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- [00:01]
Gabriel Geiger
Support comes from Dakota State University. What happens when you unite dynamic minds with one revolutionary vision? A rising force on the cutting edge of everything from a little university on the prairie to a cyber powerhouse of the plains. We're proving the nation's best cyber can come from where you least expect it. Now we're molding the future of cyber AI and quantum computing one graduate at a time. See what Dakota State University is building next@dsucyber27.com. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [01:01]
Al Letson
Hey, this is Al. And I'm sure it is no surprise to you that President Trump doesn't like us very much. He called the press the enemy of the people. Credentialed journalists have been banned from press briefings just for asking tough questions. Trump personally sued news networks demanding billions. And now, at his urging, Congress has voted to gut all federal funding for public broadcasting. And I think I know why. I think we all do. It's because real journalism brings sunlight, scrutiny, accountability. When power feels threatened, it lashes out. And that tells you just how vital independent reporting is. Right now here at Reveal, we don't answer to billionaires or politicians or special interests. We only answer to you, our listeners. But we can't do this alone. Stand with us. Support fearless independent journalism that refuses to back down. Donate today. Just visit revealnews.org fearless again, that's revealnews.org fearless.
- [02:06]
Crofton Black
Thanks.
- [02:07]
Al Letson
From the center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Ledsen. Picture a map of the world laid out on a giant screen. It's pulsing with tiny points of light. From San Francisco to Tokyo, Stockholm to Cape Town. In countries like Nigeria and Thailand, the points of light are so dense they spill across the map. Other places are marked with just a single pinprick. Shawnee, Kansas. Soron, Iraq. There are 700,000 points covering 160 countries on this map. Each one represents a cell phone that was tracked at a specific place and time. Some phones are tracked multiple times over the course of an hour or day or week. This map shows how over 10,000 people were tracked using one surveillance company's software. It was created by a group of journalists who, for the past year and a half, have been piecing together how the technology works. The software has been unknown to the public or even many experts until now. It predates the leaks of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. It's wider in scale than the hacks connected to Pegasus, the spyware that's been blacklisted by the U.S. but here's the thing. Those scandals involve governments spying on people. This tech is also helping corporations and even some private citizens get in on the spying. This week's show lifts the lid on this surveillance and what it means for all of us. It's a part of a blockbuster collaboration with the investigative newsroom Lighthouse reports. Reveal is one of 13 media partners working with Lighthouse to break this story. The investigation is already grabbing attention around the world.
- [04:02]
Gabriel Geiger
The story is that a couple of reporters from Lighthouse report.
- [04:10]
Al Letson
Thousands of people fell victim to this digital dragnet. Who are they? Who was doing the spying and why? We begin with the discovery of a database that sent the whole investigation into overdrive. His reveals, Michael Montgomery.
- [04:27]
Crofton Black
Ever since finishing college a few years ago, Gabriel Geiger has been working as an investigative journalist in Europe. In that short time, he's developed a specialty covering the surveillance industry. Not surprisingly, Gabe spends a lot of time online trawling for secrets.
- [04:45]
Gabriel Geiger
When you think about the Internet, it's almost like an iceberg. And you have the top of the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg. That's everything that you can find on the Internet via Google search.
- [04:55]
Crofton Black
Then there's the deep web. Hidden parts of the Internet that aren't indexed by standard search engines.
- [05:01]
Gabriel Geiger
A sort of ocean beneath. Beneath the iceberg.
- [05:05]
Crofton Black
So Gabe sees his job as something like an explorer searching for mysterious creatures in the vast uncharted ocean of the deep web.
- [05:14]
Gabriel Geiger
My bosses would be very angry if they understood how much time I spend fishing and getting nothing out of it. But everyone, once in a while, you find something that's actually pretty interesting.
- [05:24]
Crofton Black
That happened one evening in 2024. Gabe is at home on his living room couch, his laptop open and glowing. A colleague had given him a tip. The name of an obscure company that develops surveillance tools.
- [05:37]
Gabriel Geiger
I look at their website and looks like it's from the 2000s or something. You know, it's kind of run down website, old web design.
- [05:47]
Crofton Black
Even the company's name, first wap, seems obsolete. The WAP stands for Wireless Application protocol, A mobile Internet technology that was abandoned years ago.
- [05:59]
Gabriel Geiger
I'm sort of poking around trying to find out more about this company, and I come across this set of data lying on the Internet unsecured. Downloading it takes quite a long time.
- [06:12]
Crofton Black
As the data slowly Streams into his computer, and Gabe sees phone numbers and geographic coordinates. They were collected by first WAP over a span of eight years.
- [06:24]
Gabriel Geiger
And it becomes sort of clear that something is being tracked or monitored. I don't know if it's consensual or not consensual, but, you know, there's numbers attached to geographic coordinates that are sort of changing over time.
- [06:38]
Crofton Black
Gabe is burning to figure out who is being tracked.
- [06:42]
Gabriel Geiger
So I'm looking through these phone numbers and I see a 39 number. 39 is the country code of Italy, where my mom is from. And I spent a lot of time in. So I was sort of, okay, well, let me, let me try and identify this Italian phone number that I see here.
- [06:57]
Crofton Black
He plugs the number into a web service that can identify names, email addresses, and social media accounts.
