U.S. Military Equipment From Afghanistan for Sale on eBay

Ayman Arafa declined to say how he had acquired it.

Our national security is in the best of hands. Not Biden. Maybe whoever in Afghanistan has an eBay account.

German researchers who purchased biometric capture devices on eBay found sensitive US military data stored on their memory cards, The New York Times has reported. That included fingerprints, iris scans, photographs, names and descriptions of the individuals, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many worked with the US army and could be targeted if the devices fell into the wrong hands, according to the report.

They cost under $200.

Where did it come from before eBay? That’s a good question. And officially there’s no answer. But one seems to have come most recently from Afghanistan.

Metadata on the device, called a Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, or SEEK II, revealed that it had last been used in the summer of 2012 near Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Where was it sitting all this time?

Exactly how the device ended up going from the battlefields in Asia to an online auction site is unclear. But the data, which offers detailed descriptions of individuals in addition to their photograph and biometric data, could be enough to target people who were previously unknown to have worked with U.S. military forces should the information fall into the wrong hands.

The how likely involves our “allies” or the Jihadis who overran the place after Biden’s humiliating retreat. Sure it could be a decommissioned military device, but those are supposed to be destroyed.

How eBay sellers obtained these devices is unclear. The device with the 2,632 profiles was sold by Rhino Trade, a surplus equipment company in Texas. The company’s treasurer, David Mendez, said it had bought the SEEK II at an auction of government equipment and did not realize a decommissioned military device would have sensitive data on it.

“I hope we didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

The SEEK II with the American troops’ information came from Tech-Mart, an eBay seller in Ohio. Tech-Mart’s owner, Ayman Arafa, declined to say how he had acquired it, or two other devices he sold to the researchers.

Arafa is a common Moroccan last name.

The media’s focus is on the fact that there was unencrypted data on the SEEK devices. But a bigger story is how those devices ended up for sale. Period.

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