Exposing a Global Surveillance Empire

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.

The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.

What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.

The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry.

This week on Reveal, we join 13 other news outlets to expose the secrets of a global surveillance empire.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Al, and I'm sure it is no surprise to you that President Trump doesn't like us very much.
0:06.7	He called the press the enemy of the people.
0:09.0	Credential journalists have been banned from press briefings just for asking tough questions.
0:14.3	Trump personally sued news networks demanding billions.
0:18.6	And now, at his urging, Congress has voted to gut all federal funding for
0:23.7	public broadcasting. And I think I know why. I think we all do. It's because real journalism
0:28.7	brings sunlight, scrutiny, accountability. When power feels threatened, it lashes out. And that tells you
0:36.0	just how vital independent reporting is right now.
0:40.0	Here it reveal, we don't answer to billionaires, or politicians, or special interests.
0:45.4	We only answer to you, our listeners, but we can't do this alone.
0:50.2	Stand with us. Support fearless independent journalism that refuses to back down. Donate today. Just visit RevealNews.org slash fearless. Again, that's RevealNews.org slash fearless. Thanks.
1:06.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Lezen.
1:11.6	Picture a map of the world laid out on a giant screen. It's pulsing with tiny points of light,
1:19.6	from San Francisco to Tokyo, Stockholm to Cape Town. In countries like Nigeria and Thailand,
1:26.6	the points of light are so dense, they spill across the map.
1:30.3	Other places are marked with just a single pinprick, Shawnee, Kansas, Surin, Iraq.
1:36.3	There are 700,000 points covering 160 countries on this map.
1:41.3	Each one represents a cell phone that was tracked at a specific place in time.
1:47.0	Some phones are tracked multiple times over the course of an hour or day or week.
1:53.0	This map shows how over 10,000 people were tracked using one surveillance company's software.
1:59.0	It was created by a group of journalists who, for the past year and a half,
2:02.6	have been piecing together how the technology works.
	...

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