- [07:04]
Gabriel Geiger
And when I do that, I get the name Gianluigi Nuzzi. And I put that name into Google, and I see that Gianluigi Nuzzi is an Italian journalist. And not just any Italian journalist. He's quite a famous Italian journalist, and he's quite famous for his investigations into the Vatican corruption at the Vatican. And when I saw that, I kind of realized that I think I stumbled across something, something really important here.
- [07:35]
Crofton Black
Gabe works all night downloading as much data as he can. It will eventually total a million and a half lines with hundreds of columns along the way. He texts his boss, Lighthouse's managing director, Daniel Howden.
- [07:49]
Gabriel Geiger
And I'm excited. I thought, of course he's going to be convinced. As soon as I show him this, he's going to be like, wow, like, good job, you know.
- [07:57]
Crofton Black
So he gets Daniel on the phone.
- [07:59]
Gabriel Geiger
It's still incredibly early. It's like, you know, pre coffee hour.
- [08:03]
Crofton Black
It's 7am on a Sunday.
- [08:05]
Gabriel Geiger
And Gabe is so excited. He's zealous. I mean, he's found something. I found the new Pegasus. I found our Pegasus. Obviously talking about this massive surveillance spyware investigation that went all over the world. And my first thought is like, this is going to be a good laugh for everyone over beers for weeks to come. He is full of this kind of puppyish enthusiasm, and I kind of pat him on the head a little bit, calm him down and ask him a few questions.
- [08:38]
Crofton Black
Questions like, how is this different from the last three massive scoops that Gabe brought in, which turned out not to.
- [08:44]
Gabriel Geiger
Be what we thought?
- [08:45]
Crofton Black
Daniel knows from experience that it can take months, even years to unravel a complex data set, and even then, there might not be a story. He's also concerned that the information Gabe has dug up is old. The data trails off in 2015. Editor and reporter Crofton Black is also cautious of Gabe's discovery.
- [09:06]
Gabriel Geiger
He's young enough and like naive enough to think that he can take a million and a half row data set and turn it into a story just like that.
- [09:13]
Crofton Black
Still, something about all this is intriguing to Crofton. I mean, it's just so much data. So he shares a sample with some trusted sources in the telecoms industry.
- [09:26]
Gabriel Geiger
They were pretty stunned by the size of the data. You know, they were like, how did you get a million and a half rows of this? You know, it's floated up from the depths of the deep web. It's like the Kraken.
- [09:39]
Crofton Black
The Kraken, you know, the legendary sea.
- [09:41]
Gabriel Geiger
Monster, you know, you can measure it, you can weigh it, you can count how many tentacles it's got, you can, like how many eyes has it got? But you don't have a guide, you know, you don't have Jacques Cousteau to tell you actually what it does, what it is.
- [09:59]
Crofton Black
Two months after Gabe discovers the Kraken, Lighthouse decides to move forward with the investigation. Thirteen other newsrooms join the Lighthouse team. They include Paper Trail Media from Germany, whose founders broke the Panama Papers investigation. With Crofton and Gabe tag teaming as the famous ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, they begin the tedious work of putting names and stories to to many of those phone numbers. And while they're not able to trace all the numbers, what they find is pretty startling. A broad range of people from more than 100 countries, including the US all being tracked on their mobile phones.
- [10:39]
Gabriel Geiger
You see heads of state, you see award winning journalists, you see human rights activists, you see leaders in industry, you see people inside the surveillance industry itself. It's this sort of extraordinary cross section of important people doing important things in their lives all over the world.
- [11:01]
Crofton Black
Turns out that FirstWap, the company that makes the technology, has been around for two decades. But some surveillance experts, they've never heard of it.
- [11:10]
Gabriel Geiger
I was not familiar with this company.
- [11:13]
Crofton Black
Ron Deibert is an author, cyber sleuth and director of Citizen Lab, the digital human rights group based in Toronto. He says the fact that he hadn't heard about First WAB isn't really a surprise.
- [11:25]
Gabriel Geiger
It's a relatively crowded space. There are many companies that have been able to operate in the shadows, which I think says something about this sector as a whole.
- [11:38]
Crofton Black
As the Lighthouse team begins to make sense of the data, it also obtains company documents, marketing material and connects with former employees. A picture emerges of this mysterious company. First, WAP and the software it developed to track all those phone numbers. They learn the software's name, Altimedes, and what it stands for. Advanced Location Tracking Mobile Information and Deception System.
- [12:05]
Gabriel Geiger
And the selling point of this piece of software is that you can type in virtually any phone number and it will be able to track it anywhere in the world with no trace on the phone.
- [12:16]
Crofton Black
Altimedes doesn't leave a trace because unlike spyware like Pegasus, it doesn't get inside your phone.
- [12:23]
Gabriel Geiger
It's important to remember that our devices, our smartphones, sit on and function through a broader telecommunications ecosystem, which itself has been for decades notoriously insecure and poorly regulated. They can exploit these signaling protocols in order to package up a service that is not quite the same as getting inside a device, but can accomplish a lot.
- [12:54]
Crofton Black
Altimedias works in a couple ways. If a customer, say a government, wanted to track a phone number, they could buy a system and run it themselves through a local phone network. Another way the software works is through a web based portal. It taps into the global phone network through telecom companies in Liechtenstein or Indonesia. And it's not just about tracking someone's movements. Altimedes also makes it possible to listen in on voice calls, read texts, and hijack communications on encrypted platforms like WhatsApp. In its marketing materials and in a response to the reporting team, FirstWAP says Altimedes was developed to help governments first fight serious crime and track down terrorists. That's a common refrain in the surveillance industry. But many of the phone numbers from first wap's own database challenge that narrative. And this is where Italian investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi comes back into the picture. In May 2012, Nuzzi's blockbuster book about Pope Benedict XVI was getting worldwide attention.
