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It turns out that United States Intel is tracking the movements of Russian President Vladimir Putin by relying on sophisticated tools from the technology company PlanetRisk. Photo/REUTERS
WASHINGTON – The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United States (US) Pentagon continue to track the movements of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In their mission, they use advanced tools from the technology company PlanetRisk.
The American intelligence action was revealed by the Wired page by citing a new book written by former Wall Street Journal journalist, Byron Tau.
PlanetRisk, according to the report, has created a sophisticated tool which was initially called Locomotive but was later renamed VISR (Virtual Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance).
The tool utilizes geolocation data used by digital advertisers, and is believed to be able to spy on people close to Putin, thereby obtaining information about the Russian president's whereabouts.
In a lengthy report Tuesday, based on Tau's “Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State,” Wired reported that researcher Mike Yeagley first realized the potential uses of big data collected by certain applications in the mid-2010s.
Tech companies already routinely collect information and are willing to sell it to any advertiser willing to pay a relatively low fee for the service, making it a particularly promising area, according to the report.
According to the book, Yeagley—who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies—first experimented with geofencing, which includes virtual boundaries in geographic data sets, to track employees of U.S. government agencies.
This method has reportedly proven very successful in collecting personal data on staff using dating and weather apps, as well as games that require user location.
In 2015, Yeagley was allegedly hired by PlaceIQ after the company received investment from the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.