ShapurII
Trusted Member
Intelligence agencies operate on a much different level than what you and I think. You are not thinking about the indirect consequences of a security leak at all. Once a person's personal belongings are compromised, it doesn't threaten the person only, but an entire network of people connected to him/her.if he doesn't have his phone, and he's not with his family, how do they track him using his family's phone?
Here's a hypothetical scenario:
1. They find out that her daughter (Mahdyeh) has an instagram page. Her profile on instagram is public. That's a security leak in itself. Why should a top-commander's daughter have a public instagram page? They infiltrate her smart phone through available 0-click vulnerabilities and she, being a normal citizen with no education in cyber security, never notices it or doubts it.
2. They now have access to all the messages, all the images, all the contacts on her phone. They can process the metadata of her images, compare her contacts with the data they have collected before, they can see who she talks to and what she talks about, they can eavesdrop on her calls and texts. This may eventually help them find the bodyguards of his father, or learn about the places where his father visits frequently, about the things she and her father talk about, etc.
3. They infiltrate the smartphones of his father's bodyguards and go through the same process to collect more data on the locations, the times and the durations of visits, etc.
After a period, they form a profile of all the people associated with his father. After they have a complete profile of his father and people associated with him, then they can start to guess where his father is. They know that his father visits 5-20 safe houses regularly. Obviously, his security team does not have 1000s of safe houses, do they?
Now they can come up with probabilistic models for where his father could be. That would narrow it down to maybe 3 - 5 locations at most. Now they can ask their spies in Iran to monitor these locations for them and report to them.
This is why sometimes they fail. Because sometimes they do not know with 100% certainty if the person is there or not. They rely on the profile they have made of people and combine it with real-time data on the ground, satellite images, etc.
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