- [14:06]
Gabriel Geiger
This morning, an author is defending his explosive allegations against the Vatican. His new book accuses powerful members of the church hierarchy of greed and financial mismanagement.
- [14:16]
Crofton Black
Nuzi's book drew on leaked documents, including private correspondence between Pope Benedict and his secretary. Crofton says the Holy See was irate.
- [14:26]
Gabriel Geiger
At this moment in time, Gianluigi Nuzzi was the Vatican's public enemy number one. He was the guy who was splashing all their dirty secrets and hanging out their dirty laundry to, like, an enormous audience in Italy. And they wanted to know where he got the stuff. We know at the time from reporting that there's a sort of mad hunt to uncover who Nutzi's source is, who's inside the Vatican leaking all these documents to him.
- [14:58]
Crofton Black
Gabe took a closer look at the data he discovered, and I'm looking at.
- [15:02]
Gabriel Geiger
The dates, and I realize Nutzi is being tracked just days after he publishes his big book.
- [15:09]
Crofton Black
Gabe says the data shows Nutzi was tracked for about a week. Then the day after the Vatican police arrested his source, the tracking suddenly stopped. A scandal worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster is rocking the Vatican. The detention of Pope Benedict's butler capped one of the most convulsive weeks in recent Vatican history. The butler, Paolo Gabriele, was charged with stealing the Pope's private papers and leaking them. He was convicted by a Vatican court and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Nuzzi was also indicted. Defendant Gianluigi Nuzzi arrives to the first day of a Vatican trial over the.
- [15:47]
Gabriel Geiger
Alleged theft of confidential documents from the Holy See.
- [15:51]
Crofton Black
After years of legal wrangling, Nuzzi and another reporter were finally acquitted. Fast forward about nine years to July 2025, Nuzi is approached by the Lighthouse team. Like most people who show up in the tracking data, he has absolutely no idea he was being monitored. In a noisy cafe, they show him a map on a laptop with dots indicating all the locations where he was tracked. Like his home in Milan.
- [16:28]
Gabriel Geiger
He's sort of zooming in, zooming in, zooming in at one of the points. Oh, that's my apartment. And they were tracking him everywhere he was going while he was at the airport, while he was on a train or driving. They'd sort of scheduled the tracking every hour. So he was systematically being tracked as he moved across Italy.
- [16:46]
Crofton Black
Nuzi is surprised at the precision with which he was tracked. But he's also circumspect. Crofton says he didn't want to jump to any conclusions that it was the Vatican that was behind the surveillance.
- [16:58]
Gabriel Geiger
He was like, well, you know, it's not really their style. Like, I would expect them to be sending, you know, people to follow my car or, like, people to break into my house maybe.
- [17:10]
Crofton Black
Then there's a breakthrough in the investigation. Lighthouse obtains emails and documents that show their is a connection to the Vatican. Here's what they learned. A British company, KCS Group, was acting as a middleman for first wab. They were preparing a pitch to the Vatican showing them how they could use altimedes. Crofton says KCS was planning to ask the Vatican which phone numbers they should monitor.
- [17:38]
Gabriel Geiger
Four days after they asked that, we see that Nutsi's numbers start being tracked. Then another five days later, KCS has their meeting with officials from the Vatican. KCS's employee goes to the meeting and he's got a presentation, a presentation that shows on a map Nudzi's movements over the last week. After the meeting, the employee from kcs, he actually emails first wap, First Wait, saying presentation fine, client happy.
- [18:15]
Crofton Black
We sent First WAP and KCS Group a detailed list of questions about how the Altimedia software was used to track Nutc. Firstwap responded saying it does not provide tracking services and that they aren't involved with how its product is used once it's delivered to a client. KCS Group says they have not been involved in selling or using any inappropriate surveillance materials. Today, Gianluigi Nuzzi believes the Vatican was tracking him and he's disturbed by it. He says he's still angry over the jailing of a source. He believes his only crime was exposing corruption.
- [19:03]
Gabriel Geiger
It was a shock to me because the Vatican never arrested pedophile priests. They never arrested money launderers. Money laundering was not even a crime. But they arrested a family man with a clean record who had committed the terrible crime of making photocopies and give it to a journalist. You can really tell over the course of that interview that he's genuinely disturbed. He sort of felt that this showed the chilling effect this type of technology can have on the work of journalists like himself and other journalists all around the world.
- [19:43]
Crofton Black
So if the Vatican tracked Nuzi, were they breaking the law? Well, the Vatican is its own state, and it wouldn't necessarily be illegal to track someone within the walls of Vatican City. But Nuzzi was tracked outside the Vatican in Rome, in Milan, all over Italy. To do that legally, the Vatican would need to make a formal request to Italian authorities. We asked the Vatican if they made a deal with KCS to use the Altamides software. We also asked whether they made a request to Italian authorities to track Nuzi. They never responded.
- [20:27]
Al Letson
John Luigi Nuzzi was one of a number of high profile figures whose lives were secretly monitored. There were also hundreds of other people who weren't public figures at all.
- [20:37]
Gabriel Geiger
I felt really violated. I felt very vulnerable.
- [20:42]
Al Letson
That's next on Reveal.
- [20:52]
Crofton Black
Hi, y'.
