
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...
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Mike Yagley Clark
What's up, y'?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
All?
Mike Yagley Clark
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Mike Yagley Clark
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Eyes on Geopolitics. I'm here with Mike Yagley Clark. Uh, Mike has had an extensive career, pretty interesting one, I'd say, even a novel one when it comes to like, you know, national security. Mike worked with a, you know, bunch of tier one units, jsoc, SOCOM and stuff like that working on, I mean, what would you say you worked, you would be able to describe it better than I can.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yeah, novel is, is definitely a way to describe it. 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 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 the behavioral patterns, whether you're trying to sell or target, roughly the same. And it's. If you think about this low cost way of deploying millions of sensors into the pockets and homes and work locations of protected populations, you Know that that becomes a significant operational security risk that we demonstrated crudely 10 years ago, tracking operators, you know, without any real. We weren't looking for their forward operating base, but we had enough to start to be able to reveal a forward operating base and then track the operator to his home and then start tracking what his spouse does and where his kids go to school. And those, those rhythms, those patterns of life that transcend both what you do for work and what you're doing personally. That removal of ambiguity that we've decided we no longer cherish and hold true because we've got to reveal everything about ourselves every minute of the day. That, that creates friction for the, for the operational community, whether you're a special mission unit operator, case officer, FBI agent, ICE agent, you know, the patterns of life is, is a significant operational security risk. And it's the mobile device that, that is that sort of foundational layer.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, it's like the gateway. It's like the gateway to like, all the information about you. It's pretty scary to think about. Right, because we all kind of want
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
our,
Mike Yagley Clark
we want our convenience, we want our phone to be able to do everything for us and stuff like that. And we really kind of, it's kind of a trade off that we don't think about. And I know, like, we, you know, the America, America's been doing it and JSOC and CIA has probably been doing this for a long time, Right. Like using, you know, commercial location data to target other enemies of the United States and stuff like that. And you shot me over this. The press release from Senator Wyden's office out of Oregon. I mean, it's him and like 12 other other bipartisan members of Congress saying, like foreign advice adversaries are using commercial data to target US Service members in the Middle east. And I'm sure China's probably using it to track them all over the world, obviously. And yeah, we had a great, like you had a great appearance on the Team House. I ple I, you know, implore everybody to go check out your full episode on the Team House talking about your career, what you got into and stuff like that. It's pretty crazy because we don't really think about the consequences and. Sure. Like the layman person that's not working in national security, maybe they don't care as much. Sure. But if you have a serious job where you have a top secret or you're out going on operations or and stuff like that, that's something I would hope. Like the DOD and CIA are bringing People in like you to like kind of, I guess, beef up their operational security.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yeah, it's, it's a complicated topic. And you're right. We all want conveniences. We all want our smartphones to do these amazing things. And we're not, there isn't a, we're not going to return to an era where we're not connected like this. And really the risk and the mechanics that create that risk, whether you're an operator or just a citizen that values privacy and agency and kind of wants to be left alone, but still be able to use a mobile phone or a smartphone, we need to sort of look at this from a first principles perspective, which is we, we understand the, the fundamental issue. It's this commercial data and the device is that foundational risk surface. So let's break it down. You know, every app that you have on your phone is a collection surface. It may do things that are helpful, but its privileged position on your phone enables it to interrogate your device without any governance. And I will tell you that privacy and the privacy policies that have come out of state, federal government and privacy settings, it's really, they're, they're, they're not, it's not real privacy. If we, if we think about privacy settings on, on the current sort of the two dominant platforms, they enable a user to indicate a preference to. And let's talk about the two selectors that the, that, that the Senate Armed Services Committee Senator Wyden, who's leading this charge across a variety of domains. The, the risk to operators and to personnel being the latest. If we think about the, the selectors that are of most concern, it's this thing called an AD id, which is this crude way of doing things that a cookie would do on a browser, but on a mobile device and location. So let's start with location first. You can, you can toggle and indicate your preference that an app not extract or access the GPS sensor on your device. That does not mean the app is not going to resolve your location through other means from the data that it can inspect on your device. So this, the letter is talking about location data. And maybe everybody toggles that selector on your phone not to track location. All that is doing is indicating your preference that the app not access the sensor. It's going to figure out where you are through a host of other data features, telemetry that your device is collecting. And in many ways it's far more probative than the gps. And then the AD id again, it's just indicating your preference for an app not to track you. There's no governance at the device layer to ensure that that's policy that's being enforced. You're indicating a preference. And again, like with location data or location, there are a variety of different ways to assign an identifier to you based upon the behavioral patterns that can be resolved through the telemetry on your device that you do not control, modeled in ways that you cannot perceive. Because we're looking for these non obvious patterns. Think, think about it this way. You know, developing a pattern using the gyroscope, battery level, accelerometer and screen orientation. Is there a pattern in there? Maybe, maybe not. But at scale across the population of everybody that these platforms and systems are modeling, behavioral deviation becomes easily becomes distinguishable. And that's right, that's the risk. Where we are today, Senator Wyden and the Armed Services Committee, the letter and the focus is really on this, the way in which we were doing it 10 years ago. But the platforms, apps, they've moved on to different methodologies. So my concern is that the, the, the, the intent of the Senate sort of misses the current state of the risk. And, and we're not, we're not attacking, we're not attacking them, which, which just maintains exposure and gives us the impression that, you know, there's something that is protecting us and that's just not the case.
