Leaked sales pitch: US government contractor Anomaly Six, which says it can track ~3B phones in real time, demoed its capabilities by tracking CIA and NSA staff
Context & Ripple Effects
Anomaly Six has been building this capability in the open since at least 2020, when reporting detailed how its SDK embedded in 500+ apps let it collect and sell location data from hundreds of millions of phones globally (an SDK-based location-data business). The new leak is a sales artifact: the company demoed its claimed real-time tracking of roughly 3 billion phones by following CIA and NSA staff — pitching the very agencies whose personnel it used as targets.
It sits in a crowded commercial-surveillance niche. Babel Street's Locate X was already being used by CBP and ICE back in 2020 (federal use of Locate X), privacy advocates later published hours of leaked footage of the same warrantless tool (leaked Locate X footage), and the Ulysses Group marketed car-location tracking built on automaker data to the military. Anomaly Six's differentiator is scale plus the audacity of the demo.
First-order effects
- CIA and NSA staff were trackable in real time by an outside contractor, turning the intelligence community itself into the product demonstration — an immediate counterintelligence exposure for the agencies Anomaly Six is selling to.
Second-order effects
- Rival brokers like Babel Street and Ulysses Group now compete against a vendor claiming ~3B-phone coverage, pushing the market toward ever-larger data aggregation claims in government pitches; simultaneously, every agency buyer must weigh that any tool powerful enough to track adversaries can track its own workforce.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Locate X still circulating years after first exposure, and leaks now recurring across vendors — commercially sourced location data hardens into default US surveillance infrastructure operating largely outside warrant processes, raising the odds of eventual broker regulation driven as much by these leaks as by legislation.
The trend: Commercial phone-location brokers are scaling toward planetary real-time tracking sold directly to government agencies, with each leak exposing how little oversight governs the trade.