- [20:53]
Gabriel Geiger
All. My name is Nadia Hamdan and I'm a producer here at Reveal. Reveal is a nonprofit news organization and we depend on support from our listeners.
- [21:04]
Al Letson
Donate today@revealnews.org donate and thanks from the center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. This is Reveal. I'm Al Ledsen. Today we're collaborating with Lighthouse Reports about a global surveillance software that can track virtually any mobile phone user around the world. After discovering that the software was used to spy on an Italian reporter as he was releasing a book about corruption inside the Vatican. Gabe and the team at Lighthouse Reports started digging deeper into the data set. They found that a wide range of public figures were being monitored.
- [21:44]
Gabriel Geiger
There's the actor Jared Leto in there. There's Erik Prince, the controversial founder of Blackwater Security. You have this guy Adam Siralski, who's a Netflix producer and a former lawyer for the CIA. There's 23andMe co founder Anne Wojcicki, the Prime Minister of Qatar, the wife of Bashar al Assad, executives at the energy drink company Red Bull. It's this sort of dizzying number of important people from all over the world.
- [22:11]
Al Letson
But they also came across names that didn't fit that profile or any profile, really. Seemingly random people whose movements were also being tracked. Reveal's Michael Montgomery explains.
- [22:30]
Crofton Black
Gabe learned that lots of regular people were being tracked, like a teacher, a driver, even a softball coach in Hawaii.
- [22:39]
Gabriel Geiger
And we have no idea why. You can understand why a journalist investigating the Vatican is being tracked. It's not good, obviously, but you can understand why it happens, the motivation behind it. But why is a therapist inside there? That's a bigger mystery.
- [22:55]
Crofton Black
One phone number had a British country code, and they traced it to a person we're going to call Sophia.
- [23:03]
Gabriel Geiger
Hi, Gabriel. How are you doing? Sophia is a Russian woman who fled the country in the late 90s and eventually ended up in the UK, where she worked in the corporate sector for many years.
- [23:16]
Crofton Black
The first WAP data showed that Sophia was tracked for almost a year without her knowledge or consent. Sophia learned she was monitored in Britain, and even on her travels abroad.
- [23:28]
Gabriel Geiger
I could recognize the place where I stayed, the hotel, the restaurants area, the beach. So disturbing. Quite accurate and disturbing.
- [23:39]
Crofton Black
All of these searches put her in the top 10% of all the phone numbers that Lighthouse analyzed. Sophia asked that we not use her real name out of concern for retaliation. But she wanted her voice heard.
- [23:51]
Gabriel Geiger
This needs to be shared as widely as possible for people to be aware that dangers like this are lurking just around the corner.
- [24:02]
Crofton Black
At the time she was tracked, Sophia was working in a highly competitive industry that put a premium on new patents. As a company executive, she had access to all kinds of confidential information.
- [24:14]
Gabriel Geiger
I thought, well, most likely it was a competitor. And then I thought, oh, my gosh, maybe it was actually my own company, because I read stories of the companies also spying on their employees. And then a less likely but plausible scenario, maybe I have been surveilled by a Russian state, because I have been a fairly vocal critic of the inhumane policies of the Russian government in my own humble ways.
- [24:41]
Crofton Black
To figure out who was behind the tracking, Gabe went back into the data, where he noticed something unusual, which is.
- [24:49]
Gabriel Geiger
That her phone number is being tracked at the same time as a bunch of Pakistani phone numbers.
- [24:55]
Crofton Black
Sophia recalled knowing only one person from Pakistan while she was living in Britain. He was an instructor her company had hired to help her get a driver's license.
- [25:05]
Gabriel Geiger
He had to sometimes meet me and pick me up at my home, and we would have to drive all the way to the office together, so he already knew where I worked. He knew where I lived.
- [25:15]
Crofton Black
Sophia says the man regaled her with stories about his time in the army and about his connections to Pakistani intelligence agencies.
- [25:25]
Gabriel Geiger
He was quite keen to stay in touch with me, and over time, he started to pursue me romantically.
- [25:34]
Crofton Black
Something about this guy felt off. Sophia definitely wasn't interested, so she broke off contact. But for months, the man kept calling and texting. Years later, after speaking with Lighthouse reports, Sophia learned something important. The man wasn't just a driving instructor. He was also a sales manager for a private security company. It seems somehow, he got access to Altamedes and used it to track Sophia and several of his colleagues.
- [26:04]
Gabriel Geiger
This software became a sort of plaything of some people who had access to it, and they used it to track people they were romantically pursuing or harassing. They used it to track their wives. They used it to track their kids. They used it to track the people their kids were dating. It's really alarming and disturbing how easy it is to use this type of technology.
- [26:29]
Crofton Black
The unwanted calls and texts eventually stopped. But since learning about the man who was secretly surveilling her, Sophia says she's been asking herself a lot of questions. How do you build relationships with people, and how do you maintain them?
- [26:45]
Gabriel Geiger
It makes me definitely rethink how to deal with people, you know, without turning into a paranoid or a bitter person. It sort of put my own perceptions of safety upside down, like there is no. No privacy. There is no safe space where I can just be. Just be left alone.
- [27:14]
Crofton Black
When you think about it, it's kind of amazing that this massive data set that Gabe stumbled on would include a journalist covering corruption in the Vatican and just a regular person like Sophia. The lighthouse reports investigation continued, and Gabe says they figured out one way to make sense of the mobile numbers in the data set. Look for patterns or clusters.