Mike Yagley Clark
Mike, I saw a report early on when we started bombing Iran that the Iranians used some of that information or some of those techniques to kind of triangulate where we, where our guys were. And it might have caused like people like the 13, you know, some of the 13 service members that passed that got killed to get killed or you know, the hundreds that have been injured. Is that, is that factual
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
as far as, you know, I don't know if, if, if the adversary, you know, used commercially available location data for targeting. But I will tell you this. If you have a variety of devices that are clustered that you can reasonably infer are U.S. personnel because the location data, the GPS sensor hadn't been turned off. And this is where I kind of lose my mind on this because These are alleged DoD issued devices where the AD ID is still available, GPS, you know, and GPS is highly precise. So if you start seeing clusters of devices, you know, based somewhere, you can infer, well, that's US personnel, they will certainly look at other targeting data and intelligence. But if you're looking for, you know, target queues about where US personnel are stationed, of course this is possible. And of course an adversary can do it. And you know, 10 years ago when I was standing in front of a room at jsoc, you know, I said to them, if a history major from St. Lawrence University can expose your forward operating base at the Lafar cement factory in Syria and then target and bring and identify where, where your operators live, if I can do it, certainly an adversary can, if they're not already. We don't have, you know, dominion or a monopoly on, on these things. And we, we must assume that an adversary is as, as equally hungry for targeting information as we are. And this is perhaps, you know, a lesson learned. Unfortunately, it required casualties in, in order for anybody of consequence to take notice. And that, I don't know, that's dereliction. I don't know what to characterize that is. And I understand, you know, I look at these things, you know, in a perfect if, if I were in, in charge. This is how I do things. And I know things don't work that way, but these are easy fixes. We're, you know, we need the Senate Armed Services to get involved in the easy fix, the fix that should have been applied de facto, full stop, 10 years ago. And here we are today, still talking about something that, you know, is a decade old, but notwithstanding, we need to fix this. We have tools and tech that can address this, and we need to make this a priority because these are the easy ways of propagating OPSEC across the entire continuum of OPSEC risk.
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Mike Yagley Clark
I love like an example like so what would it take for an adversary to exploit commercial data? They have to buy data that's already been hacked and is online. Or like, do they hack an app and somebody downloads an app? Like, how does it, how does it work exactly?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
I think it's far easier than that. I think through I'll just, this is how I did it. You develop a sort of a cover, you know, some commercial use case as to why you're even in the business or interested in commercial location data. Maybe you set up a proxy easy to do outside of Tehran. So maybe you have a proxy based in Turkey or Oman or, you know, a country like that and you're buying the data. You don't have to hack, you don't have to hack an app. You don't have to engineer anything. You know, 10 years ago, again, you know, I had to, I had to defend my methodology and explain that, you know, I didn't hack intercept engineer. I didn't, you know, follow anybody. I bought it. I bought it sitting in a home office. And 10 years ago there wasn't a lot of challenge. It was, you know, like if you're in the market to buy, we're in the market to sell. Yeah, probably a little, there's maybe a little bit more friction today because some of these companies have to provide reporting and you know, they're on the hook if they sell to an adversary. But if it's a proxy, if it's a legitimate proxy that I Sell to
Mike Yagley Clark
an end user who's getting it.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
How do they know?
