Palantir, Clearview A.I., NSO Group, maker of the infamous Pegasus spyware, Anomaly 6 and Zignal are a few examples of private companies that offer to spy on anyone for a price.  Anomaly 6, a mobile phone spyware solution set up by 2 former NSA military intelligence officers, can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population. Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm that leverages its access to Twitter’s rarely granted “firehose” data stream to sift through hundreds of millions of tweets per day without restriction.

With their powers combined, A6 proposed, Zignal’s corporate and governmental clients could not only surveil global social media activity, but also determine who exactly sent certain tweets, where they sent them from, who they were with, where they’d been previously, and where they went next. This enormously augmented capability would be an obvious boon to both regimes keeping tabs on their global adversaries and companies keeping tabs on their employees. These firms represent a burgeoning new private military-grade surveillance industry and it is targeted at us!

Is this the beginning of surveillance on demand? What can we do to prevent this type of surveillance from happening? Join the Decentralists this week and find out why hacking tools are available to the highest bidder and how anyone can hire their own Private Spy...for a price.

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