There have been widespread reports ofmass deportations of Muslim migrants from Russiain the wake of the March 22 terror attack on the Crocus City Hall venue in a Moscow suburbwhich killedat least 140 people and left hundreds more wounded and injured.
This trend is said to be the result of a significant uptick in raids by authorities on apartments and dorm complexes known to house Central Asian migrants, amid concerns that Islamic radicals could carry out more attacks.
President Vladimir Putin has put blame on Islamic extremists for the major attack which involved four gunmen planting explosives and randomly shooting into crowds; however, he and Kremlin officials also believe the men had assistance from Ukraine or possibly US or other foreign intelligence.
The alleged gunmen, who reportedly tried to escape across the Ukrainian border, are all Tajik nationals. A number of other foreigners have also been arrested in the days after the attack. Washington has said ISIS-K was behind it, while condemning Moscow's allegations that the US or Ukraine could have had something to do with it.
The regional pro-opposition outlet Meduza hassaid that in the last week of March, St. Petersburg courts "received 584 cases of administrative offenses in connection with non-compliance with migration legislation."
The report indicated that at least 418 foreigners were then ordered to go to special holding facilities to await expulsion from the country. "Another 48 people must pay a fine and leave the Russian Federation on their own," Meduza wrote.
An organization of human right lawyers who work in Russia, Perviy Otdel, observed in a statement Friday that in the St. Petersburg region, "Temporary detention centers for foreign citizens are packed, surrounded by special vehicles and buses heading to the airport."
The Amsterdam-based Moscow Times linked the surge in deportations to the Crocus City Hall terror attack:
The countries where the migrants were being sent to were not specified, though it is known that labor migrants in Russia mostly hail from poor Central Asian countries.
Bailiffs reportedly refer to St. Petersburg’s mass deportations as “Operation Anti-Migrant,” with raids targeting local hostels and apartments. Similar raids were reported in Moscow and other Russian cities.
Anti-immigrant sentiment surged after four gunmen — who were later identified as Tajik nationals — stormed Crocus City Hall last Friday, killing 144 people and injuring 382 in the shooting and massive fire at the popular concert venue.
The backlash against Russia's sizeable Tajik immigrant community is expected to grow. Recent years have seen over one million unemployed Tajiks enter Russia in search of work.
A separate Moscow Times report has found that "Between 2012 and 2018, over 2,000 Tajik citizens joined terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq, making Tajikistan the third highest sender of foreign fighters to the war on a per capita basis."
The report continues: "Most joined Islamic State, with some taking up key positions, including the group’s War Minister Gulmurod Halimov, who used to serve as head of Tajikistan’s OMON paramilitary police force." This means Russia's monitoring of and crackdown on this migrant community is likely only to grow from this point.
Preventive mental health therapy for children may be doing more harm than good—and there’s research to prove it, author Abigail Shrier suggests in her new book “Bad Therapy.”
“What you might not know is that the stuff that travels under the headline ‘mental health’ is really harmful for kids,” she said at a recent book-signing event hosted by the Lincoln Club at Newport Beach. “I’m telling you that according to the best psychological research available, it’s exactly what you would want to do if you wanted to break kids down.”
In “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up,” which hit The New York Times’ best seller list, Ms. Shrier investigates the mental health industry and its negative impact on children, and concludes that when it comes to preventive therapy—especially for children—more is not always better.
‘Irreversible Damage’
Ms. Shrier’s previous book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” led her to the explore the potential harmful effects too much therapy can have on children.
“Irreversible Damage,” exposed the “social contagion” and phenomena behind the sudden spike in the number of teenage girls identifying as transgender.
“Twenty percent of seventh-grade classes were deciding they were transgender, and the terminus of this journey, as they call it, was a double mastectomy and infertility,” Ms. Shrier said.
She knew from talking to parents of gender dysphoric children that gender ideology was a social contagion that was spreading, and that a worldwide controversy was brewing. But, at the time, she said, liberals thought she was “picking on a tiny minority of kids who weren’t harming anyone,” and conservatives were asking her, ‘Why would you write about that?’”
“Nobody wanted to talk about it,” she said.
“Irreversible Damage” lit a political firestorm with the progressive left and remains a cultural lightning rod. The New York Times condemned the book in a review prompting Target stores to pull it from their shelves and triggering some Amazon employees who threatened to quit their jobs in a failed attempt to get the book banned.
The influential book not only shocked parents but it led them to question the gender ideology they discovered was being pushed in schools across America and sparked the parental rights movement across the nation.
