It is called Bundesservice Telekommunikation, or Federal Telecommunications Service, it has an address, a telephone switchboard and an office in the Treptow district of Berlin, yet it does not exist. After the investigation of Lilith Wittmann, the Wikipedia page of the self-styled federal service reports: “The Federal Telecommunications Service (Bst) should be a federal authority within the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Homeland. Nothing is publicly known about the activities of the Berlin-based authority ”. After investigating him, Wittmann writes that the German authorities have denied the existence of the Federal Telecommunications Service.
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Wittmann read about the existence of the elusive Federal Telecommunications Service on an old list of German federal authorities and realized that, both offline and online, there were few references to what was being passed off as an offshoot of German public services.
The first investigations
The telephone calls made by Wittmann to employees of the Federal Telecommunications Service in Berlin did not clear up his doubts and the telephone numbers dialed were deactivated within a few hours. A inspection near the headquarters reinforced Wittmann’s suspicions. Too calm anywhere, for an office of 2500 square meters in which, theoretically, a hundred people could work. He blinds the windows everywhere, no lights on and in the underground parking lot a lot of clean VW Transporter vans with no lettering or logos on the sides.
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Even talking to people from other companies located in the same building did not give concrete results, even if someone – without providing evidence – confirmed that there was a federal secret service in that building. The search in the public databases relating to the assignments of domain names of websites, where the name and email address of those who follow the technical and administrative aspects must appear, did not bear the hoped-for results.
Tired of proceeding with manual searches, Wittmann decided to rely on an Apple AirTag, a device that allows you to locate an object. One can, for example, apply one on a bunch of keys and know where it is, thanks to a positioning network made available by Apple devices (with U1 processor, therefore from the iPhone 11 onwards) in the vicinity of the AirTag.
The discovery
Wittmann therefore decided to send a parcel to the Berlin office of the Federal Telecommunications Service, following it via the AirTag entered and monitored via the application Where of iOS. From the Berlin sorting center the package arrived in Cologneto be finally delivered to the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, i.e. the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a German intelligence service that operates on the homeland with the task of monitoring the activities that infringe the constitutional principles of the Federal Republic of Germany.
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Apple and unwanted tracking
AirTags were used by stalkers to track their victims and by scoundrels to pinpoint targets they had set their eyes on. Lilith Wittmann has made an alternative use of it, as part of a research with relevance that could be of public benefit, but you should be careful about your devices and how they are used.
With a view to protecting users, Apple recently announced a series of technical measures aimed at averting what could become a tragedy from every point of view if the abuse of AirTags were not only declined to the use for which it was created or in the service of cybersecurity experts such as Wittmann, but would lead to the death or injury of a victim of stalking.