Video data from drones hasn't been the only way to track whereabouts of friendly soldiers, in order to discern whether their activities correctly match their given objectives.
In this section, we will first look at a bit of history about wearable technologies that collect users' physical activity data including physical location. And then we will go through a general overview of the method for tracking particular US-led personnel and contractors via their wearable technologies. Similar means can be used in tracking illegal mining, fracking, timber logging, and other such activities involving cross-border trafficking. The ideas presented here are at an introductory level, and the details of how to implement them aren't provided. Those who are more keen on learning about ways to implement the following ideas, can refer to the links provided in the later part of this section.
At some point during the year 2018, I came across a news article in The Guardian, titled, "Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases".
The Guardian's news report from 2018, about publicly available GPS data from Strava devices, was similar to the issues faced by US-led personnel in 2008-2009, because of data leakage from FitBit's wristbands, and Jawbone's wearable audio communication devices. Practically every other US army soldier, and the commanding officers of coalition soldiers, used to have some type of a "hands-free" communication device with them at all times, and a commercial-off-shelf fitness tracker.
As a side note: Fitbit is now owned by Alphabet Inc. (Google's holding company). And AliphCom, i.e. Jawbone, went out of business in the year 2017, in a spectacular way.
Coming back to leaky data-streams, the Strava data trove contains trillions of data points across years, from wristbands worn by US-led personnel, and military contractors, who were deployed to Afghanistan during "the war on terror." Apparently that data trove was floating around on the web for quite a few years, before somebody decided to make it more noticeable by writing about it to The Guardian news and media group.
The fact that GPS location or navigational data, contained within leaked data-sets, reveals locations of forward bases used by US-led armed forces, isn't likely to be of great value, because much more detailed data about those bases is already available from satellite imagery. Even commercially available, daily satellite pictures of the earth's "arid, and semi-arid regions," show the locations of various military installations along with the movements of vehicles to and from those facilities.
However, the more intricate and nuanced behavioral analysis, which can be conducted using data gathered by fitness trackers and wearable communication devices, can be invaluable in being able to convict, or exonerate, persons accused of committing crimes like thefts, rapes, and murders.
So, there are two necessary components of such analysis:
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The information brought forth by the narratives of victims and survivors, which provide some knowledge about the time and location of assaults, and abductions; or parts of the legally obtained testimonial evidence, which provide physical details about acts of looting, plundering, and pillaging committed by aggressors.
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The information from a wearable, or a mobile device (e.g. watches, fitness trackers, phones, or cameras), that collects real-time GPS location data, which can tie the accused to the reported crime scene; given that the accused, or a member from their gang or unit, had such a device on them while committing the reported offenses.
You may now click the below 
icon, to read a vignette about prevalent injustice, or skip ahead to the later part of this section.
Prevalent Injustice
The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry, i.e. The Brereton Report, provides results of an inquiry into war crimes committed in Afghanistan, by a number of Australian soldiers, between the years 2005 and 2016. Similar reports from the US, the UK, and Canada don't even exist; and not because war crimes committed by armed forces of those countries within the Middle-East have never come to light.
The current situation in Afghanistan during the years 2022 and 2023, with increased violence against civilians by Taliban's militia, is much worse than the types of war crimes reported by civilians, which had involvement of American-led soldiers. In many ways, Afghanistan being suddenly abandoned by the American military and its allied groups, showed the people of the region that Afghans could have chosen and been content with the lesser evil — of being harassed, violated, or murdered by US-led soldiers and contractors, on relatively fewer occasions; compared to the much worse evil of Taliban's harassment, violations and murders of Afghan civilians, particularly of women and children, that are currently occurring in a much more rampant and egregious way.
The current number of daily incidents of rapes and murders committed by Taliban's forces has overshadowed and buried the earlier war crimes of US-led troops in the region.
In the context of rapes, and gang rapes of civilian victims in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, where sexual violence has continued to be used as an instrument of genocidal warfare: the narratives collected by aid-workers and non-government organizations from victims, survivors, and eye-witnesses, has been repeatedly undermined and brushed aside within various courts, using the following types of excuses:
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The "tall tales" of so-called victims are false and baseless accusations. (The case is outright bogus.)
