Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker

 NEARLY 200 MOBILE devices of people who visited Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious “pedophile island” in the years prior to his death left an invisible trail of data pointing back to their own homes and offices. Maps of these visitations generated by a troubled international data broker with defense industry ties, discovered last week by WIRED, document the numerous trips of wealthy and influential individuals seemingly undeterred by Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender.

The data amassed by Near Intelligence, a location data broker roiled by allegations of mismanagement and fraud, reveals with high precision the residences of many guests of Little Saint James, a United States Virgin Islands property where Epstein is accused of having groomed, assaulted, and trafficked countless women and girls.

Some girls, prosecutors say, were as young as 14. The former attorney general of the US Virgin Islands alleged that girls as young as 12 were trafficked to Epstein by those within his elite social circle.

The coordinates that Near Intelligence collected and left exposed online pinpoint locations to within a few centimeters of space. Visitors were tracked as they moved from the Ritz-Carlton on neighboring St. Thomas Island, for instance, to a specific dock at the American Yacht Harbor—a marina once co-owned by Epstein that hosts an “impressive array” of pleasure boats and mega-yachts. The data pinpointed their movements as they were transported to Epstein’s dock on Little St. James, revealing the exact routes taken to the island.

The tracking continued after they arrived. From inside Epstein's enigmatic waterfront temple to the pristine beaches, pools, and cabanas scattered across his 71-acres of prime archipelagic real estate, the data compiled by Near captures the movements of scores of people who sojourned at Little St. James as early as July 2016. The recorded surveillance concludes on July 6, 2019—the day of Epstein’s final arrest.

Eleven years earlier, the disgraced financier was sentenced to 18 months in jail after a guilty plea in 2008 for soliciting and procuring a minor engaged in prostitution, securing a secret “sweetheart” deal to avoid any federal charges. Renewed interest in the case, notably prompted by a Miami Herald investigation, spawned new charges against Epstein, who was apprehended at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport in July 2019. A raid of Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse by federal agents yielded a cache of child sexual abuse material, nearly 50 individually cut diamonds, and a fraudulent Saudia Arabian passport, which had expired. He reportedly died by suicide a month later while incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal detention facility that closed shortly after Epstein’s death.

Ghislaine Maxwell, former British socialite and an Epstein accomplice, was convicted in 2021 on five counts including sexual trafficking of children by force. Maxwell was arrested in New Hampshire, tracked to a million-dollar home by federal agents using location data pulled from her cell phone.

Little is known publicly about Epstein’s activities in the decade prior to his 2019 arrest. The majority of women who came forward that year to accuse the convicted pedophile in court say they were assaulted in the ’90s and early 2000s.

Now, however, 11,279 coordinates obtained by WIRED show not only a flood of traffic to Epstein’s island property—nearly a decade after his conviction as a sex offender—but also point to as many as 166 locations throughout the US where Near Intelligence infers that visitors to Little St. James likely lived and worked. The cache also points to cities in Ukraine, the Cayman Islands, and Australia, among others.

Near Intelligence, for example, tracked devices visiting Little St. James from locations in 80 cities crisscrossing 26 US states and territories, with Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, and New York topping the list. The coordinates point to mansions in gated communities in Michigan and Florida; homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts; a nightclub in Miami; and the sidewalk across the street from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

The coordinates also point to various Epstein properties beyond Little St. James, including his 8,000-acre New Mexico ranch and a waterfront mansion on El Brillo Way in Palm Beach, where prosecutors said in an indictment that Epstein trafficked numerous “minor girls” for the purposes of molesting and abusing them. Near’s data is notably missing any locations in Europe, where citizens are safeguarded by comprehensive privacy laws.

Near Intelligence’s maps of Epstein’s island reveal in stark detail the precision surveillance that data brokers can achieve with the aid of loose privacy restrictions under US law. The firm, which has roots in Singapore and Bengaluru, India, sources its location data from advertising exchanges—companies that quietly interact with billions of devices as users browse the web and move about the world.

Before a targeted advertisement appears on an app or website, phones and other devices send information about their owners to real-time bidding platforms and ad exchanges, frequently including users’ location data. While advertisers can use this data to inform their bidding decisions, companies like Near Intelligence will siphon, repackage, analyze, and sell it.

Several ad exchanges, according to The Wall Street Journal, have reportedly terminated arrangements with Near, claiming that its use of their data violated the exchanges’ terms of service.

Officially, this data is intended to be used by companies hoping to determine where potential customers work and reside. But in October 2023, the Journal revealed that Near had once provided data to the US military via a maze of obscure marketing companies, cutouts, and conduits to defense contractors. Bankruptcy records reviewed by WIRED show that in April 2023, Near Intelligence signed a yearlong contract with another firm called nContext, a subsidiary of the defense contractor Sierra Nevada.

nContext secured six federal contracts to provide data in support of the National Security Agency and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, according to reporting by Byron Tau, author of Means of Control, an exposé of the data-broker industry and its ties to the US surveillance state. According to information released during a $100 million funding round in 2019, Near claims to have information on roughly 1.6 billion people in 44 countries.

“The pervasive surveillance machine that has been developed for digital advertising now enables other uses completely unrelated to marketing, including government mass surveillance,” says Wolfie Christl, a Vienna-based researcher at Cracked Labs who investigates the data industry.

