They use an AirTag to find the location of a secret German espionage agency

Apple’s AirTags are still in the eye of the hurricane. When they are used as a tracking device for people or foreign objects, they violate privacy. Here we have another case.

For those of us who defend Privacy What a vital human right, it is difficult to understand the existence of the AirTag de Apple.

It is true that it is very practical to find a lost or stolen object, but it is still a tracking device that can be used to track or follow a foreign person or object, violating privacy, or even facilitating crimes.

There are criminals who use them to steal cars, people who watch their children or their partner without them knowing… Or to pinpoint the location of a secret German government agency.

According to our colleague Iván Zambrano and Business Insider, Lilith Wittmann is a computer security expert who has spent time trying to find out what is the Federal Service for Telecommunications (BST in German), an enigmatic government agency that has no address or email. Just a closed office and an expired website.

Lilith Wittmann even called the official government information phones, but no one wanted to explain What does the Federal Telecommunications Service do?.

So this security expert decided to find out on her own.

He went to the address of the enigmatic office, and began to trace the IP addresses from the parking lot. I wanted to know if they had any connection with the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a German intelligence agency that monitors the extreme right and religious fundamentalisms.

The IP addresses were connected to a building of said federal office, in Cologne. It wasn’t proof enough, so he tried another tack.

He hid an AirTag in a book, put it in a package, and sent it to the Federal Telecommunications Service, without putting the address. He wanted to know if he would make it to the unsigned mailbox of the mysterious car park office.

But it was not like that: the AirTag ended up at the headquarters of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in Cologne, with which it was demonstrated that the Federal Telecommunications Service is part of the organization chart of the German espionage service.

After the news was released, a spokesman for the German Ministry of the Interior has denied this connection. But AirTag Do not cheat…

We are sure to discover many creative uses of this tracking device in the coming months.