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The persons who have come forth with their accusations are no more than opportunistic con-artists, who are using malicious tactics to shake down the accused parties by threatening to spoil the good reputation and character of hard working, august, and upright armed forces personnel. (The case is motivated by illegitimate aims and designs, is too specious, and is highly doubtful.)
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The victim's story is full of inconsistencies, memory lapses, and is "contaminated" with "emotional residue and malaise." (The case is too dirty and "icky.")
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The given matter, though tragic, is mainly due to happenstances and is being pursued by a misguided poor soul, who is on a quest for personal vendetta or a "witch-hunt." Such a case needs to be summarily dismissed as it is a waste of the court's precious resources. (The case is utterly misguided, and needs to be quashed immediately.)
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The given matter has been heavily conflated and confounded by the presenter with their "personal issues," due to their "personality disorder or mental afflictions." As such, the case is muddled beyond the capacity of the court, to be sorted out in a reasonable and fair-minded manner. The case must therefore be dismissed, or handed to a different process of adjudication, so that it can be better presented and handled else where, without demeaning the honor and dignity of the presiding court's officers. (The case is too tedious.)
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It would be a futile and hopeless endeavor to pursue the matter because the accused persons have deceased, or cannot be located "despite the best efforts" of law enforcement agencies. (The case is simply worthless and lacks any merit.)
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The plaintiffs have sought to exert undue influence over the court, by inciting public opinion against the defendants and ongoing legal procedures. Therefore, the matter needs to be bound by a gag order. (The entirety of the case can only be considered within a socio-political vacuum, or not at all.)
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Prosecuting a commanding officer, or any higher-ups within the chain of command, of a "rogue soldier," is not feasible within existing legal frameworks and statutes of the civil court. (The case is about the untoward actions of a single bad apple who has already been dealt with. And no form of humanly powers or authorities could have foreseen or prevented, those untoward actions and activities.)
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If a court marshal is to be paneled for a trial, the armed forces can do so, as per the rules, regulation, discretion, and cultural norms of the particular wing of the military, where the staff or the active duty member, currently stands accused, in matters concerning any type of dereliction, misconduct, or wrongful activities and behaviors, attributed to the accused. Also, if the consequence of any provable misdeeds and wrongdoings of the accused, happen to impact civilians or civilian facilities, then the matter is to be first legally analyzed and concluded by a military court or tribunal, before any civil suits can proceed, so as not to "muddy the waters," and to not "step on anybodies toes." (Dealing with this case is not within our job description.)
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Even if a statutory crime is discernible and provable beyond any conceivable doubt: prosecuting acts of sexual violence, abductions, or any type of misconduct involving coercion of individuals to perform sexual favors, or to perform any kinds of unethical, humiliating, degrading or dehumanizing activities, as directed by any members or contracted agents of the armed forces, is seen as a provocative issue that leads to politically charged conflagrations. (The case is too hot and toxic, it can't even be touched with a ten-foot pole by somebody wearing a hazmat suit.)
At this point, one may exclaim, "But, wait! Which particular cases, if any, have had any of those aforementioned excuses used for obtaining any kind of a leave, or a dismissal? Where is the source or reference to the above types of 'colored' and 'colorful' claims?"
Do you have access to a thing called "Reuters' Westlaw Database?" If you do, please type in its search field, the keywords,
"military + sexual violence"
You may then come to understand that: most number of cases involving sexual harm perpetrated against a civilian by a member of any military service, particularly by military personnel and contractors during war-time, aren't even allowed to reach the stages of a hearing in a formal, court ordered proceeding, to be placed on the record; especially not on any kind of a record that isn't already heavily redacted, or completely sealed to the public.
When any of the above kinds of excuses are thrust by the defense team to sway the magistrate or the judge, more often than not, and for the better or for the worse, the "final" judgment delivered by most civil courtrooms is to deem the matter closed, without the necessity for any further discussions or arguments to be considered on the given issues, except by a petition to a higher court. Of course, the particular higher court that would need to hear the case, is made prohibitively expensive and inaccessible, by design, and is also too busy to be bothered with such systemic issues, due to the court's ever increasingly massive backlog of unresolved cases.
