This Secret Tech Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You

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► For more, visit Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altamides-phone-tracking-surveillance-secrets-assad-erik-prince-jared-leto-anne-wojcicki/ Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley. It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.” Altamides leaves no trace on the phones it targets, unlike spyware such as Pegasus. Nor does it require a target to click on a malicious link or show any of the telltale signs (such as overheating or a short battery life) of remote monitoring. First Wap emphasizes that its technology is used by law enforcement to “fight against organized crime, terrorism and corruption.” It sells Altamides directly, as well as through third-party resellers. The company said in a statement that it does not provide “any tracking services to government entities or similar”—that is, it does not perform any tracking itself—and that “after installation” it has no further involvement in or knowledge of how its product is used. It said it sells solely to “government entities, which have a clear and verified legal mandate to obtain and operate such products” and it “vets and verifies” users “for sanctions compliance.” The company’s contracts state that customers must comply with anti-corruption laws and “there must not be any business transaction with a sanctioned entity,” and First Wap said it adheres to these rules “no matter what any sales personnel may state verbally.” Of the company’s interactions with undercover reporters at the Prague conference, it said that “misunderstandings evidently arose” and that the statements by its executives referred merely to “technical feasibility.” Last year the investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports obtained a secret archive, containing more than a million instances where Altamides was used to trace cell phones all over the world. This data trove, the majority of which spans 2007 to 2014, is one of the largest disclosures to date of the inner workings of the vast surveillance industry. It does not just list the phone numbers of people who were monitored; it offers, in many cases, precise maps of their movements, showing where they went and when. Over months of research, Lighthouse, Germany’s Paper Trail Media, Mother Jones, Reveal, and an international consortium of partners dug into these logs to understand who was being spied on and why. We identified surveillance targets in 100 countries and spoke to dozens of them. We obtained confidential documents and communications outlining how Altamides—an acronym for “Advanced Location Tracking and Mobile Information and Deception System”—was marketed and deployed. We also interviewed industry insiders and former employees of the company about its operations and clientele. What we found changes what we know about the history of surveillance technology, demonstrating the proliferation of dangerous tools well before Edward Snowden brought the issue to global attention. Read the full investigation here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altamides-phone-tracking-surveillance-secrets-assad-erik-prince-jared-leto-anne-wojcicki/ #investigation #surveillance #tech -- For more award-winning independent reporting, visit Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/motherjones/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/motherjones Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/motherjonesmag