Dead Drop: May 31 - June 6

THE BUTCHER’S BILL: In her first public speech, delivered May 27 at Bletchley Park, GCHQ's new director Anne Keast-Butler assigned a number to Russia's war dead: nearly 500,000 of its soldiers killed since 2022. That figure is hard to confirm but BBC News says their organization has verified more than 223,000 names. Given that both sides closely guard their own casualty counts there are undoubtedly many more, perhaps as many as GCHQ cites. To put that stunning half million number into perspective, the United States has 2.4 times Russia's population. So, it would be like the U.S. losing 1.2 million military personnel over the same period. That is roughly equivalent to America's combined losses in the Civil War, the Second World War, and Vietnam. There are currently only 1.35 million personnel on active duty in the U.S. military. Keast-Butler's verdict on the man running up this tab: "Putin is going backwards on the battlefield."

WHY SPY IF YOU CAN JUST BUY? It’s no doubt a much faster (albeit less sexy) answer to the age of 007: why invest in training and deploying spies when you can just buy the information you need? According to a report in WIRED (has a paywall but totally worth it), CENTCOM says it has seen multiple reports that adversaries are exploiting commercial location data to surveil- or potentially target - U.S. personnel in theater. Seriously. While the reporting indicates that there has not been confirmation of successful strikes against U.S. troops that are tied to the data that’s for sale, it is the first time a combatant command has publicly acknowledged the threat exists in those terms, which is kind of a big deal because it’s been talked about – and pointed out as a vulnerability – for close to a decade. And it turns out, the data itself was never even all that hard to get. Researchers, reporters, and basically anyone with a halfway decent cover story have been able to buy sensitive information about service members including their locations, movements, even personal details, for what would feel like pocket change to the CIA or MI6. The fix? Not exactly brain surgery: turn off location sharing, limit trackers, stop sharing data on everyday apps. How’s that for starters?