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, right.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yeah, yeah. But it's, you know, buying this stuff is, you know, is a far requires fewer higher risk operations. You don't need to have, you know, case officers, you don't need to have this sort of bespoke unique capability. You just need to know how to buy it, how to talk it, how to explain what it is that you want. And, and that's not hard to do.
Mike Yagley Clark
Is it legal to buy this stuff? For the most part, yeah. Right. Like there are data brokers out there that. Or is it like a gray area?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
I feel like, you know the line from Pulp Fiction. You know Pulp Fiction, where of course, yeah, Samuel Jackson is, or no, John Travolta is like, it's legal to sell it, it's legal to buy it, it's legal to carry, you know, that line where he's, and, and then he says, and, and they, and the police can't even, you know, they can't even, they're not allowed to inspect or, or whatever that line was. But no, the answer d is, is yeah, it is legal. It is. This is a market. There are big businesses involved in this in, in marketing technology or ad tech. Microsoft has a business, Oracle had a business, but they sort of deprecated it. This is big business. And if you think about all of the credit bureaus, you know, their entire business model is predicated on, on these types of data sets that, or, and
Mike Yagley Clark
like credit bureaus can go ahead and flip them.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Say that again.
Mike Yagley Clark
So credit bureaus can just go ahead and flip that information, no problem.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
So credit bureau is creating credit products. But if you, if you think about the modern sort of data broker industry, a few years ago Tim Cook sort of launched a fatwa against data brokers because he kept, you know, sick and tired of hearing about the, the, the, the malfeasance of data brokers, you know, tracking people. And so that triggered the, the suppression of the ad ID and GPS data, which is sort of the lifeblood of a data broker. So what a data broker is going to do now is they're going to take all of this raw data and build products around it. So if I'm an advertiser, I'm going to go to an audience attribution firm which buys a lot of data or collects a lot of data and I'm going to buy an audience of, you know, people that are of a certain demographic, certain income, education, profession, etc. Etc. In order to do targeted advertising as an Adversary and, and, and working with those firms to actually acquire the raw data behind those products is just a matter of, of negotiation, man.
Mike Yagley Clark
I mean are there, are there any steps that like the US Government could take to like reel that in or it's just like it's the free market, you know, go ahead. You gave up your data. It's, it's now a product and can be marketed and sold to whoever wants it.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yeah, so this is where policy like you're trying to regulate these businesses is hard because methods, tech change so rapidly. So you regulate one element and six months later the market has developed a new technique. Whether they develop that new technique because of regulation or because of optimization, who knows. But policy, it's difficult for policy to keep up with the state of change because the incentives are just, are so massive. I mean we're trying to regulate $10 trillion economy that is opaque. It's not like trying to regulate the banks. There is no FINRA or there's no bank regulation, there's no data regulation that everybody plays by a certain rule. And we've got, you know, AML policies and kyc. So from a policy perspective, you know, they're, they're, they're moving in the right direction. They recognize that the risk is acute, but recognizing the acute risk and actually applying techniques or technologies that we're not trying to put a 10 trillion dollar economy out of business, but to give the user, the operator, the case officer, the special agent, the ICE agent, capability to inject on their own some friction in that commercial data economy as a means of foundational opsec. You know, we think about tradecraft and we have all sorts of techniques and approaches and, and, and you spend a lot of time learning tradecraft, which is absolutely foundational to, to operational, you know, objectives where the modern economy has disrupted. That is this loss of ambiguity that we all used to enjoy, we just sort of took for granted. Maybe you knew somebody was a special mission unit operator, but you didn't really know. And nowadays now I know what unit he's in. I know that he's a, you know, I know that he's a case officer that is, spends a lot of his time or is focused on Africa or Western Hemisphere. That ambiguity was a substrate for tradecraft because we started at a baseline and now that baseline has been eroded, has collapsed. And so you're starting, you're starting the mission and your pattern of life, your behavior is already out there. And so it's a, it's, it's a disadvantage. But for, for a long Time now, you know, I would, I would sit in front of the operational community and explain to them what they're up against. And the question, the fundamental question always came back was how do I get, how do I get out of commercial data? Well, it's that there's not a, there's not a maximalist approach to fix that. However, if commercial data is imposing this operational risk, we need to, we need to inject some friction into that business model and, and restore some of that user choice in what they're sharing, what an app can collect of what it and what it can extract. Now apps have to collect and understand device diagnostics in order to function. That is certainly a reasonable expectation. But when you look at the delta between what they're collecting, that's essential to function and everything else. It's like I have this flashlight app. Why does it need to know my network configuration? It doesn't. I need light, right? Yeah, show me light. I don't need you to, you know, improve my user experience. Like give me a break. But when you look at, and you're able to see what an app is doing on your device, which you cannot do now because they're, the platforms are, are, you know, they're sort of, they want to provide privacy but their, their business depends upon an app thriving. You know, like there's only so much they can do and that governance layer built into the operating system on an iPhone or an Android just does not exist.