When I served as an Electronic Warfare and ISR Operator, my job was to find patterns: to map behaviors, frequencies, and locations that could reveal a correlation to a person or an event, or better yet, an adversary’s intent. Every emission, every signal, every anomaly told a story. I helped build profiles and target networks based on those digital and physical patterns of life. In that world, the smallest trace – a radio transmission, a device handshake, even a sudden silence – could expose a person’s identity, routine, or role. Silence was security.

But the world isn’t silent anymore. It’s LOUD.

Today, we live inside an electromagnetic ecosystem that never stops transmitting. Wi-Fi routers, 5G networks, smartphones, vehicles, cameras, and even the devices we wear constantly emit identifiers, telemetry, and metadata that collectively form a digital map of human activity. We’ve built an environment where the act of connecting is the act of emitting.

This is what is referred to as Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance, or UTS – the persistent, often passive collection of digital, electronic, and environmental signatures that reveal location, movement, content, and association.

What UTS Really Is

UTS isn’t new. It’s an evolution.

In military and intelligence operations, we relied on sophisticated sensor networks and signals analysis to understand the battle space. Those capabilities still exist, but now versions of that same architecture surround us in everyday life.

Every connected object in our environment – every phone, vehicle, router, or camera – participates in a global system of technical surveillance. Some of it is overt, built into infrastructure for convenience and safety. Some of it is incidental, the byproduct of constant connectivity.

Think about it:

• Your phone connects to Wi-Fi networks that log proximity and movement
• Bluetooth beacons in stores record dwell time and customer flow
• Vehicles share real-time telemetry about driving habits, routes, and destinations
• Public cameras tie visual recognition to digital identifiers

Individually, these systems serve legitimate functions. Collectively, they create a continuous feed of machine-readable context – an ecosystem of observation that’s always on.

From Tradecraft to Daily Life

In the defense world, operations security (OPSEC) and digital force protection (DFP) were disciplines. We reduced signatures to stay hidden. Or at least we tried to. The idea of digital signature reduction was a bit more feasible not too long ago. Today, however, our professional and personal lives have merged more than ever. Now it’s become a matter of digital signature management. Because in navigating and communicating in 2025 and beyond, constant connectivity and broadcast have become the price of admission.

The same logic once used to locate a radar site or jam a transmitter now applies to understanding how cities, organizations, and individuals interact. The electromagnetic spectrum has become the new social terrain.

As someone who’s worked in intelligence and ISR, I can tell you that the principles haven’t changed; only the participants have. The sensors are now in everyone’s pockets, on our wrists, and built into our vehicles.

UTS has become pervasive. It’s no longer a tool of statecraft or warfare alone; it’s part of the infrastructure of modern life.

The Human Multiplier

Technology may provide the scaffolding, but human behavior supplies the signal density.

Every new app we install, every connected device we adopt, every convenience feature we enable adds another handshake, another emission that reveals a sliver of our daily rhythm. These moments compound into something larger: a digital pulse unique to each of us.

The same principle applies outside of ISR. When our behavior is consistent, it becomes predictable, and predictable behavior can be analyzed, modeled, and exploited. But sometimes, it’s not consistency that exposes us – it’s the deviation from it.

Consider this: someone wants to keep a meeting discreet. They know phones can be tracked, so they power theirs off before arriving. What they don’t realize is that the sudden disappearance of a constantly active device is an anomaly on its own. The route they drove was captured by traffic cameras, and they made a quick stop for gas and a pack of Zyn (IYKYK). Then they chose a café well outside their normal routine, which pulled another person’s digital footprint into the anomaly. When they turned their phone back on, that timestamp, location, and gap in activity all became part of the reconstructed timeline.

A single meeting created multiple signals, and each one tells a piece of the story. Nothing was “caught” in real time, but the data lives forever, waiting to be discovered.

That’s the subtlety of UTS. It doesn’t just record where we are, but when our behavior changes. Anomalies become signals, and signals become stories. We’ve built an existence where presence and emission are inseparable. Turning off the signal entirely isn’t realistic. The real skill lies in understanding how your environment communicates, even when you don’t.

