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. How did she expose this? With the help of an Apple AirTag.
Apple’s AirTags have been used for both good and bad purposes in the recent past, but now German researcher Wittmann says she’s used one in this expose of government secrets.
Initially, Wittmann wrote how she “accidentally stumbled upon a federal authority that does not exist.” She has since provided details of her attempts to prove her suspicion.
Wittmann looked up a list of federal authorities online and recorded phone calls with an official whose cell phone number mysteriously stopped working.
Calls like that, IP searches, and much driving around to official buildings, Wittmann worked to track down the mysterious Bundesservice Telekommunikation, or Federal Telecommunications Service.
Wittmann indicates that both are allegedly a secret part of an intelligence agency named the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
As you might expect, everyone Wittmann spoke to denied that they were employed by the intelligence agency, so she decided to prove that the postal address for this “federal authority” actually leads to the intelligence service’s apparent offices.
“To understand where mail ends up,” she writes (translated), “[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 monitored it through Apple’s Find My functionality as the parcel was delivered via the Berlin sorting center to a sorting office in Cologne-Ehrenfeld. And then ended up at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne.
Wittmann, therefore, saw an AirTagged package she addressed to a telecommunications authority based in one part of Germany being delivered to the offices of an intelligence agency based in another part of the country.
Wittmann’s research is also now detailed in the German Wikipedia entry for the federal telecommunications service.
(Via AppleInsider)