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah. It's like why do they want to throw a wrench into their money making operation? Right. Without they're not going to do something like that unless they're legally forced to. They're not going to just give it up. It's interesting too. Like when I download an app, particularly on iPhone, it's so it always gives me the g, like the creeps a little bit because it says at it gives you like a notification ask app to not like track your location. Why do I have to ask the app? Why didn't I just say no, don't track my location. I need permission from the app to not track my location. Just the way that they phrase the prompt that they give you is super like it gives me the creeps for some reason. And I always like second thing like, oh, maybe I should delete this app.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yeah. And isn't that interesting? It's, it's ask app not to track the linguistics of it.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Is very. You know, and, and like I said before that that is you are indicating a preference whether the app respects your preference. That's up to the app there. That's not a policy that you're invoking. That's up to the app. You have indicated a preference not to reveal your ad ID in that, in that selector for app ask not to track or your, your GPS sensor. Those are user preferences that you're indicating and not necessarily enforced by policy. You're just, you know, when, when the app sees your, your, your user session, it's, you know, there's a little field that says, you know, user is as indicated preference for you to. Not to track. Okay, I'll, I'll respect that or tuck that I'm going to track.
Mike Yagley Clark
Right? Yeah, it's, it's literally every app and you know a developer to developer. Like who knows? Like if you had TikTok and I like I have a cap cut on my phone, right? Cap cut is the same developer or it's a Chinese developer that's a known like that is I guess been pinged as possibly Chinese intelligence or whatever it is like connected to the CCP and for a while it was not, you weren't allowed to use it like when the whole tick tock thing was going on as well. I don't know if it's the same developer. I don't know exactly. But you're asking developer to developer, app developer to maybe please, if you don't mind, not track my location and all my data. Like what are they going to do? You're going to think, you know, you can't give everybody the benefit of the doubt. Even American developers, You know, like absolutely.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
I mean look at the. So when Apple invoked app tracking transparency, this privacy panel that suppressed the ad ID and location services, I mean that really throttled meta's business for a couple of quarters. I mean like that was a big, that was a big quarter revenue miss because yeah, the gig was up. Meta could no longer claim that cat videos, you know, sell sneakers. They were really dependent upon attributing behavior through these stable identifiers. But if you look at meta's recovery in this post privacy environment, they're doing just fine. And how are they going to kill us? They had a great quarter because they're not, they're not, you know, laying awake at night worried about user privacy. They've just gone deeper into the device and they've developed, you know, different cross app partnerships where if, if you're not, if you're not a meta user, there's a meta SDK on that app and meta is monetizing you that way. Minutes.
Mike Yagley Clark
What's A meta SDK.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
This is a little, it's, it's. Think about an SDK. Like when you build a house, you've got a general contractor. That's the app. The app is going to have a bunch of SDKs that provide functionality. And a lot of that functionality is, you know, like, I'm going to just use an SDK. I'm not going to build my own proprietary, you know, payment capability. Right. I'm going to use an SDK.
Mike Yagley Clark
I see that.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
That, you know, and the SDK is the plumber, the electrician, the carpenter. Right. To build your functionality. And so some of these SDKs are only there to collect data and monetize data for, for question.
Mike Yagley Clark
How does a guy or a girl who's working overseas, whether it's a case officer or an SMU person, how do they, you know, go about their jobs? I guess it, I guess the question doesn't even apply for just overseas, but let's talk about overseas. How do they avoid things like that outside of getting an unplugged phone?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Okay. Yeah. So you know that I'm on the board of advisors of unplugged. So whether, so it goes down, goes back to this. How do we, how do we inject some friction into the flow of our personal data to these opaque networks and the current configuration of all of the devices, you know, the, the two major platform duopoly, they are, they are part of that cartel, which is Apple and Android, right? Correct. Yep.
