Why a Navy Just Banned Musical Birthday Cards

Dutch journalists exposed a military operational security (opsec) vulnerability by mailing a €5 Bluetooth tracker to a fictional serviceman aboard the Dutch Navy frigate Everson. The tracker, leveraging Apple's Find My Network or Google's FindHub, successfully tracked the ship's movements from a Dutch naval base to Cyprus by piggybacking off sailors' personal phones aboard the vessel. The incident revealed that military mail lacks authentication or security screening for letters, and that sailors' personal phones with Wi-Fi access inadvertently acted as location relays. The Dutch government initially misrepresented the situation by claiming the ship's AIS transponder was on the whole time, which was false. As a result, the Dutch military has banned batteries in letters sent to servicemen, effectively ending musical birthday cards for deployed sailors.