Mother Jones

10/14/2025

Some of the companies that have promoted their products at this event are now infamous, such as NSO Group, which makes the blacklisted Pegasus spyware that news reports and multiple lawsuits implicated in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, or Intellexa, which triggered a hacking scandal in Greece. In recent years, surveillance companies have been linked to assassination plots. They have been exposed for targeting politicians, including members of Congress; political dissidents and human rights advocates; and journalists. Their spy ops have led to lawsuits, parliamentary inquiries, financial penalties, and, in the case of both NSO Group and Intellexa, US government sanctions. But, through these controversies, one company has remained in the shadows.

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.

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. Despite its considerable size, the archive represents only a fraction of the surveillance activities carried out with Altamides. But it nevertheless shows how it was used, and abused, across the world.

The targets included Blackwater founder Erik Prince (who declined to comment), executives from military contracting company Raytheon, employees of telecom and cybersecurity firms, and a foreign defense attaché based in Washington, DC. Altamides pinpointed the location of Google engineers as they traveled across Northern California, and it tracked Anne Wojcicki, founder of DNA testing startup 23andMe who was then married to Google’s Sergey Brin, more than 1,000 times as she moved across Silicon Valley and San Francisco. (Google declined to comment, while Wojcicki told us she had no knowledge of these efforts to track her.) Award-winning journalist and former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky’s phone was targeted as he investigated the arms industry for Vanity Fair. A phone number that public records link to Hollywood star Jared Leto was targeted a month before he began filming Dallas Buyers Club.

Elsewhere in the world, the First Wap archive shows how the company’s technology was used by repressive regimes, as well as by corporate investigators. It has even been utilized for personally motivated invasions of privacy. The onetime prime minister of Qatar, the ousted first lady of Syria Asma Al-Assad, high-profile international lawyers, music stars, and executives all came into Altamides’ crosshairs.