Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will place security over the concerns of the Pentagon workforce when deciding on whether to ban cellphones in the building, his chief spokeswoman Dana White said Thursday.
White provided the first official confirmation that Mattis is considering a ban as part of a military-wide review of personal electronic devices after news of the possibility broke Wednesday.
The review is partly driven by revelations that personal fitness trackers used by jogging troops might be revealing sensitive information about military bases around the world.
But new restrictions on cellphones could create a headache for the roughly 24,000 workers at the Pentagon, who depend on the devices to stay in touch with family and the outside world.
“With respect to the workforce, the secretary’s primary interest is to ensure that we are all safe and that we are all secure. Operational security is his priority,” White said. “So all of those things will be considered in his calculus but you have to understand that the secretary sees everything in that prism of ‘How do I protect the civilians, the service members, their families,’ and so that’s how he will make his decision.”
White also said the review of electronic devices, especially those that use global positioning systems to collect user data, is not confined to the Pentagon and that Mattis is looking at new restrictions across the Defense Department.
“It’s about electronics, GPS-enabled electronics. You have to also consider the fact that we have been attacked, bases have been attacked,” she said. “Information is power and our adversaries have used information to plan attacks against us.”
White said there was no estimate on when Mattis might complete his review.
The GPS tracking company Strava recently posted what it called a “Global Heat Map” that shows the movement and jogging routes to subscribers of the company’s fitness service between 2015 and 2017.
Concerns quickly emerged that data collected from U.S. troops exercising or wearing the fitness tracking devices at military bases overseas and in war zones might reveal valuable information to foreign enemies.