Mike Yagley Clark
Just for the, for folks listening.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yep. And they are fundamentally incentivized to make their devices easy for an app to collect, extract and monetize. As a, as a user, we have to go how, we have to think about how do I supervise or how do I almost like an intervention before all of that data flows from my device to this opaque network, how do I intervene and mitigate some of that? And until we start thinking about privacy as an integration of hardware and software, where privacy is built into the, is engineered into the device, we're going to be susceptible to this. So, you know, use a vpn. It's, it's, it's. There's nothing wrong with using a vpn, but all VPN is doing is mediating your traffic. Everything that's going over that pipe has already been extracted. So VPN is not offering you any privacy at that identifier layer or at that telemetry layer from your device. Privacy settings have already sort of blasted that. It's, it's really theater. Makes you feel good. But the app is gonna, is Gonna figure out a way to either resolve your location or attribute you through the behavior of your device. So until we mediate what an app is collecting on your device and give the user options to suppress that flow of telemetry, we're gonna be. We're gonna be chasing this problem indefinitely.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah. And, like, I'll give a free plug to Unplugged. You know, we're in the middle of talking about Unplugged becoming a sponsor of the show. Full disclosure. But, you know, I got a phone from Unplugged, and I did the orientation. First off, the orientation is, like, opens your mind up to what the phone can actually do. It's pretty incredible, honestly. So if you are worried about your location or, you know, just all the kinds of stuff that could get sucked out from all these apps that we all get, we all have. Unplugged does seem like the right fit. And I'm not like, we're not getting paid. Not yet anyway, so. And I had the orientation, and frankly, I was. I was extremely impressed by it, like, especially the new operating system. And Jacob, one of the people that, like, you know, I guess the customer success. One of the customer success guys was like, you know, super dialed into it. And. And I remember texting Jack Murphy afterwards. I was like, yo, this phone is pretty impressive, like, what you can and can't do. It's like the. And I hate to sound like I'm selling it, because I'm really not. Like, it's just a fact. Like, from what I've gathered from just the orientation and playing around with the phone is it feels like a James Bond phone because you could, like, reset it, like, super quick if you needed to. So outside of that, I don't really think there's, like, another company doing that. So.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
That's a good point.
Mike Yagley Clark
People are really worried about.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yep. Yeah. And the white glove onboarding experience, you know, it's not just because you're super handsome. D. We do that for everybody.
Mike Yagley Clark
I thought that was just for me. God damn it.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
That's part of the. That's part of the. That's part of the deal. But, you know, the. The community is not. Has. Has spent a lot of time and a lot of money developing, you know, special phones. OP phones. Unplugged is built for a consumer. So if we think about what we need to do for operators, we don't want to create new signatures that are revealing because it's a phone that has special egress points and, you know, acts differently and looks different than a Consumer ice. Whereas the unplugged phone or a privacy. A privacy phone built for a consumer is meant to not create new signatures that. This is a special operator or case officer. This is an individual who values privacy and carries a device that enables that without it looking like one of these OP phones that are concerning. Considering the amount of data that an adversary can collect and discover. Okay, this is what an OP phone looks like. Show me all of the other OP phones that are in my country or phones that look like that. That's the math. A lookalike model is really how advertising targeting is built. Show me this person just bought a $150,000 G Wagon. Show me other people like him or her right to target. And that's the math behind this. So, you know, we don't want to build new technology that is specific to a community. This is, this is privacy. But the, the new substrate of tradecraft or opsec starts with privacy and all that ambiguity that I, that I. Yeah,
Mike Yagley Clark
I mean, it's interesting how, you know, I've heard a couple CIA guys talk about like, how it's going to be very difficult to do like the, the. What do you, how do you, would you describe it? Like the legacy style of human collection? Because, you know, ubiquitous technical surveillance is everywhere. And specifically if you're liaison in an embassy somewhere, like, you're going to be, you know, the cyclops eye will be pointed at you specifically. Any like, tips or tricks that you would give. Obviously, I guess you can't really say it out loud if you do have like real, real insight. But like, what can somebody like that do? Or what will human intelligence really look like in the next 10, 20, 30 years?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yeah, you all have had people that, that have worked this, this problem, you know, ubiquitous technical surveillance almost became this living, breathing thing that constrained. It is constraining, but it is going to require that we think about tradecraft or the operational differently. And we've seen this before. We have historical references. The Agency is infamous for something called Moscow Rules, where you need to figure out a different way to operate in a really hostile, aggressive environment. And they did. And they. Some of the things they came up with were crude but creative as hell to enable to be able to operate and create those windows, those gaps where they could have a meeting without physical surveillance. And, and this environment is, is really, is no, no different. This, this new environment and, and ubiquitous technical surveillance where, you know, there is no neutral ground anymore because who knows, in some of these countries, all of their telecom is, is, has been, you know, gifted by China as part of their Belt and Road initiative. So there's no neutral ground any safely, like everywhere is a, is a hostile environment or could potentially be a hostile environment because of ubiquitous technical surveillance. And so this just is, is it's going to require a more holistic approach to operational readiness. If, if you are making that left turn into CIA headquarters every day with your phone on and you think you're going to go black anywhere, forget it. It's not, not possible, or it's possible, but with significant risk. So how do we, how do we mitigate this and how do we, how do we create, how do we refabricate some, some ambiguity so that we have this operational range? And I think the, the first step is really looking at this commercial data problem and applying solutions that add some friction to that, to that the velocity of that data that's flowing.
