cambridge Five saga - just one of the stories in The MI5 Archive, a new book by British National Archives specialists Mark Dunton and Stephen Twigge. The book draws on MI5's declassified files from its 1909 founding through the mid-1970s. Among the newly released files: more details from the frantic days before Maclean and fellow Cambridge Five member Guy Burgess fled to Moscow in 1951. After Maclean vanished, MI5 reportedly questioned his heavily pregnant wife, Melinda, who was due with the couple's third child within a fortnight. She explained his sudden departure as ordinary domestic chaos: two kids down with measles, and relatives due that weekend. It worked. Her interviewer, Jim Skardon, the officer who'd wrung a confession out of atomic spy Klaus Fuchs a year earlier, took her account at face value. Dunton suggests MI5 may have underestimated her simply because she was a housewife, not a suspected operative. What Skardon didn't know was that Melinda had long been aware of her husband's espionage. The book is due to be published in the UK September 3 and in the U.S. on November 17.
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