‘Bad Therapy’
Ms. Shrier began her latest book, “Bad Therapy,” with a couple of questions: “Why was the generation that had gotten the most treatment, the most wellness techniques, the most regular emotional regulation techniques, the most anti-bullying classes, the most miserable? And, why do they have no interest in growing up?”
She decided to attend a conference about a multi-tiered system of support devoted to the mental health of children in California.
“I thought I should go and find out what our schools were doing to support the kids I knew were in distress,” she said. “Well, by the end of the three-day conference, I learned that actually every kid is in therapy. They just call it something else. They call it social emotional learning, or anti-bullying classes, and they look a lot like group therapy.”
Ms. Shrier also discovered a whole body of research on the known harms of therapy such as a study of burn victims who left therapy feeling worse than the control group and people who had lost a loved one feeling sadder than those who didn’t go to therapy, she said.
“First responders responding to catastrophe have left therapy feeling worse about themselves and their lives and what they went through than those control groups that didn’t,” she said.
It was then that Ms. Shrier began to realize the symptoms society was seeing in children are “exactly the symptoms you would see in a population that had gotten way, way, way too much therapy,” she said.
Social Emotional Learning
Ms. Shrier went to the schools to find out how social emotional learning, or SEL, is taught to children.
“How do you actually teach SEL? Well, let’s start by sharing a time when you’re happy. Well, that’s boring. Nothing to teach there. Control your joy? Let’s start by all sharing the time when we felt sad, when we felt misunderstood, when we thought we might be bullied,” she said. “Now we’re on a roll. Now we have something for the teachers to teach.”
The problem is that parents are often blamed for the child’s sadness at school because, after all, “Whose job is it to keep kids safe?” she asked.
“So now, we’re criticizing parents,” she said. “It’s completely built into the system. And, I’m not saying that because it’s a conspiracy. I’m just saying, naturally, if you want to teach wellness and emotional regulation, the way to do it is to focus on a time when kids felt sad.”
Ms. Shrier predicts in the book that social emotional learning would lead more children to be sad, anxious, phobic, and alienated from their parents.
When she finished the book in October, Ms. Shrier didn’t know researchers in Australia and England wondered the same thing and were conducting experiments on wellness techniques and anti-bullying, she said.
As it turned out, two new studies showed that “kids ended up being sadder and more anxious, more depressed and more alienated from their parents than the control group,” she said.
Rise of the Expert Class
The rise in the expert class to break down parental authority has been happening for generations, she said.
Society began to regard informal relationships “as hazardous and somewhat sinister,” and instead placed their trust in “experts.”
“So, we didn’t trust grandma as much even though she had raised good kids to adulthood, but to this parenting expert whose oldest child was five, we listened,” she said.
But, while the overtreatment of children who don’t need therapy is causing damage, she said there are still children and adults who do need therapy.
“There are kids who need it. But, if you don’t treat them well, you’re only introducing risk,” she said. “They stand to gain nothing.”
Ms. Shrier stressed that she’s not opposed to therapy or medication.
“If you have a severe phobia and are afraid to leave your house, by all means get the therapy. It will help you leave your house if it’s done right. If you’re so germophobic you can’t shake people’s hands, get the therapy. ... If you have a severely anorexic kid ... get your kid the help they need of course,” she said.
Abigail Shrier discusses her latest best-seller, “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up” at a book-signing event hosted by the Lincoln Club at Newport Beach, Calif., on March 20, 2024. (Brad Jones/ The Epoch Times)
Parents need to know that therapy for a child is “an entirely different experience than therapy with an adult, because an adult can say to a therapist, ‘Listen, I really appreciated that, but I wouldn’t call my mom emotionally abusive,’ or ‘Listen I know you’ve said in the past that’s toxic, but I’m not going to cut off my parents,” Ms. Shrier said.
Society now treats a healthy-minded child who is a little worried or a bit anxious by sending them to therapy, exposing them to risks such as increased anxiety, increased depression, alienation from their parents, and demoralization, the feeling that they are limited by a mental health diagnosis, and in some ways the sadness of all treatment dependency, she said.
Children are left feeling that “they can’t do for themselves,” or make decisions, without consulting an expert or an adult, which hinders them from gaining confidence and growing up, she said.
“We’ve never had an American generation that believes less in its ability to rise to a challenge than this one,” she said.
‘They’ve Been Told a Lie’
Ms. Shrier interviewed a young woman who has received preventive, or prophylactic, therapy since she was 6 years old, when her parents divorced. The woman, called Becca in the book, never stopped going to therapy.