- [27:36]
Gabriel Geiger
We're talking about groups of numbers that are related to each other. And so maybe every day, these two numbers are being tracked within one minute of each other, or they can be connected in terms of place. So these two numbers are being tracked in the same building, or they're being tracked, you know, 100ft away from each other.
- [27:57]
Crofton Black
That's how they came upon a trail of South African phone numbers.
- [28:00]
Gabriel Geiger
And we can notice that they're all being tracked at the same time. This tracking is highly correlated. We start digging in further, and we realize that these aren't South Africans. We see that they're actually Rwandans in exile living in South Africa.
- [28:16]
Crofton Black
Turns out some of the numbers were connected to an opposition movement called the Rwanda National Congress that was actively campaigning for a more democratic government.
- [28:26]
Gabriel Geiger
The movement was gaining momentum when one of its leaders was found strangled in a hotel room in Johannesburg. A former head of the Rwanda External Intelligence Service has been found murdered in a hotel in South Africa, the country where he has been living in exile for several years.
- [28:44]
Crofton Black
The man's name was Patrick Karagaya. He was a rebel fighter who became Rwanda's foreign intelligence chief after the genocide in 1994. He was a close ally of President Paul Kagame, but the two had a bitter falling out. As a result, Patrick was imprisoned and then went into exile. Here's Patrick talking about the dangers he and his comrades faced.
- [29:08]
Gabriel Geiger
Some have died, some are in prison. Others are in exile like us.
- [29:11]
Crofton Black
And it will continue. Even in exile. Patrick says he knew they were being targeted by the Rwandan government.
- [29:18]
Gabriel Geiger
That's why my colleague got shot.
- [29:21]
Al Letson
I probably was a bit lucky.
- [29:23]
Gabriel Geiger
I went off without a scar.
- [29:26]
Crofton Black
Still, he continued to speak out against Kagame, and for that he was branded an enemy of the state.
- [29:31]
Gabriel Geiger
There's been a wealth of reporting that's sort of shown how Kagame's regime was incredibly paranoid about potential opposition to his government. And it's been well documented that Kagame has set up a sort of intelligence apparatus that tracks and hunts down dissidents abroad.
- [29:50]
Crofton Black
Patrick believed he was a marked man, but he would make light of it using his dry sense of humor. This is Patrick's daughter, Portia.
- [29:58]
Gabriel Geiger
He used to joke in a way.
- [30:00]
Crofton Black
That I didn't enjoy that he was.
- [30:02]
Gabriel Geiger
A dead man walking in verbatim.
- [30:05]
Crofton Black
Journalist and author Michaela Wrong knew Patrick and also remembers his dark sense of humor. She wrote a book about him and his murder called Do Not Disturb. In it, she writes about how Patrick would joke about Rwanda's intelligence operations. Patrick Karagaya used to joke.
- [30:22]
Gabriel Geiger
Hey, you know, you think they're James.
- [30:24]
Crofton Black
Bond, but I was James Bond. I'm the spy chief.
- [30:29]
Gabriel Geiger
You know, I know how this stuff Works I'm ahead of the game.
- [30:32]
Crofton Black
And he was more vulnerable than he realized. And events proved that to be the case. The Lighthouse team wanted to know if there was any connection between Patrick's killing in 2013 and the tracking of people around him before his death. They knew one thing. Patrick's phone number didn't show up in the cluster. But they uncovered the identities of others, including a man named Jack Nziza, and shared them with Michaela Rong.
- [31:00]
Gabriel Geiger
If you follow Rwanda closely, or even.
- [31:04]
Crofton Black
If you don't follow it closely at all, Jack Incisa is infamous. He's been associated really throughout his career with top level assassination.
- [31:15]
Gabriel Geiger
I mean, people. People sort of shudder when they mention his name.
- [31:19]
Crofton Black
Mikaela recognized a second person who showed up in the cluster, the wife of an opposition figure who worked closely with Patrick, and a third, Patrick's bodyguard and driver. So you've got the wife of one dissident, the bodyguard and driver of another, and a man who is associated with top level hits. Those clusters that Gabe and the Lighthouse team found are known as relational targeting. In the world of surveillance technology, it's a concept that's very familiar to Ron Deibert from Citizen Lab.
- [31:51]
Gabriel Geiger
You have a principal target in mind, and you want to gather as much information about that target as possible. But you might have difficulty, for example, hacking their device because they put in place all sorts of defense mechanisms.
- [32:05]
Crofton Black
This is where relational targeting comes into play. You track people whose movements mirror those of your targets.
- [32:13]
Gabriel Geiger
So you get at their daughter, their son, their cousin, their uncle, or whatever, and you track them collaterally. We see it in just about every case that we investigate. You know, you can't kill someone if you don't know where they are. You can't kill people if you don't have real time intelligence showing you their locations.
- [32:34]
Crofton Black
As a former officer in the Rwandan Army, Robert Higuero had organized sensitive military operations where intelligence gathering was crucial. Robert was also living in exile and was close to Patrick. He says he knew the government wanted to kill his friend, but he didn't know someone was using first wap's software, altimedes, to track people close to him. Learning about it today, he's not surprised.
- [32:59]
Gabriel Geiger
They do these things. They choose these methods of eliminating people by killing in cold blood because of they want to terrorize the population.
- [33:13]
Crofton Black
The tracking stopped months before Patrick's murder, and it's unclear if other people close to him were being monitored at the time of his death. Portia was in Canada when she got word that her father was dead. It was New Year's Day, 2014.
