Data from a whistleblower appears to show Saudi Arabia tracking the location of its citizens in the US by exploiting flaws in the SS7 phone network protocol
Exclusive: Whistleblower's data suggests millions of tracking requests sent over four-month period
The GuardianStephanie Kirchgaessner
Context & Ripple Effects
This report extends a documented pattern of Saudi transnational surveillance into the phone network itself. Earlier coverage traced the kingdom's targeting of dissidents through insiders — [[a:934774|a groomed Twitter employee who spied on dissident accounts until Western intelligence warnings led to his firing]] — and through device-level exploits, with UN experts concluding that NSO Group's Pegasus was likely used in the hack of Jeff Bezos' phone via a file sent from the Crown Prince's WhatsApp account.
First-order effects
Saudi citizens and dissidents living in the US are the direct targets: whistleblower data indicates millions of location-tracking requests were pushed through SS7 over four months, meaning their movements could be resolved from carrier signaling rather than any compromise of their own devices.
US and international carriers whose networks relayed those requests are implicated as unwitting infrastructure, since SS7 flaws allow foreign operators to query subscriber location across borders without the target's knowledge.
Second-order effects
Carriers and regulators face pressure to deploy SS7 filtering and firewalls at network edges, shifting security spending from handset protection toward signaling-layer defense — the same accountability gap exposed when [[a:879481|phone coordinates sold by data broker Datastream exposed the movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany]].
Surveillance vendors and their government customers gain a cheaper complement to targeted spyware like Pegasus: bulk network-level tracking reaches every citizen on the network, not just hacked individuals, changing the economics of monitoring diaspora populations.
Third-order effects
If states can track citizens abroad through legacy signaling protocols and commercial data brokers, the structural fix points toward treating inter-carrier trust and location-data supply chains as regulated critical infrastructure — with diplomatic consequences for countries running such programs against people on allied soil.
The trend: State surveillance is stacking layers — insider access, device spyware, and now core-network exploitation — so that no single defensive fix covers a targeted population.
New: Saudi spies tracked its citizens' phones using flaws in the phone networks. Sen. Ron Wyden blames FCC chairman Ajit Pai for failing to do more to compel carriers to secure their networks. https://techcrunch.com/...
“The data shows requests for mobile phone location data that were routed through the decades-old SS7 global messaging system, which allows mobile operators to connect users around the world.” https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Whistleblower data suggests Saudis are tracking cellphones *inside* the US. There are “millions of secret tracking requests” Senator @RonWyden responds: “An authoritarian govt may be reaching into US wireless networks to track people inside our country."https://www.theguardian.co…
Leaked data suggests the #Saudi government has engaged in a large-scale surveillance operation in the U.S. and other Western states using mobile telephone networks. https://theguardian.com/...
🔥🔥Revealed: Saudis suspected of phone spying campaign in US. Whistleblower's data suggests millions of tracking requests sent over four-month period. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
“The report says the location tracking was done through exploiting weaknesses in #SS7, a set of protocols used by carriers around the world to route and direct calls and messages between networks.” https://techcrunch.com/...
Saudi Arabia accused of exploiting weaknesses in global mobile telecoms network to track its citizens as they travel around the US; kingdom made millions of secret requests for location data between Nov 2019 - March 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Saudi Arabia is exploiting weaknesses in global mobile telecoms network to track its citizens in the US, according to a whistleblower who has shown the Guardian millions of alleged secret tracking requests. Another amazing exclusive by @skirchy https://www.theguardian.com/ ...