Although Becca, now 17, has never been diagnosed with a mental illness, she continues to see a therapist to discuss her “anxiety,” Ms. Shrier said.
When Ms. Shrier asked what Becca and her therapist were currently working on, she replied that the therapist was helping her prepare to make friends in college.
“This is what we’re seeing in the rising generation. They don’t believe they’re up to the basic challenges of adulthood. They think they need a mental health day off,” she said. “They don’t want to have kids or get married either because they think they’re sick. In some ways, it’s the saddest thing of all, because they’ve been told a lie that they’re all mentally ill; it’s just a question of degrees.”
‘Who Objects to Wellness?’
Policies governing therapy are almost always couched in language that makes them difficult to challenge.
“They are always being sold as something you can’t object to, like wellness,” she said. “Who objects to wellness?”
“That’s how all the conversion therapy bans got passed, she said. These bans were sold as a way to stop the cruel practice of trying to force gay young people to go straight, but then they slipped in gender identity language,” Ms. Shrier said.
So now, therapists who tell a girl she’s a girl and not a boy can be accused of conversion therapy and lose their license, she said.
Therapeutic Culture
Therapeutic culture has worked its way into “everything,” Ms. Shrier said.
And, while anti-bullying classes may sound like a good idea on the surface, how they’re taught and by whom has side-effects, she suggested.
“You know what you need to do to teach kids not to bully? Teach them right from wrong: ‘Don’t pick on someone smaller than you. Don’t join in,’ and ‘I’m going to be really disappointed if you do. That’s not a behavior we expect in this house. It’s wrong.’ That’s how you teach anti-bullying,” she said.
“You know what you don’t do? Go into a class with a school counselor and teach all the kids they’re so fragile that if anyone says anything they don’t like they’re going fall apart, because now you have kids who don’t believe they can survive anything. That’s what they’ve been told over and over.”
The remedy is simple, she said.
“This is the easiest thing in America to fix. We’ve got a lot of problems, but this one is so easy,” she said. “Mom and Dad can fix it tomorrow. It doesn’t even take any money. You just need to assert your authority and tell kids what’s what. That’s it.”
Children are dwelling far too much and too long on their problems, and not learning how to perform errands and tasks that build confidence, she said.
“If a kid takes his problem to a pastor, or grandma, or an aunt, at some point, the aunt or the grandma is going to say, ‘You’re fine. We’ve talked about this enough. Go play!’” she said. “And guess what a therapist won’t say. ‘You’re fine.’ That’s the problem.”
Almost any activity would be better for children than social emotional learning or “talking about our bad feelings” in schools, she said. “Paint the gym, play ball—they could literally do anything—pick up trash on the side of the highway, and it would be better for them than sitting around talking about their pain,” she said.
It’s “not fair” to children who have gone through a traumatic experience to talk about their pain right before a math test, she said.
“You’re not helping them, but you might convince a kid who hasn’t gone through something really hard that actually they were abused, too,” she said.
How Much Therapy is Too Much?
Ms. Shrier told The Epoch Times in an interview that while researching “Irreversible Damage” she realized that at the core of the “social contagion” she exposed were the children’s therapists and school counselors.
“In almost every case, a kid had a therapist or school counselor that encouraged them in the idea that they might be transgender,” she said.
It was “obvious and disturbing” that mental health professionals had left children “worse off or introduced a new problem,” she said.
Since too much therapy can increase anxiety and depression, “it can introduce new symptoms, like the idea that you can have gender dysphoria,” she said.
Ms. Shrier interviewed Arthur Barsky, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and world expert on illness anxiety disorder, somatic symptom disorder, or what used to be called call hypochondriasis—the condition afflicting hypochondriacs.
Mr. Barsky, she said, told her hypochondriasis isn’t about people imagining pain, but rather hyperfocusing on the normal pains we all feel.
“If you make that an organizing principle of your life, the pain will magnify,” she said. “That’s what these kids are doing to their emotional lives.”
Today’s children, many who are leading unhealthy lifestyles, think the solution must be diagnosis, therapy, or medication, but too much therapy has led them to every kind of diagnosis, including gender dysphoria, Ms. Shrier said.
Parents ‘Terrified’
‘Helicopter moms,’ the term for overprotective parents who hover over their children fearing they will be traumatized at school or away from home, have given rise to a new generation of parents who are even more afraid, according to Ms. Shrier.
“They’re frantic,” she said. “It’s much worse than helicoptering. It’s surveillance parenting.”
These parents “are actually tracking their kids with an app on their phones,” and calling teachers demanding their children not be seated next to students who might hurt their feelings, she said.