Mike Yagley Clark
So, you know, you've been working in the space for a long time. Do you think that now, I mean, it's, I feel like it's been trending this way for a while, like technical surveillance and SIGINT is, is becoming the dominating intelligence. Right? Compared to like, you know, giving a guy 10 grand a month for information about the Chinese military or whatever, do you think, like humans kind of taking the back seat to now sigint because, you know, everyone's on their phones and trying to find a way to penetrate them or, you know, what do you think?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
So I, I think that in terms of, you know, targeting an asset, developing that asset, validating that asset, I think there are a lot of things that all of this commercial data enables us to do, you know, below the threshold of risk. And before we even begin that recruitment process to understand who we're dealing with and what their value is, almost no differently than, you know, a company that's trying to determine the value of a customer based upon who they are, what they've bought, where we can apply those same techniques. I think that human relationships will always be critical when you're in these types of transactions. But I think that the technical, open source, publicly available information, commercially available information will help us target with more precision with lower risk.
Mike Yagley Clark
It's interesting, there was an article, we spoke about it a little bit on the episode before this one, where Russia and Iran, like have hit up kids on like video game servers, essentially giving them like a couple hundred bucks, maybe a grand to go, like do some PDA or even sabotage, like place bombs and stuff like that. It's interesting, like you mentioned, like, the, it's relatively crude Right. Like this is a crude way of doing it. It's like maybe the guys, the kid that's going to take a picture of a bomb site or plant a bomb, like that's like a one off kind of. He's like a one off, one use case and the kid's life is ruined. It's interesting the ways that different intelligence agencies are trying to get things done. Right. It seems way more cost effect, cost efficient and stuff like that. So it's an interesting world.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
I don't have a question but that's that use case is, is one of those. Look, if, if you can sort of activate the gig economy through these methods so long as that gig is doing legitimate commercial work and not something that's been stood up on behalf of, you know, if, if these, if these third party collection platforms and, and there are companies that do this, if they are able to develop situational awareness through either, you know, photographs or whatever, whatever the assignment is. But if they're doing that for legitimate commercial purposes and then they can sell that data to the government, it's a much safer approach as, versus standing up a contract and having you know, this contract be specific to a US government entity that just, that's where, that's where you know, people who are trying to make some, make some coin or tokens or however the payment stream is. That's how they get in.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, it's an interesting ever evolving world this stuff. But yeah, again I'm not trying to plug unplugged but I was and I'm a cynical fucker. Like you know, I think people know that about me that watch eyes on. I was very impressed by the phone, like extremely impressed by it because I don't really know what to expect until we did that, you know, that white glove orientation and it really opens your eyes. So like if it was incredible and I, you know, I'm really looking forward like they're gonna likely be sponsored or working with us. So I'm excited about that because it's actually a product that, that works, you know, it's a good thing.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
So it's, you're gonna, it's gonna be a high performance. You're gonna. All of the, everything that you expect from a smartphone, apps that you're using will function just as you normally expect them to function. But that, that disintermediating that data flow does not encroach or interfere with the functionality of the app. So as a user you're not sacrificing or trading off anything in terms of functionality to have engineered privacy into the device.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, interesting too. Like the sketchiest apps are not the sketchiest, but they're the ones that, that track the most are like the ones you wouldn't even think of, you know, like the State Farm app or something. And I know like people use the apps like test monitor their driving and you know, to maybe lower their rates, but they, they go at it pretty, pretty aggressively honestly.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Or, or an app that, you know, the scrapbookers use or you know, people who are selling their art or crafts out of their garage. You know, that app begins with a P. They really understand the behavior of their users.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, I could, I could totally see that. I was thinking Etsy once you said that, but I'm trying to think. I can't really come up with the
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
top of my head, but same Etsy and Pinterest.
