An interesting article published by The Intercept reveals the secretive business of a US surveillance firm named Anomaly Six.
When we speak about the secretive business of surveillance businesses we often refer to the powerful tools developed by Israeli firms like NSO Group and Candiru, but many other firms operates in the shadow like the US company Anomaly Six (aka A6).
According to an interesting analysis published by The Intercept, Anomaly Six is a secretive government contractor that claims to monitor billions of phones worldwide.
While Russia was invading Ukraine in February, two unknown surveillance startups, Anomaly Six and Zignal Labs joined forces to provide powerful surveillance services.
Zignal Labs is a company that provides social media surveillance, combining its analysis with capabilities of A6, the U.S. government was able to spy on Russian the army before the invasion.
“According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population.” reads the article published by The Intercept. “The staggering surveillance capacity was cited during a pitch to provide A6’s phone-tracking capabilities to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm that leverages its access to Twitter’s rarely granted “firehose” data stream to sift through hundreds of millions of tweets per day without restriction.”
The capabilities claimed by the surveillance firm are worrisome, a government contractor can spy on Americans and pass gathered data to the US intelligence agencies.
The source that provided the information on the secretive surveillance firms to The Intercept said that Zignal Labs violated Twitter’s terms of service to gather intelligence, but the company refused any accusation.
A6, unlike other surveillance firms, harvests only GPS pinpoints and data it provides allows to surveil roughly 230 million devices on an average day. A6 is able to access GPS measurements gathered through covert partnerships with “thousands” of apps. A6 also claimed to have amassed a huge quantity of information on people, it has gathered over 2 billion email addresses and other personal details for these individuals.
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