Report: Phone-Snooping Company Demonstrated Its Services by Spying on CIA, NSA

A U.S. phone-tracking firm demonstrated its surveillance powers by spying on American spies from the CIA and NSA, according to a report by the Intercept.

“I like making fun of our own people,” Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six (A6) told the Intercept. Anomaly Six is a company that purchases a copious amount of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting the fact that most allow common smartphone apps to constantly harvest their location and pass it on to third parties.

Smartphone apps are able to harvest this information and relay it to advertisers by including disclosures — buried deep within their lengthy terms of service agreements — that most smartphone users either don’t read or don’t care about.

Currently, there is no law in the United States that prohibits advertisers from further selling that information to firms like Anomaly Six, which can then turn around and sell it to their clientele who are interested in tracking the daily lives of others.

So to prove their technology worked, Clark directed Anomaly Six’s powers inward, spying on the CIA and the NSA, pulling up a Google Maps-like satellite view that displayed the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

With virtual boundary boxes drawn around both headquarters, A6’s software reportedly revealed 183 dots representing phones that had visited both agencies — potentially belonging to American intelligence personnel — with hundreds of lines streaking outward revealing their movements.

“So, if I’m a foreign intel officer, that’s 183 start points for me now,” Clark said, before clicking on one of the dots from the NSA to show how he was able to follow that individual’s exact movements — virtually every moment of their life — from that previous year until the present.

“I mean, just think of fun things like sourcing,” Clark said. “If I’m a foreign intel officer, I don’t have access to things like the agency or the fort, I can find where those people live, I can find where they travel, I can see when they leave the country.”

In his demonstration, Clark proceeded to track the individual around the United States, and abroad to a training center and airfield near the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Zarqa, Jordan, where the U.S. reportedly maintains a fleet of drones.

According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept, the firm says it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, which is equivalent to one fifth of the world’s population.

Recently, Anomaly Six met with the media intelligence software service company, Zignal Labs, to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones, with data purchased from Twitter.

The combination of A6’s smartphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to easily spy on the movement of foreign militaries, like Russian forces or Chinese nuclear submarines.

 

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