A private surveillance firm that once demonstrated its capabilities by covertly tracking the movements of CIA and NSA employees has been contracted by the U.S. military to investigate the mysterious cluster of neurological symptoms known as Havana syndrome. Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that Anomaly 6, a Virginia-based data broker, is now embedded within the Pentagon’s official Havana syndrome investigatory apparatus — raising pointed questions about who watches the watchers, and what exactly a commercial phone-tracking company brings to a classified health investigation.

The Contractor With a Controversial Past

Anomaly 6 was founded in 2018 by two former military intelligence officers and operates from Alexandria, Virginia. Its business model is straightforward, if largely invisible to the public: the company purchases bulk cellular location data harvested from millions of smartphone users worldwide, exploiting the routine practice by which common smartphone apps silently collect and sell user location data to advertisers, who then resell it to companies like Anomaly 6. According to a presentation reviewed by The Intercept, the firm claimed the ability to track approximately 3 billion devices in real time — equivalent to roughly one-fifth of the world’s population.

Anomaly 6 has embedded its software development kit inside more than 500 mobile applications, giving it a persistent, passive window into the movements of hundreds of millions of people. Most users of those apps have no awareness of this arrangement. No U.S. law currently prohibits the sale and resale of this location data once it leaves the original app.

The company’s first publicly known government contract came in September 2020, when U.S. Special Operations Command Africa paid Anomaly 6 $589,500 for what procurement records described as a “Commercial Telemetry Feed.” It was a preview of a far larger and more sensitive role to come.

The 2022 Revelation: Spying on Spies

Anomaly 6 drew significant public scrutiny in April 2022, when The Intercept revealed the details of a business pitch the firm had made to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring company. During that closed-door presentation, an Anomaly 6 representative demonstrated the power of the firm’s data by tracking the movements of CIA and NSA employees — using their own smartphones against them — as they commuted between their homes and their agencies’ headquarters.

The pitch proposed a partnership: Zignal’s access to a full stream of Twitter data, combined with Anomaly 6’s location intelligence, would allow clients to identify not just who sent a particular tweet, but where that person was located, who they were near, and where they traveled before and after. The two companies ultimately did not proceed with the partnership, but the demonstration itself had already exposed the extraordinary reach of private-sector surveillance infrastructure.

The same presentation highlighted Anomaly 6’s ability to track Chinese and Russian military personnel abroad — including naval assets — a capability the firm positioned as a national security asset rather than a privacy liability.

Project Yellowfin: Anomaly 6 Inside the Havana Syndrome Investigation

Documents obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request now confirm that Anomaly 6’s technology is being used to assist the “Anomalous Health Incidents Cross-Functional Team,” the Pentagon’s official task force investigating Havana syndrome. The contract, administered through the U.S. Air Force Concepts, Development, and Management Office and described in procurement records as Project Yellowfin, is worth nearly $6 million and is set to run through September.

The Air Force heavily redacted the documents before releasing them, but the fragments that survived provide a window into the scope of Anomaly 6’s role. According to the contract language, the company’s “expertise in location intelligence” will be used to “identify actors and activities of interest.” The contractor is also required to produce “data visualization products capable of being utilized as stand-alone brief materials by decision-makers and senior leaders,” including materials highlighting “geographical distribution, temporal patterns, patterns of life, and interconnectivity of events and actors.”

Neither Anomaly 6 nor the Air Force responded to requests for comment from The Intercept.

What the Intelligence Community Has Already Concluded

The backdrop against which this contract was awarded is significant. The U.S. intelligence community has released assessments concluding that most of its constituent agencies believe it is highly unlikely that Havana syndrome symptoms are the result of deliberate attacks by a foreign adversary. A 2023 National Intelligence Council assessment and a subsequent 2025 update both challenged the narrative that a hostile nation was targeting American personnel with a directed-energy weapon.

The symptoms, which have been reported by U.S. diplomats, intelligence officers, military personnel, and their family members since at least 2016, include severe ear pain, sensations of pressure in the skull, vision disturbances, balance problems, and in some cases lasting neurological effects. The affected individuals — many of whom have described deeply disorienting and physically debilitating experiences — have broadly attributed their suffering to attacks by a foreign government. Russia and China have both been named in various hypotheses.

Despite the intelligence community’s skeptical posture, the investigation has continued. The contract language referencing “actors and activities of interest” suggests that the Anomaly 6 engagement may be aimed at probing a potential foreign nexus — though the Air Force did not confirm whether Anomaly 6 location data has contributed to any intelligence reporting on that question.

The Architecture of Commercial Surveillance, Repurposed

What makes this contract notable is less the investigation itself and more what the choice of contractor reveals about the current state of government surveillance procurement. The Pentagon did not build its own tool for this task. It did not rely solely on classified intelligence assets. Instead, it turned to a commercial firm whose data pipeline runs directly through the smartphones of ordinary people worldwide — people who consented to nothing beyond a terms-of-service agreement buried in a weather app or a mobile game.

Anomaly 6 built its business on the observation that the digital advertising industry performs the hard work of mass surveillance as a byproduct of its core function, and that any entity willing to pay can purchase the results. The Pentagon, it turns out, is willing to pay nearly $6 million for access to that infrastructure in the context of a single health investigation.

The irony embedded in the arrangement is difficult to ignore. A company that proved its value by demonstrating it could track CIA officers without their knowledge — using the phones in their pockets — is now being paid by the U.S. military to bring that same capability to bear on an investigation involving those agencies’ personnel. Whether that capability will yield meaningful answers about Havana syndrome, or whether it will simply add another layer of commercial surveillance to an already opaque inquiry, remains to be seen.

Questions That Remain Unanswered

The Air Force has not explained the basis on which Anomaly 6 was selected for the Project Yellowfin contract, nor has it clarified how that company’s location intelligence tools are suited to investigating a phenomenon the broader intelligence community has largely attributed to non-adversarial causes. The heavily redacted documents leave the operational details of the engagement almost entirely obscured.

What the documents do confirm is that commercial phone-tracking technology — built on data harvested from the public without meaningful consent — has been formally integrated into one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive and contested ongoing investigations. The contractor doing the tracking once pointed that same technology at the spies now being investigated on behalf of the government that employs them.

This article draws on reporting from The Intercept (July 2026) and The Intercept (April 2022).