- [33:32]
Gabriel Geiger
Even when I used to visit and say goodbye, you would always wonder, is that the last time I say goodbye to my dad and then that he actually ultimately is killed? You know, I just remember thinking, okay.
- [33:44]
Crofton Black
So the world is just chaos and.
- [33:47]
Gabriel Geiger
People are awful, and there's not much you personally can do to get away from that. And it is absolutely a part of your life and your story.
- [33:58]
Crofton Black
The Rwandan government was widely suspected of ordering Patrick's killing, and arrest warrants were issued for two Rwandan men. But there's never been a trial. Portia says her father's murder had the intended effect of splintering the opposition movement.
- [34:14]
Gabriel Geiger
There's a certain something that happens when you feel like you've lost good people. And so I think folks just didn't quite know how to stay together in the same way.
- [34:29]
Crofton Black
It remains a mystery who had access to the First WEP software and that was used to track people close to Patrick Paraghe. A representative from the Rwandan embassy in Washington said the government of Rwanda, quote, has never had nor sought to have such software directly or indirectly. In response to this investigation, First WAP denied it was involved in any human rights violations. The company also said it couldn't address specific allegations because of client confidentiality. There is other evidence showing how the company and its executives have been connected to a list of governments with poor human rights records, such as emails, interviews with former employees, and the original data that Gabe collected. According to that data, first WAP founder Josef Fuchs visited more than 25 countries between 2007 and and 2015.
- [35:26]
Gabriel Geiger
One of the unique things that you see in this data set is that Fuchs and other company executives are tracking their own phone numbers hundreds of thousands of times as they crisscross the globe.
- [35:37]
Crofton Black
Lighthouse reports suspects that Fuchs and other First WAP executives travel to many of these places while drumming up business for Altamedes.
- [35:46]
Gabriel Geiger
And what kind of ties a lot of them together is that one, they're authoritarian, and two, they have a history of abusing surveillance tech against their own citizens.
- [35:57]
Crofton Black
Like Thailand in 2013, Fuchs is there. Just as anti government protests surge.
- [36:07]
Gabriel Geiger
We see Fuchs tracking his phone number and other Thai phone numbers. You know, maybe this is a way for him to show off how the software is working. But in any case, right after that, we see a huge uptick inactivity in Thailand.
- [36:25]
Crofton Black
Gabe says hundreds of Thai phone numbers were monitored with Altamides just as the authorities stepped up a brutal crackdown. According to documents. In interviews with former employees, Lighthouse learned that Altamidi's customers included the governments of Belarus, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan.
- [36:52]
Gabriel Geiger
This is essentially despotism as a service.
- [36:57]
Crofton Black
Ron Deibert from Citizen Lab says working with repressive governments is a common feature throughout the surveillance industry.
- [37:04]
Gabriel Geiger
These are companies that are facilitating human rights abuses and some pretty horrible, egregious practices. So we're dealing with the facilitation through this service of transnational authoritarianism. This is just probably a small sliver of the company's total activities. It's clearly not the entire set, and we don't have activities from 2015 onwards. So what happened after that point? Yeah, that keeps me up at night.
- [37:39]
Crofton Black
In a statement from First, WAP said it had not offered or sold its products to repressive regimes. And it noted that it had no knowledge of any discussions or presentations that may have been carried out by the company's founder, Josef Fuchs. Fuchs died in 2024.
- [37:59]
Al Letson
In a moment, the team at Lighthouse Reports goes undercover to learn how this mysterious company markets its surveillance technology.
- [38:07]
Gabriel Geiger
Today, we wanted to know in 2025, is there anything that these guys would bullcat? Do they have any red lines?
- [38:15]
Al Letson
That's next on Reveal. From the center for Investigative Reporting and prx, this is Reveal. I'm Altson. This week's show is about an investigation that began with a trove of det data from one of the world's oldest surveillance companies. FirstWAP, that data drops off in 2015, which left the team at Lighthouse Reports wondering what's happened to the company in the decades since. How has their software advanced and who are they willing to sell it to today? To answer those questions, Lighthouse Reports decided to go undercover. Michael Montgomery explains how they did it.
- [39:02]
Crofton Black
The Lighthouse Reports team is holed up in a rented apartment in Prague. It's filled with breakfast dishes, luggage, a collection of laptops and the sweat of anticipation. They've come to the Czech Republic to attend ISS World Europe, a premier gathering for intelligence agencies, police and companies that build and sell surveillance systems. Outsiders, especially the media, aren't allowed in.
- [39:29]
Gabriel Geiger
We're going to keep discreet about exactly where the camera is.
- [39:33]
Crofton Black
Emanuel Freudenthal is an editor at Lighthouse. He's dressed up in a flashy suit that's been fitted with a hidden camera.
- [39:41]
Gabriel Geiger
Basically, you can't see this like a tiny hole, but you really can't tell where. It's a very beautiful fashion accessory.
- [39:52]
Crofton Black
Emmanuel is getting direct from his colleague, editor and reporter Crofton Black. Crofton's been planning this operation for six Months.
- [39:59]
Gabriel Geiger
You've got that in your trouser pocket. Just coming through with the wire. My underwear and your underwear. Okay. Let's hope it doesn't fall out in the middle of your conversation. This is what makes a podcast into a hit. Instead of being like, just kind of run of the mill. Yeah.
