In a unsettling study published on Monday, researchers from Duke University approached 12 data brokers in the US and asked what would be necessary to buy this kind of information; they ultimately purchased thousands of records about American service members, finding that many brokers offered to sell the data with minimal vetting and were willing to deal with buyers using email domains based in both the US and Asia.

The year-long study, which was funded in part by the US Military Academy at West Point, highlights the extreme privacy and national security risks created by data brokers. …

The researchers say they were “shocked” at the ease with which they were able to obtain highly sensitive data about members of the military.

[They shouldn’t be the only ones “shocked.” This is a huge national security gap if it’s truly this easy to collect this data on deployed active-duty troops and reservists. The problem, however, may not be the Pentagon as much as it is the men and women in the military, who may be inadvertently exposing themselves through on-line commerce. If that’s the gap, it will be very difficult to plug it through policymaking or better DoD security. — Ed]