This is where one needs to meditate on the following questions:
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How have any of the inequitable practices of judiciary offices, particularly of those offices with powers of self-absolution, ever been, or can ever be "for the worse," for the legal industry and for its members, especially, in comparison to the brunt of unfair legalized practices and systemic corruption, that invariably produce detrimental outcomes for tax-payers, and which continue to add to the harms suffered by survivors of violent offenses?
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When have the lives and habitats of people in countries like Panama, Guam, Philippines, Laos, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, Nigeria, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela ever mattered, in comparison to the "pleasures, comforts, wants, needs, and interests" of persons in "esteemed places" of countries like Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, or the US?
To analyze a physical-memory-dump of things like time and location data from wearable devices, one can use the kinds of analytical tools highlighted in this section, while being careful in using their appropriate workflows involving sensitive, statistical techniques.
Suppose you have trillions of data points within a particular dataset. Manually rummaging through it would be impractical. Even producing visualizations of various statistical groupings from the dataset, might not lead to any actionable intelligence. In such instances, using a database that can efficiently run millions of queries on the dataset, per minute or per second, could be more fruitful, compared to manually evaluating printouts of the data. Doing so is specially useful for interactively discovering patterns within the available dataset.
So, what type of queries can be more pertinent in finding perpetrators associated with known date-time specifications, of a crime scene? A straightforward method would be to use a list of date-time specifications, of existing crime scenes from unresolved cases, and match them against available GPS location data, about movements of potential suspects, via their associated wearable artifacts that have wireless functionalities.
However, the available GPS data may only contain identifiable attributes of the wearable device such as its hardware serial number, make and model. Who a particular wearable, or a mobile device, or even a vehicle like a Tesla Car, is registered to, might be anonymized. Furthermore, the geo-positioning data of a device or a vehicle's transponder, that ties it to a crime scene, might not indicate the identity of the person who was actually using that particular device or vehicle, at the given time and location. That is, the person using the device or vehicle, might not have been its registered owner. So, this is where tools such as the following ones, can come in handy:
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https://usc-isi-i2.github.io/karma -
https://usc-isi-i2.github.io/dig -
https://usc-isi-i2.github.io/effect
One can combine the above types of tools and techniques, such as Karma Geospatial Data and Service, with more recent advancements in machine learning, and computer aided interfaces for datasets (such as ChatGPT), to produce a multitude of ways to excavate pieces of hard evidence; evidence which can potentially convict or exonerate persons like soldiers accused in cases of thefts, rapes, and murders, perpetrated against civilians and/or other friendly units.
For example, here is a YouTube video demonstrating how Dig can be used in Investigating Online Sex Trafficking by data-mining publicly accessed websites like CraigsList, where coded messages among traffickers and offenders are openly used for conducting their illegitimate activities. One doesn't even need to venture into the "dark-web" because such nefarious activities have remained prevalent in publicly accessible forums, in plain sight.
However, just in case one needs to deal with more difficult cyber-security issues posed by dark-web and deep-web based activities of threat-actors, in order to safeguard against a variety of cyber-attacks and cyber-threats, they can view the techniques and examples from:
https://usc-isi-i2.github.io/effect/#pub
Those of you who are interested in more recent digital techniques that use accelerated learning algorithms, can view the following link, which also provides intermediate and advanced level coursework on the general topic of computer programming, and machine learning.
https://huggingface.co/course/
These kinds of inferential tools and methods used in digital forensics, might not be admissible in a variety of courts because those judiciary systems have decided not to, or somehow, haven't managed to keep up with the current era. Particularly, members of poorer quality judiciaries in various countries, who have been financially deprived by their parliaments, or those who have deliberately chosen to remain stuck in the rut of a bygone colonial era, simply cannot suffer any types of negative consequences from the shortcomings of their judiciary systems, at least, not within their existing lifetime.
Crimes like international-scale Ponzi schemes, corporate fraud, trafficking, and violent crimes like serial mass abductions, serial mass murders, and sexual harms committed against targeted people, cannot be brought to justice, until and unless, humanity as a whole decides to stand up against such heinous crimes; for implementing punitive and preventative measures, to uproot, and expunge large-scale crimes, from global human society.
Abbreviations:
GPS - Global Positioning Satellite (Navigational data)
UK - United Kingdom
US - United States (of America)