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
In partnership with — In the months leading up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss …
Context & Ripple Effects
Anomaly Six has been building this capability in plain sight: back in 2020, reporting showed its SDK embedded in 500+ apps, harvesting and selling location data from hundreds of millions of phones worldwide. What the leaked sales pitch adds is proof of scale and audacity — the company says it can track ~3 billion phones in real time, and chose to demonstrate it on CIA and NSA personnel.
First-order effects
- CIA and NSA staff movements were exposed as a sales demo, meaning a private contractor's marketing material doubled as a live counterintelligence breach against its own government's agencies.
- The leak lands during Anomaly Six's push to sell its tracking stack to other contractors and government buyers ahead of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, putting every existing and prospective agency customer under scrutiny.
Second-order effects
- Government customers now face a procurement dilemma: the same vendor capability that serves intelligence work can be turned on intelligence personnel, forcing agencies to weigh insider-threat risk when buying commercial phone-tracking products.
- The precedent echoes the earlier case of Tracer, a US surveillance tool resold by Moscow-based OpenGSM — once a tracking capability exists as a product, it proliferates beyond the intended buyer, pressuring the entire app-SDK location-data supply chain that feeds vendors like Anomaly Six.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, bulk commercial location data becomes an off-the-shelf intelligence layer that sits outside traditional oversight — following the trajectory Palantir's leaked documents showed a decade ago, where contractor-built analysis tools became integral to NSA and GCHQ operations.
- Sustained leaks of this kind point toward regulatory reckoning for the location-broker ecosystem, with the app developers whose SDKs enable ~3-billion-phone tracking becoming the chokepoint any future rules would target.
The trend: Commercial phone-tracking firms are converting bulk location data into a sellable intelligence product, collapsing the line between private data brokers and state surveillance capability.