Mike Yagley Clark
Got you.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yep, yep. Yeah, but when you, when you understand what's going on and you can see it and what's even, what's even more compelling is when you take that telemetry, which to a normal person like you and me means nothing, right? It looks like telemetry and you dump that into, you know, ChatGPT or Claude and, and give it an instruction like, find me some patterns that are unique or tell me about this user in a, you know, develop the pattern of life based upon this data and it just, it unravels your story big time. And if we think about it at scale, like, okay, do this over the course of a year and tell me how this person is different from everybody else. That's where it becomes a state sponsored approach, becomes operationally significant.
Mike Yagley Clark
One question, like, about the data sets that people buy or like, you know, adversarial countries buy or whoever buys, are those data sets like up till this date or is it like continuous? Like you're continuously getting the same data based on like the, whoever the cohort of people that you bought, is it like a subscription or you pay like a lump sum? Like how does it work?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
You can do a, you can do a big data buy, you can do a subscription. It's, it's near real time based upon, you know, the processing and when they're doing the extraction. You know, if you think about, people have talked about, you know, all of a sudden at, you know, 2:00am My device just started firing off and processing. So this is it. The, the, the extraction, you know, happens on a sort of a scheduled basis. It's not pure real time, but it's near real time. And I got you up to date. Within easily, you know, 12 hours.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, that's pretty. That's insane.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Which, if you're trying to target, you know, you're trying to whittle down who you're targeting, and you go from 100,000 people who have top secret clearances in the D.C. area to, you know, the 50 that are doing things with their device that indicate an operational posture, like powering down your phone in the middle of the workday against the population that never does that. You are the anomaly, and you've got a clearance and you're powering down, and who else is powering down around the same times, et cetera, et cetera. And when your phone powers back up, all of that backfill shoots off to the various apps. So, you know, this is how it works. And it's not that complicated, but it's something that people who are dealing in life and death, not just advertisers, but they're dealing with an adversary that's going to target them in way that is, you know, the metrics are. Are far more acute. This is something we need to fix.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, you brought up a great point. Like, you know, in a city where, you know, everyone's on their phones all day, and, like, there's a specific amount of folks that just shut their phones down that would stick out like a sore thumb and would not be hard to kind of sift through. Specifically, too, if you add, like, you know, large language models to it, too. Like, you know, I could see it being as easy as pie to figure out.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yeah. I mean, you power down your phone, there isn't some parameter that says you're a drug dealer, you're a spy, you're committing crimes. You know, it doesn't. But again, it is a behavioral indicator that is anomalous compared to the rest of the population that never does any of those things. Faraday bags toggling between airplane mode. When you're nowhere near an airport and, you know, you're trying to provide some. Some obfuscation to what you're doing, but all you're really doing is nominating yourself for inspection.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hope that, like, at least, like, off, you know, case officers, analysts, whoever, whoever's working in intel or jsoc, you know, national security professionals for the top secret clearance. I hope there's, like, some ways of, like, spoofing that, too. You know what I mean? Like, there's got. I'm assuming there is, like, for the love of God. But I could see where people, you know, don't think it's a big deal. Even, even somebody with a top secret clearance, right? It's, it's a wild world we live in, man. It's like this whole second like dimension of where we live, you know?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
MySpace. Only wish they were around today, right?
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, for sure, 100%. They'd be making tons of money off selling data just targeting ads.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Absolutely, Mike.
Mike Yagley Clark
Anything else, man? You tell me. The floor is yours.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
No, man, I think we got it. Look, there are, there are solutions out there. I joined the, the board of Unplugged because frankly, I got sick and tired of, of standing in front of these people who are desperate for a solution and, and, and not really having anything for them that, that wasn't some fancy op phone. So this convergence of, of privacy as that substrate, tradecraft makes a lot of sense to me having spent over a decade talking about this and educating this community about this. And look, we don't have the cognitive capacity to be monitoring and toggling and thinking through all, thinking through all of these risk surfaces layered on top of. We are, you know, in a denied area. We're on the X, we're, we got people shooting at us. I'm not going to sit there and worry about my stupid device. So we need something that just is a permanent state to remove that, that cognitive burden from, from people who are, you know, already in a high risk situation. We don't need to add more to that. And that's, that's where I see this as a variable in that solution space.
