Intelligence tradecraft has always separated a witting source from an unwitting one. A person can supply information without knowing who receives it, or that anyone does. What changed is scale, and it required nobody's cooperation. American law enforcement agencies buy location data that phones emit continuously. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's investigation into Fog Data Science documented a company selling local police searchable access to billions of location signals harvested from ordinary apps, at prices small departments could afford. Babel Street's Locate X offered comparable capability, and EPIC obtained records of Customs and Border Protection's use of it. The mechanism is commercial: brokers buy from the advertising ecosystem and agencies buy from brokers. No warrant is involved because no compulsion is involved. The result is a population of unwitting sources. A person carrying a phone generates a record of where they went, who they were near and for how long, and that record is purchasable. They were never approached, never recruited, and are never harassed — because harassment would defeat the purpose. The value of an unwitting asset lies precisely in their not knowing. What this does not describe is access to perception. No documented capability reads a person's eyesight, and the mechanism above does not require one. What people already emit is sufficient.
- EFF investigation into Fog Data Science (2022): searchable location data sold to local police, drawn from billions of signals emitted by ordinary apps
- EPIC obtained FOIA records covering Customs and Border Protection's use of Babel Street's Locate X
- The purchase route avoids the warrant requirement because it involves no compulsion — the data is bought, not seized
- Witting versus unwitting source is a standing distinction in intelligence tradecraft, not a novel category
Open questions
- The record establishes commercial purchase of bulk location data. It does not establish any programme of deliberate individual targeting.
- No documented capability accesses a person's visual perception, and none is needed for the collection described here.
- Whether any particular person's data has been purchased by any particular agency is not answerable from public records.
References
EFF and EPIC are cited for their own documented investigations. The linked concept is method — it records that the person a system is used on appears almost nowhere in the procurement record.
Not independently verified
This concept reports documented commercial data sales to law enforcement. It establishes no programme of individual targeting, no access to perception, and no conduct by any named agency beyond what the cited investigations found.
Topics: Technology · Surveillance & memory access · Law enforcement & government