Mysterious US Govt Contractor Alarmingly Spied On The CIA And NSA By Tracking Billions Of Phones
However, The Intercept was able to obtain a recording of a presentation given by A6, that details the company’s alarming capabilities. The presentation was part of a pitch to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring company that assisted with the Department of Defense’s (DoD) artificial intelligence initiative known as Project Maven. The presentation claimed that A6 can track the location of roughly 3 billion devices in real-time and proposed that Zignal make use of this capability to enhance its own intelligence abilities. For example, Zignal has access to Twitter’s special “firehose” feed that displays every single tweet posted, live, as its happening.
The presentation proposed that, using information provided by A6, Zignal’s global social media surveillance could be enhanced to determine the identity and location of every Twitter user, in order to track where users are and who they are with when they tweet. The A6 pitch also outlined a future where Zignal could help government agencies monitor foreign troop movements.
The presentation eventually showed the individual traveling to an air base north of Zarqa, Jordan, where the US is reported to house a drone fleet. The sales rep also demonstrated a “Regularity” feature that analyzes frequently visited locations to determine where a target lives and works. “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,” the sales rep noted.
When asked, Zignal confirmed that A6 demonstrated its capabilities in a presentation and pitched a collaboration, but denied any relationship between the two companies. Meanwhile, Brendan Huff, co-founder of Anomaly, made the following statement in an email to The Intercept: “Anomaly Six is a veteran-owned small business that cares about American interests, natural security, and understands the law.”