{"id":6387,"date":"2022-01-25T14:01:05","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T14:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/01\/25\/apples-airtag-uncovers-a-secret-german-intelligence-agency\/"},"modified":"2022-01-25T14:01:05","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T14:01:05","slug":"apples-airtag-uncovers-a-secret-german-intelligence-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/01\/25\/apples-airtag-uncovers-a-secret-german-intelligence-agency\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple’s AirTag uncovers a secret German intelligence agency"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A researcher has sent one of Apple’s AirTags<\/a> to a mysterious “federal authority” in Germany to locate its true offices \u2014 and to help prove that it’s really an part of an intelligence agency. <\/p>\n

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Apple’s AirTags have already been used for good<\/a> and for bad<\/a> in cases involving the tracking of individuals, but now a German researcher has used one in an expose of government secrets. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Activist Lilith Wittmann claims that she has uncovered how Germany’s little-known Federal Telecommunications Service is actually a “camouflage authority” for a secret intelligence agency. Initially she wrote how<\/a> she “accidentally stumbled upon a federal authority that does not exist.” <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Now Wittmann has detailed<\/a> her subsequent and extremely thorough attempts to prove her suspicion. She has methodically gone through every step of learning what she can of the intelligence agency, including where it is. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Some of the steps she details are no longer possible to reproduce, such as her initial one of simply looking up a list of federal authorities online. Similarly, Wittmann includes transcripts of phone calls with an official whose cell number that she reports then ceased working. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Through calls like that, IP searches, and even driving to official buildings, Wittmann worked to track down the mysterious Bundesservice Telekommunikation, or Federal Telecommunications Service. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She establishes multiple reasons to believe it is part of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), and ultimately concludes that there are actually two “camouflage” authorities. Both are allegedly a secret part of an intelligence agency named the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Using an AirTag<\/h2>\n

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Wittmann says that everyone she spoke to denied being part of this intelligence agency. But what she describes as a “good indicator,” would be if she could prove that the postal address for this “federal authority” actually leads to the intelligence service’s apparent offices. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“To understand where mail ends up,” she writes (in translation), “[you can do] a lot of manual research. Or you can simply send a small device that regularly transmits its current position (a so-called AirTag) and see where it lands.” <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She sent a parcel with an AirTag and watched through Apple’s Find My<\/a> system as it was delivered via the Berlin sorting center to a sorting office in Cologne-Ehrenfeld. And then appears at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So an AirTag addressed to a telecommunications authority based in one part of Germany, ends up in the offices of an intelligence agency based in another part of the country. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wittmann’s research is also now detailed in the German Wikipedia entry<\/a> for the federal telecommunications service. It recounts how following her original discovery in December 2021, subsequent government press conferences have denied that there is such a federal telecommunications service at all. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In her latest post detailing her research, activist Wittmann says she is continuing in a forthcoming third part in her series. In the meantime, she writes that the intelligence service can keep the AirTag. “I heard they are supposed to be very expensive,” she concludes. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n