Report: Activist Uses Apple AirTags to Uncover Secret German Intel Agency

An activist in Germany has reportedly used AirTags, a mass-market GPS tracking device developed by Apple, to identify a secret arm of German intelligence.

Activist Lilith Wittmann suspected that a mysterious German agency called the “Federal Telecommunications Service,” of which little is publicly disclosed, actually belonged to the country’s intelligence services. Wittman then utilized a novel method to discover the truth.

By mailing an AirTag to the innocuously-named federal telecoms authority and then tracking it via GPS, the activist was able to observe that the device ended up at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the federal domestic intelligence agency of Germany.

Via Apple Insider:

“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.”

She sent a parcel with an AirTag and watched through Apple’s Find My 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.

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.

Wittmann detailed her full experiment in a Medium post.

It would not be the first time that the existence of a western intelligence agency has been kept from the public. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was created in 1952, but its existence was not revealed to the public until 1975.

The existence of GCHQ and MI6 were also not acknowledged by the British government until the 1980s, despite being a relatively open secret before that.

GPS tracking has been a feature used in mass-market products for some time, notably smartphones and tablets, which can be located by their users using GPS if they are ever lost.

Apple’s AirTags are designed to track anything they are attached to, a feature which has many benign applications — although as Breitbart News has previously reported, the devices have begun to show up in crimes like stalking and car theft.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.