The data on Epstein’s guests was produced using an intelligence platform formerly known as Vista, which has now been folded into a product called Pinnacle. WIRED discovered several so-called Vista reports while examining Pinnacle’s publicly accessible code. While the specific URLs for the reports are difficult to find, Google’s web crawlers were able to locate at least two other publicly accessible Vista reports: one geofencing the Westfield Mall of the Netherlands and another targeting Saipan-Ledo Park in El Paso, Texas.

The Little St. James report features five maps, one of which reveals locations of devices observed on the island over more than three years prior to Epstein’s arrest. Two of the maps indicate the inferred “Common Evening Locations” and “Common Daytime Locations” for each device that had visited the island. According to the Vista report, these metrics are meant to show visitors’ “most frequented location on weekdays” as well as weeknights and weekends.

A fourth map shows the “general geographic areas from which a location generates the majority of its visits.” The fifth details visitors’ locations 30 minutes before and after they arrived on Epstein’s island, producing a trail of signals that show phones and other devices carried over by helicopter and boat from the main island.

WIRED extracted the location data from the charts and maps to conduct its analysis, which is ongoing. For this story, we reproduced some of the maps created by Near, while excluding any precise location data that could be used to identify properties or individuals, to protect the privacy of anyone uninvolved in Epstein’s crimes.

CRIPPLED BY DEBT, Near Intelligence filed for bankruptcy protection in December, reporting liabilities of approximately $100 million, less than a year after being listed by Nasdaq. An independent investigation commissioned by the company's board alleged multiple executives engaged in a years-long “concealed scheme” to cheat the company out of tens of millions of dollars. (One of those former executives has filed a claim against the company alleging defamation.)

Near Intelligence has since quietly resumed operations, under the same leadership that initiated the bankruptcy proceedings, rebranding itself as a newly incorporated entity called Azira.

US senator Ron Wyden in early February urged federal regulators to launch investigations into Near Intelligence, citing reporting by The Wall Street Journal that found its platform had been used by a third party to geofence “sensitive locations,” including roughly 600 reproductive health clinics at the behest of a conservative group that waged a multiyear antiabortion campaign. US regulators have begun to designate certain types of locations “sensitive,” including health clinics, domestic abuse shelters, and places of religious worship, in an attempt to shield Americans from predatory data brokers amid the US Congress’s years-long failure to pass a comprehensive privacy law.

In an email to WIRED, Kathleen Wailes, speaking on behalf of Azira, acknowledged that Near Intelligence had deliberately collected the data on Epstein’s island for its own purposes. Wailes declined multiple invitations to discuss how the data was collected, which prospective client may have created the report of Epstein’s island, and what purpose it served.

IMAGE: WIRED/FLOURISH

“Azira is committed to data privacy and responsible access to and use of location data,” Wailes said. “To this end, Azira works to track and respond to legal developments under emerging new state laws, FTC guidance and prior enforcement examples, and best practices. Azira is developing procedures to protect consumers' sensitive location data. This includes working to disable all sample offering accounts created by Near.”

Although the discovery of the Epstein island data involved many additional steps, WIRED also found it could be easily retrieved with a simple Google search.

A Department of Justice spokesperson for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where Epstein was prosecuted in 2019, declined to comment on whether its investigators ever did business with Near.

While many of the coordinates captured by Near point to multimillion-dollar homes in numerous US states, others point to lower-income areas where Epstein victims are known to have lived and attended school, including areas of West Palm Beach, Florida, where police and a private investigator say they located around 40 of Epstein’s victims.

"Most of the clients who come to me, their number one concern is privacy and safety,” says attorney Lisa Bloom, who represented 11 of Epstein's alleged victims. “It's deeply concerning to think that any sexual abuse victims’ location will be tracked and then stored and then sold to someone, who can presumably do whatever they want with it.”

Legislation introduced during multiple sessions of Congress have aimed to restrict the sale of location data, chiefly to prevent US law enforcement and intelligence agencies from tracking Americans without a warrant. So far, those efforts have failed. Separately, US president Joe Biden issued an executive order in February instructing the Justice Department to establish new rules preventing US companies from selling data to rival nations, which might include Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea. This order is unlikely to impact Azira’s business in the United States.

“The fact that they have this data in the first place and are allowing people to share it is certainly disturbing,” says Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit. “I just don’t know how many more of these stories we need to have in order to get strong privacy regulations.”

Updated 3/29/2024, 10:03 pm ET: In an email following publication, Kathleen Wailes, Azira's third-party spokesperson, says that WIRED's description of the Epstein island data as "deliberately collected" was "incorrect and misleading." Instead, she says, "[t]he data referenced in the story was compiled by someone using a free trial, not an employee of Near. The parameters of that report were determined by the user and not Near Intelligence."

Wailes further says that Azira, as a new company, "is not accountable for the actions and business practices of Near Intelligence referenced in the article."

"While some parties have used geolocation data in the past for purposes that are inappropriate, Azira’s management team is committed to doing everything possible to protect consumer data, adhere to known laws and regulations, and safeguard the proper use of consumers’ data," Wailes says. "Our policies are clearly stated on our website."

Also following publication, Azira temporarily made the Epstein island data public after having removed it prior to WIRED's publication. The data was again removed after WIRED alerted the company to the public availability of the report.

https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-data-broker-leak/