In his article for The Hill, “The data industry has become a full-blown threat to US national security,” Erik Wittreich, Veilant’s CEO, explains the commercial data threat that faces U.S. military personnel, demonstrated by an exercise which revealed how easily adversaries can purchase, aggregate, and analyze commercially available information to expose personal information of those who guard our nation’s defenses.

This summer, the Veilant team bought three months of commercially available data to see what someone — perhaps someone ill-intentioned — could learn about American troops.

We started with a military installation publicly associated with some of our most sensitive special operations units. We pulled the advertising IDs seen there. There were tens of thousands…