“They’re calling coaches. They’re calling bosses,” she said.
And they’re convinced they must protect their child from being “called a bad name at elementary school” because if they don’t the trauma will devastate them, she said.
“They can never look away,” she said. “They’re terrified of emotional injury. They’re terrified of bullying.”
‘Surveillance Parenting’
While generations of older Americans, including conservative opinion hosts, have mocked the rising generation, often calling them “snowflakes” who need “safe spaces” and “therapy dogs” so they don’t melt over comments they find offensive, Ms. Shrier says the problem runs much deeper than thin-skinned youth.
“It’s worse than that,” she said. “Kids are not able to deal with normal problems in adult life because they’re genuinely believing themselves sick.”
American society has been immersed in trauma and therapy culture for more than a generation, and its effects are “profound,” she said.
“Now kids don’t say ‘I’m shy,’ they say ‘I have social phobia.’ They don’t say ‘I’m worried,’ they say ‘I have anxiety.’ They don’t say ‘I feel sad,’ they have depression,” she said. “That is proof that they were swimming in the language of psychopathology.”
These parents bought into the notion that preventive therapy was an innocuous intervention, “but it’s not,” she said.
“It’s false. It’s never been true, but they believed that,” Ms. Shrier said. “Where did they get that idea? They’d all been teased, they’d all been neglected, they’d all had their hearts broken, so why did they become convinced in one generation that their children couldn’t survive that?”
The answer: “Because the experts told them.”
This parental generation trusted the mental health experts and believed the “trauma narrative” they were selling, she said. Some became “obsessed” with normal problems children face at school because they grew up to think everybody can use therapy like “a mental tune-up,” even though there is a body of research called iatrogenesis “when a healer introduces a harm.”
Most parents weren’t aware of the negative side effects therapy can cause, especially for children who don’t need it, Ms. Shrier said.
Preventive Mental Health
Some of this therapeutic culture stems from rising divorce rates over the last few decades.
“A lot of us went to therapy as adults and we thought that really helped, and we assumed it would be the same for a kid,” she said. “It’s not.”
Mental health experts—the American School Counseling Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, the American Psychological Association—that had nothing to say as children headed into the second academic year of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the lockdowns were “the most obvious detriment to kids’ mental health,” she said, “now present themselves as the cure.”
These mental health experts behave more like groups that want to enrich themselves than people who are “actually trying” to help the mental health of children, she said.
“Now, if you need therapy, if you have a disorder, if you have a real problem, it’s worth the risk. It’s when you don’t have a problem, that you only stand to face the risk because you don’t stand to benefit,” she said. “So, I’m not against treatment. What I’m against is what they call ‘preventive mental health,’ which has no proven track record of helping anybody. And, by the way, of course it can’t. It’s treating people who don’t have a problem.”
Healthcare companies fell sharply Monday as ebullience about a new class of weight control drugs subsided.
Viking Therapeutics shares (VKTX) gave back some of their recent gains amid skepticism about the biotech firm's attempt to compete with heavyweights such as Novo Nordisk on obesity drugs. Novo Nordisk (NVO) fell, shaving its gains for the year to date to around 25%.
Shares of Eiger BioPharmaceuticals (EIGR) plunged after the drug developer filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy with a deal in hand to sell its Zokinvy drug.
NEARLY 200 MOBILEdevices of people who visitedJeffrey 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’sstatus 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 promptedby aMiami 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. Hereportedly died by suicidea 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.
“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.
Isreali airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria stokes tensions
Pemex said it would halt exports of crude over next few months
Oil held near a five-month high, with heightened geopolitical risks in the Middle East and tighter supply from Mexico helping to buoy prices.
Brent futures climbed toward $88 a barrel after rising by 0.5% on Monday, with West Texas Intermediate around $84. An Israeli airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria killed a top military commander and others, with Tehran saying it would respond decisively. Pemex, Mexico’s state-run oil company, said it plans to halt exports primarily of its Maya crude over the next few months.
Acorda Files for Voluntary Chapter 11 Protection to Facilitate Orderly Sale
Acorda Enters into a Restructuring Support Agreement with over 90% of the Secured Convertible Noteholders
Patient Access to INBRIJA®(levodopa inhalation powder) and AMPYRA® (dalfampridine) to Continue Uninterrupted
Additional information about the bankruptcy cases is available by calling the Company's Restructuring Information Line at (844) 712-1917 within the U.S., or (646) 777-2412 outside the U.S. Information is also available at https://cases.ra.kroll.com/Acorda. Additional information may also be found in our public reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
