Concepts

Are people made into intelligence assets without knowing it?

29Author's observationDocumented

An idea drawn from this archive’s research and journal, either the author’s own speculation or generated by AI, and labelled as such.

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

Keep reading

43AI analysisDocumented

How protected is your medical information?

Less than most people assume, and the gap is structural rather than criminal. HIPAA protects a setting, not a category of information. It binds health plans, clearinghouses and providers who bill electronically. It does not bind most of the places health information is now generated. That distinction is not academic. When the Federal Trade Commission acted against GoodRx in February 2023, it could not use HIPAA at all — it used the Health Breach Notification Rule, and part of its complaint was that GoodRx had falsely suggested to consumers that it complied with HIPAA. What GoodRx had actually done was compile lists of users who bought particular medications and upload their email addresses, phone numbers and mobile advertising identifiers to Facebook, Google, Criteo, Branch and Twilio, so those users could be advertised to on the basis of their prescriptions and health conditions. The penalty was $1.5 million. The FTC brought a comparable action against BetterHelp over mental-health questionnaire data shared with advertisers. Scale is the other half. In 2024 a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that processes a large share of American medical claims, exposed the data of roughly 190 million people — the largest health-data breach in United States history, and not a break-in at a doctor's office but a failure at a clearing house most patients had ne

TechnologySurveillance & memory accessLaw enforcement & governmentRead →
44AI analysisDocumented

What happens to everyone around a target?

Surveillance aimed at one person is rarely confined to one person, and in at least one widely deployed technology the indiscriminacy is the design. A cell-site simulator, commonly called a Stingray, works by impersonating a mobile network tower. Phones in range cannot tell the difference, so they connect and identify themselves. That includes the phone the operator is looking for and every other phone nearby — neighbours, passers-by, people in adjacent flats, anyone in a hospital or a place of worship within the radius. The bystander collection is not an error; it is how the device locates the target at all. What surrounded that capability is documented too. The FBI required local police departments to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of acquiring the equipment, and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained and published them. Departments concealed the technology's use from defence lawyers and from judges, and in some cases prosecutors dropped charges rather than disclose in open court how a defendant had been found. The Pasco County programme shows the same shape without any exotic equipment: the people repeatedly visited were not only those on the list but the households around them — parents, siblings, grandparents cited for uncut grass and missing house numbers because someone under that roof had been designated. Whether or not a given system is aimed at one

HarassmentTechnologySurveillance & memory accessRead →
01Author's observationPattern

What Does a Future with Consent Look Like?

In the author's speculation, the world's population could be experiencing telepathic communication that no one has consented to. It is not limited to words. It can reach any of the physical senses. - Verbal communication. It can be heard aloud on the neurotech bullhorn. - Inside the skull. With the ears held shut, it can still be experienced internally, through voice-to-skull (V2K) technology. - Phantom sensations. Something felt on or in the body that has no visible cause. - Augmented reality visuals. Images added to what a person sees (see The Diving Ecosystem, Capability 9). None of it has been consented to. Statements suggest that most of it is weapons development, carried out by certain organizations within a union of approximately 200 organizations that has been sold access to the population of the United States, and of other countries. That rests on statements alone and is unverified. On the record: the microwave auditory effect is documented in laboratory research: pulsed microwaves can be heard as clicks or buzzes that seem to come from inside the head. No published research shows it delivering speech to a person at a distance. The feeling of something crawling on the skin, and brief glimpses of things that are not there, have many known medical causes and are worth a doctor's assessment (see The Diving Ecosystem, Capability 9). From the author: "Wouldn't a mobile

Proposed solutionsSpeculationTechnologyRead →