A researcher has sent one of Apple’s AirTags to a mysterious “federal authority” in Germany to locate its true offices — and to help prove that it’s really part of an intelligence agency.
Apple’s AirTags have already been used for good and for bad in cases involving the tracking of individuals, but now a German researcher has used one in an expose of government secrets.
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. Initially she wrote how she “accidentally stumbled upon a federal authority that does not exist.”
Now Wittmann has detailed her subsequent and extremely thorough attempts to prove her suspicion. She has methodically gone through every step of learning what she can of the intelligence agency, including where it is.
Some of the steps she details are no longer possible to reproduce, such as her initial one of simply looking up a list of federal authorities online. Similarly, Wittmann includes transcripts of phone calls with an official whose cell number that she reports then ceased working.
Through calls like that, IP searches, and even driving to official buildings, Wittmann worked to track down the mysterious Bundesservice Telekommunikation, or Federal Telecommunications Service.
She establishes multiple reasons to believe it is part of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), and ultimately concludes that there are actually two “camouflage” authorities. Both are allegedly a secret part of an intelligence agency named the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Hellbound and Down 