- [40:18]
Crofton Black
To get inside the conference, Emmanuel is posing as Albert, a French business broker based in South Africa with lots of connections to governments and mining interests throughout the continent. Reporter Gabriel Geiger explains why Emanuel is perfect for the role.
- [40:34]
Gabriel Geiger
He's someone who just has a perfect poker face. You have no idea what this guy is thinking.
- [40:40]
Crofton Black
They crafted Albert's backstory as a test to see how far First Wap would go to make a deal.
- [40:47]
Gabriel Geiger
We intentionally designed him to be very shady. He's working for unnamed governments, private clients. His company is supposedly registered in the British Virgin Isles, like a sort of post box address. A bunch of red flags that anybody who's doing serious due diligence would pick up on. We decided to approach First Swap undercover for one very simple reason. We wanted to know, is there anything that these guys would Balkat? Do they have any red lines?
- [41:17]
Crofton Black
Today, Albert is representing clients in French speaking West Africa, where First Wap doesn't seem to do much business. Lighthouse hopes First Wap will see meeting Albert as an opportunity to increase sales in a new region. He's joined by a man they're calling Abdu, one of Albert's clients, who's looking to acquire some surveillance tech. Albert's hidden camera is rolling as he and Abdu arrive at the conference. They ride an escalator up to the sales floor, where tiny cameras and drones are on display. But the busiest vendors are focused on smartphones. Albert moves smoothly through the crowd. So far, so good.
- [41:59]
Gabriel Geiger
Yeah. How's it going?
- [42:02]
Crofton Black
Hello.
- [42:03]
Gabriel Geiger
Are you quite busy? I guess.
- [42:05]
Crofton Black
He and Abdu have set up a meeting with FirstWap's sales director, a man named Gunter Rudolf.
- [42:11]
Gabriel Geiger
I wanted to introduce you to Mr. Mala. Hello. Abdul Mahler. Gunter Rudolph is in full sales mode. He doesn't show any sort of skepticism towards Albert, and he's just like, launches right in. Please take a seat.
- [42:26]
Crofton Black
Albert and Abdu move quickly to learn more about the company's software, Altamedes. First, they get a look at it. When one of the executives demonstrates the tracking function by locating Rudolph's cell phone on a laptop, they track his phone to a point on a map. This is the same software that was used to secretly track all those people, like Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi. Then Rudolph explains how you could use Altimedes to crack into an encrypted WhatsApp account.
- [42:55]
Gabriel Geiger
So what I can do now is an extending the OTP to respond. So what Rudolph explains is that first swap software allows you to hack into WhatsApp accounts by stealing and intercepting these authentication text messages. And that allows you basically to take over someone's account. Then I take the OTP clock, put it in my mobile phone, and I have his WhatsApp on my phone. His favorite thing.
- [43:22]
Crofton Black
Then Albert presents Rudolf with one of those red lines that Crofton had mentioned. He says there's a client, a private mining company in West Africa that's having trouble with people protesting its operations.
- [43:34]
Gabriel Geiger
So he's wondering what would be the best approach for that, to monitor those activists and check that they're not disrupting business?
- [43:42]
Crofton Black
Rudolph asks Albert.
- [43:43]
Gabriel Geiger
He knows already who are the leaders, what he wants to find out.
- [43:48]
Crofton Black
Does the client already know who. Who the leaders are, or does he want to find out?
- [43:52]
Gabriel Geiger
The point is, do you know already the target and we want to monitor them to know what they are doing, or do you have to find out who is the organizer?
- [44:06]
Crofton Black
Rudolph explains that Altimedes has another feature called geofencing. It can track large numbers of cell phones in a specific area, like a protest. He said they can even use it to identify the organizers. Gabe says the fact that Rudolph is even talking about sharing their surveillance system with this private mining company is shocking.
- [44:28]
Gabriel Geiger
I think that's the moment where we're like, wow, they're actually playing ball with this.
- [44:33]
Crofton Black
Rudolph goes on to talk about why First WAP is special. Their headquarters are in Indonesia, which places fewer restrictions on on the export of sensitive technology like Altimedes. He says that gives them a competitive advantage. That basic idea, the lack of strong export restrictions, leads them to a conversation about another redline scenario. Working with a client on a sanctions list, someone like that is known as a specially designated national, special designated nationals.
- [45:05]
Gabriel Geiger
There are some Spitfires in Africa and also entities in Africa which are under sanction and export limitations. You have to understand that sanctions are something that the United States and European countries put in place that bans you from doing business with a sanctioned entity. And that can be an individual, it can be a company, it can be a government.
- [45:28]
Crofton Black
Rudolph explains how First WAP could make a deal with someone who's on a single sanctions list.
- [45:33]
Gabriel Geiger
If you're just holding a German passport, like Johnny.
- [45:36]
Crofton Black
He's talking about his colleague Johnny Goebelstein.
- [45:39]
Gabriel Geiger
Passport, like me, I have not even allowed to know about the project, because otherwise I can go to prison.
- [45:48]
Crofton Black
The audio isn't great here, but what Rudolf is basically saying is that he could go to prison in his home country of Austria because it's illegal for him to have. Help someone avoid sanctions. Then he explains how the company could run the deal through its office in Indonesia instead.
- [46:05]
Gabriel Geiger
So that's why we make such a deal. For example, we make it through Jakarta and signatures coming from our. And then he goes on to say, you know, slyly, we will never know about this project, quote, unquote, and then sort of smiles. What Rudolph is talking about here is a way to. To circumvent sanctions.