Mike Yagley Clark
Yeah, Mike, a pleasure, dude. I want everybody to know that, like, if you want to know more about Mike's career, the kind of shenanigans he got up to, there's. We have a long form interview with him on the team house. I'll put the link in the description for that. Yeah, it's, it's kind of like when you sit and think about it for a little bit, especially like a layman like myself, it's, it's kind of daunting to think about and like it feels like an impossibility. Like you can't avoid being on the phone and stuff like that. And I think we really like the normal, like the masses. We really give up information about ourselves. We trade it off for like convenience. Right. And I think if everyone's a little bit more cognizant of it, I think it would be beneficial for them just as a whole.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
If you're in the operational community and you're struggling and you know that you need to do something, contact me. I will help you
Mike Yagley Clark
cool? You want me to put. I'll put your LinkedIn and stuff like that. Is there anywhere else you want people to follow you?
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Yeah, that's about it.
Mike Yagley Clark
All right, so the LinkedIn, I'll put it down in the description. You can grab it there and if you're listening on audio down in the show, notes as well. Mike, awesome as always.
Guest Expert (Likely Mike Yagley Clark)
Thanks D Appreciate it.
Author/Host
Hey guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Teamhouse Podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free and what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the team house on our Geopolitics podcast, Eyes on things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the high side, anything else that we have going on, books, we recommend upcoming guests that we have coming on the show and also, you know, filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out, we send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can find our newsletter@teamhousepodcast.kit.com join again. The website for that is teamhousepodcast kit.com join so we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.
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Ryan Seacrest
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Ryan Seacrest
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Host: Dee Takos
Guest Expert: Mike Yagley Clark
Date: June 11, 2026
This episode of Eyes On Geopolitics takes a deep dive into how modern smartphones have become powerful tools for intelligence gathering—not just by big tech and advertisers, but by adversarial nation-states as well. Featuring Mike Yagley Clark, a national security professional with extensive experience supporting elite U.S. special operations and intelligence communities, the conversation unpacks the operational security (OPSEC) risks posed by commercial mobile devices and data. The discussion is especially timely given recent Congressional attention to the threat of foreign adversaries exploiting commercial data to target U.S. service members and intelligence operators abroad.
On the Illusion of Control:
"You are indicating a preference whether the app respects your preference. That's up to the app... When the app sees your user session, there's a little field that says user has indicated preference for you not to track. Okay, I'll, I'll respect that or, fuck that, I'm going to track."
— Guest Expert (31:14)
On Adversarial Exploitation:
"If a history major from St. Lawrence University can expose your forward operating base... and then target and bring and identify where your operators live, if I can do it, certainly an adversary can."
— Guest Expert (13:02)
On "Moscow Rules" for Today's Surveillance:
"The Agency is infamous for something called Moscow Rules, where you need to figure out a different way to operate in a really hostile, aggressive environment. ... We have to think about tradecraft or the operational differently."
— Guest Expert (42:42)
On Privacy-Engineered Devices:
“Until we start thinking about privacy as an integration of hardware and software, where privacy is built into the device, we're going to be susceptible to this.”
— Guest Expert (36:01)
Host’s Reflection on Convenience vs. Security:
"We really give up information about ourselves. We trade it off for, like, convenience. Right. And I think if everyone's a little bit more cognizant of it, I think it would be beneficial for them just as a whole."
— Host (59:05)
Mike Yagley Clark’s key message is stark: mobile devices are not merely tools for convenience—they are sensor platforms deeply embedded in our lives, and the data they emit is weaponized not only by marketers but by nation-states. Attempts at privacy by users are often little more than a facade; without technical and policy intervention, even the most careful operators stand out by their efforts to hide.
The episode advocates for a new paradigm of privacy as part of modern tradecraft, both for national security professionals and informed consumers. Specialized solutions, like privacy-engineered hardware, can now provide some friction against the data economy without sacrificing usability, but no perfection is possible. Awareness of these issues—not complacency—is the first line of defense.
For security professionals and laypeople alike, the risks are real—and the conversation on this episode provides both sobering warnings and a look at emerging solutions.