Implications Across Domains

Defense and Intelligence:

For operators and analysts, UTS is both an advantage and a liability. The same tools that enhance situational awareness can also betray position, pattern, attribution, and intent. Adversaries no longer need to breach networks to collect valuable intelligence; the ambient emissions from our own systems can often reveal enough to build a reliable picture of activity.

That said, when an adversary does compromise infrastructure, the results can be far more damaging. A recent example illustrates this well. In 2024, cybersecurity researchers detailed an extensive Chinese campaign known as Salt Typhoon, which exploited vulnerabilities in U.S. telecommunications infrastructure. By embedding itself deep within routers, switches, and signaling systems, the threat group gained persistent access to metadata and traffic flows – the connective tissue of modern communication.

It wasn’t just a network intrusion; it was a strategic exploitation of the UTS environment itself, leveraging the same data flows that enable global connectivity. This kind of access provides an adversary with a vantage point into how we move, communicate, and operate – all without touching the endpoints we believe are secure.

Corporate Sector:

For private industry, UTS represents both a strategic opportunity and a profound vulnerability. The same connected infrastructure that drives efficiency – IoT sensors, telematics, logistics networks, and cloud-linked operations – also creates a constant emission of technical data. When aggregated, this data can reveal production cycles, distribution bottlenecks, leadership movement, or the location of critical assets.

In competitive markets, business-intelligence firms and data aggregators already harvest this ambient information to anticipate mergers, shipment volumes, or regional demand. In high-risk industries such as law, energy, defense contracting, and global trade, those emissions can also become targeting data for corporate espionage or foreign intelligence collection.

Even within companies, insider threats can exploit UTS-enabled systems to track team activity or uncover sensitive communications metadata. For executives, every connected device, from a smart vehicle to a conference-room hub, becomes a sensor that can betray schedule and intent.

The private sector often thinks in terms of cybersecurity, but that focus alone is a misstep. True organizational security requires leadership to understand how technical vulnerabilities, human behavior, and adversarial insight converge to complete the picture of exposure.

Civil Society:

For individuals, the implications of UTS are less about tradecraft and more about the quiet erosion of privacy and autonomy. In the United States, our freedoms of movement, speech, and assembly are protected by law. Yet, in practice, exercising those rights increasingly leaves a permanent digital trace.

Cameras, license-plate readers, public Wi-Fi, and connected vehicles log our movements automatically. Participation in modern life means being recorded in motion. Even lawful activities – a political rally, a doctor’s visit, or a private meeting – contribute to data streams that can later be analyzed, correlated, or monetized.

Abroad, the situation is often worse. Authoritarian regimes have already merged technical surveillance with social scoring, protest deterrence, and population control. The difference in the U.S. is subtle but significant: our surveillance ecosystem is commercial first, governmental second. We’re not compelled to share, we’re enticed to.

That’s what makes the modern challenge so complex. The infrastructure that connects us is the same infrastructure that observes us. UTS has blurred the line between safety and scrutiny, between connection and control.

The Intersecting Threat Vectors

The full impact of UTS becomes clearer when viewed through the five threat vectors we teach at CohēCiv: Online, Electronic, Visual/Physical, Financial, and Travel. Each of these domains interacts with the technical layer differently, but all are amplified by it.

• Online data shapes digital identity and targeting profiles
• Electronic emissions expose movement and proximity
• Visual/Physical systems bridge the digital world with physical presence
• Financial activity creates traceable behavioral timelines and irrefutable correlations
• Travel patterns unify them all into a coherent map of intent and association

UTS is the thread that binds these vectors together. It doesn’t replace them; it empowers them, extending their reach across both personal and organizational boundaries.

Moving Toward Awareness

Understanding UTS isn’t about fear; it’s about literacy. You don’t have to be a signals analyst to understand that our devices share more than just data. They reflect our behavior, who we are, and how we move through the world.

At CohēCiv, I focus on helping leaders and organizations build this literacy. We teach that defending against digital threats starts with understanding the environment, not as a network of systems but as a living, sensing organism that’s constantly watching and listening.

The objective isn’t to disappear. It’s to move deliberately, with awareness of the signals we generate and the stories they tell.

In the next article, we’ll explore how the commercial layer, Ambient Data Surveillance (ADS), amplifies UTS by adding behavior, preference, and intent to the technical signal. Together, these layers define the modern Ubiquitous Surveillance Ecosystem.