We Spied On Trumps ‘Southern White House From Our Couches
Spying on the president is hard work. One of the great unsung heroes of American history is Mary Bowser, a former slave who infiltrated Jefferson Davis' family as a housemaid and eventually found full-time work as a spy in the Southern White House, the political headquarters of the Confederacy. . Armed with a photographic memory and a thorough message about the workings of the Davis government, he provided daily details to the Union Army, what Ulysses S. Grant called "the most valuable information" he obtained during the Southern War. . .
Now it's very easy. While researching our new book , The Secret Life of Data , we gathered insider information from Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's Palm Beach club, which he used as a political base of operations during and after his presidency. On several occasions he even referred to it as "the White House of the South".
We should not risk life or limb by posing as helpers and smuggling information through funded spy networks. All we have to do is register for the online service, enter the Mar-a-Lagoon address and press the button. We have reports detailing thousands of visitors to the Trump Club in a matter of minutes. Your visit. And when they got there, they spent time on the property.
These are not dark web hackers. No Bitcoins are traded. The service we use is completely legal and available for free on the web, and is one of dozens of "data brokers" that collect and exchange consumer data. The business is worth $300 billion a year, roughly equivalent to Hong Kong's gross domestic product. Called Proximity, this specialized data broker uses smartphone location data to track the foot traffic of nearly 1.6 billion people in 70 million locations in 44 countries.
He was completely unprepared to spy on a current or former US president. Their typical client is a retail company that uses location data to track where physical store visitors come from and market to them more effectively. However, on the other hand, it is not designed to prevent spying on the president. Once data is collected and analyzed, it is not known who is using it or for what purpose; He has his own secret life. And this can be very dangerous for individual privacy and, on a larger scale, for democracy itself. This is the main point of our book and why we wanted to see what we could do with the latest data.
That's right, so we decided to spy on ourselves first. Between December 2020 and December 2021, we were shown day and night locations associated with one of our home visitors, including a teaching assistant, some of our children's friends, and perhaps the food service staff, the mailman, and the exterminator. It shows traffic signals when we have a big outdoor party. It found that the most common age of visitors was under 18 (very true, as we have two school age children), 50% of our visitors were white, and the median household income of our visitors was $96,487 (from less than $20,000 to about $20,000) . ). local average).
So let's set our sights on Mar-a-Lago. Although local traffic numbered about 100 people, mostly within a 10-mile radius, Trump's visitors numbered in the thousands from around the world that same year. By examining the tabs labeled “General Night Areas” and “General Day Areas,” we can identify visitors' homes and workplaces marked as dots on buildings on the map. Is she Mary Bowser level? Of course not. Can you provide some useful information about Trump and his club? insecurity.
Most visitors to Mar-a-Lago spend their days and nights in the United States east of the Mississippi. But special circumstances, distant travelers, made them stand out on the world map. While the data is technically “anonymous” (we can't see visitors' age, income, or ethnicity, let alone their names), it makes it easy to guess where they spend their days and nights. .
For example, one of the points on the map is a private residence on a medium-sized pond in southwest Nigeria. This is unlikely for Mar-a-Lago visitors, especially since Trump called African countries “brutal countries” and accused Nigerians of “living in shacks.” Who spends his days in a small walled house on the corner of Fabusui St. Acre and fly to Mar-a-Lago?
A few minutes of Googling yielded an excellent answer: Abraham O. Adeyemi, of Fellowship Baptist Church, Akure, about 20 minutes from the private residence where visitors share Mar-a-Lago. There are two pieces of evidence that suggest Adeyemi was a visitor to Trump. First, among anti-abortion, anti-mask, and anti-vaccine reminders, Adeyemi's Instagram profile features a photo of himself standing on a green lawn in front of a white roof. Property. On a business mapping platform. Second, and more convincingly, Adeyemi tweeted a video of Trump's campaign in Nigeria in October 2020, which Trump retweeted on Election Day on Facebook with the comment, “Dear rally for me in Nigeria!” Comment.
As far as we know, there is no public record of Adeyemi ever visiting Mar-a-Lago. On the other hand, there is nothing special about it. If Trump wants to invite his die-hard fans onto his private property, he has every right to do so. Similarly, we digitally tracked a visitor to the offices of a petrochemical company called Agro Allied Agency at a business address on the outskirts of Moscow, and another at a residential and business complex in the port city of Kherson. Southern Ukraine, where the fiercest fighting took place during the war. (Representatives for Adeyemi and Trump did not respond to Rolling Stone's request for comment.)
We weren't the only ones watching. Many others are interested not only in legitimate actors such as journalists and prosecutors, but also dangerous actors such as extortionists and foreign intelligence agencies. This puts brokers like Near at a disadvantage in a data-rich world.
And Trump isn't the only one at risk. Every day of our lives, each of us sifts through vast amounts of information as we go about our normal activities. According to Dennis Crowley, founder of location technology platform Foursquare, many of the apps on our devices are data collectors disguised as little digital Trojan horses.
“Many poker and solitaire games, flashlight apps, and Tamagotchis are designed simply to collect location data and sell it to third-party intermediaries,” Crowley said. And that data will never be lost. Even though most of these hard drives have no practical value today, middlemen keep them, because hard drives are cheap and no one knows what they might be useful for in the future; For example, if a private real estate developer were suddenly elected to national office.
We can spy on the president from the comfort of our couch just by playing the free version of the Single Data Broker web app. Now imagine what a 24/7 forensics team could do to the paid access services of every commercial data broker and other data sources, from high-tech to traditional surveillance. . This is one of those cases where reality is worse than the stories told in dystopian science fiction and superhero films.
So if we want to get out of this mess, while preserving individual privacy and practical democracy, we all have to start thinking about technology like we think about supervillains. As Congress drafts new laws, big tech companies bring new devices to market, and businesses and consumers invite new apps and devices into their homes and workplaces, simply adopting technology is not enough. . Data brokers are never just trading services and poker apps are never just games. They are the foundation of our society and can be used to destroy it.
So from now on, every conversation about the future of technology should start by asking what is the worst that could happen. Because we guarantee it will happen.
Aram Sinrich and Jesse Gilbert are the authors of The Secret Life of Information , to be published by MIT Press in April 2024 .