- [46:26]
Crofton Black
At the end of the conference, Albert tells the executives he'll follow up to continue the conversation.
- [46:31]
Gabriel Geiger
All right, thanks a lot. Okay, good feedback. Bye.
- [46:36]
Crofton Black
With the undercover operation behind them, the Lighthouse team is stunned by what they've learned. First there was all that data Gabe discovered and the people who were tracked more than a decade ago, and now this. Here's Crofton.
- [46:51]
Gabriel Geiger
We spent like six months trying to figure out every possible permutation of what could happen, from the sublime to the ridiculous. But I never anticipated that they were going to basically offer us a sanctions busting recipe.
- [47:09]
Crofton Black
There was just one thing left to do. This September, Albert set up one final call with Gunter Rudolf and. And two other FirstWap executives, Johnny Goble and Evgeny Karakanovsky. On the agenda, follow up on the proposed deal from the trade fair.
- [47:25]
Gabriel Geiger
Hi, Guinter, how are you? Hello. Hello.
- [47:28]
Crofton Black
Hello.
- [47:29]
Gabriel Geiger
Thank you. I can see Dubai behind you.
- [47:31]
Crofton Black
Rudolf is in Dubai, where FirstWap has offices. The conversation starts out with smiles and laughs. Albert asks about things like pricing for Altamedes Depend.
- [47:42]
Gabriel Geiger
Depends on what the client chooses on the different modules and the features. Minimum 1 million to whatever, 15, 20 million. Theoretically.
- [47:52]
Crofton Black
Albert mentions that proposed deal he talked about at the trade fair. The client under sanctions who wanted to acquire Altamedes.
- [48:00]
Gabriel Geiger
So I think we can all agree we found a good way around the sanctions. But I have to admit.
- [48:07]
Crofton Black
And then, without missing a beat, Albert reveals his true identity.
- [48:12]
Gabriel Geiger
I'm actually working for a coalition of investigative journalists. And so I was wondering, why did you agree to do a deal with a sanctioned client when you said yourself that you could go to prison for that?
- [48:26]
Crofton Black
Rudolph and his partners are silent, almost frozen after hearing what Emanuel Freudenthal has just said. They're not moving, just staring into their computers, listening as Emmanuel asked again about their conversation in Prague.
- [48:40]
Gabriel Geiger
You agreed to the sale and it was clear, against the law and the European sanctions regime. But you agreed. What's your comment on that?
- [48:49]
Crofton Black
Eventually, Rudolf responds, we are not doing.
- [48:52]
Gabriel Geiger
We did not agree to deliver there. Right.
- [48:55]
Crofton Black
He's pointing out they never actually signed a deal.
- [48:58]
Gabriel Geiger
So when we make a contract with you, you will see the crosses that we are not dealing with, with people under sanction.
- [49:05]
Crofton Black
What he's saying here is that when we make a contract with you, there would be a clause that says we don't deal with people under sanctions. And then he says Emmanuel must have the wrong company altogether.
- [49:17]
Gabriel Geiger
Either you really have the wrong company, you talk to the wrong company or your sources or whatever is completely wrong. I don't know. Okay, thanks for taking the time to answer the questions. So we'll be sending you an email with more questions and for the opportunity to respond. Have a good afternoon. Bye bye.
- [49:43]
Crofton Black
Just about a week before we published this investigation, First WAP issued a statement. The company said there had been misunderstandings at the conference in Prague and that their executives only spoke about what was, quote, technically feasible. First WAP also told us they don't sell to corporate clients, only governments.
- [50:04]
Gabriel Geiger
When you get to the end of one of these big investigations, there's always this question of what does it all mean? And I think that for me, it kind of redefines who uses these tools. It redefines who can get targeted by them. And that image to me of them laughing about breaking sanctions is just something that really sticks with me. And I find it kind of haunting in a way.
- [50:35]
Al Letson
A few days ago, our 13 reporting partners each released a version of this story. There's already been reaction in Europe. A telecom company in Liechtenstein suspended its business with First WAP after learning that Altimedes may have used it to tap into to phone networks around the world. And in the US Oregon Senator Ron Wyden responded to our investigation, saying it underscores the glaring weaknesses in our phone system, which the US Government and phone companies have failed dismally to address. A lot of people from a lot of places pitched in on this week's show. Special thanks to our friends at Lighthouse report and the 12 other media outlets that were part of this collaboration. We've got the full list on our website. We've also got a terrific package from Mother Jones, including a video that follows reporter Gabe Geiger's journey from the moment he discovered the massive trove of data. Check it all out@revealnews.org our lead producer for this week's show is Michael Montgomery. Lou Okowski edited the show. We have production help from Nadia Hamdan, Ricardo Coluccini and Artis Cheriscus. Artis is also our fact checker. Special thanks to Flavio Pompetti. Victoria Baranetsky is our General Counsel. Our production manager is Ulema Cobb. Score and sound design by the dynamic duo Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando My Man Yo Arruda. That help this week from Claire C. Note Mullen. Taki Telenides is our Deputy Executive Producer. Our executive producer is Bret Myers. Our theme music is is by Cameraado Lightning. Support for reveals provided by the Riva and David Logan foundation, the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, the park foundation, the Schmidt Family foundation and the Hellman Foundation. Support for reveal is also provided by you our listeners. We are a co production of the center for Investigative Reporting and prx. I'm Al Letson and remember there is always more to the story.