Last year, Wired Magazine ran an article about a company called Near Intelligence, Inc. and Little St. James Island aka Epstein Island. What Wired discovered was that Near Intelligence had tracked over 200 cell phones of visitors to Epstein’s Island between 2016 and 2019. Near Intelligence had also tracked the movements of these cell phones and their owners to and from the island.
Near Intelligence had mapped who went to Epstein’s Island, when, and how. Wired’s report was extremely detailed and is worth reviewing. What it did not ask, however, were the critical questions.
Who hired Near Intelligence, a commercial, profit-making company, and why?
Near Intelligence was in the business of selling its services to clients. It did not decide to dedicate the resources required for this project for the heck of it. Who paid them to do that?
The obvious answer is the FBI, or some other USG entity. The timeframe in question corresponds to when we know the federal government decided to move ahead with the criminal prosecution of Epstein. He had earlier been convicted by the State of Florida for solicitation of prostitution and served time in jail, but all observers characterized his punishment as a slap on the wrist. The determination had been made to pursue federal charges against Epstein, who had not “learned his lesson” and was continuing to offend.
Near Intelligence is known to have done work for the federal government in the past. In particular, it had worked with elements of the Defense Department and may have done prior work with federal law enforcement as well. It was not an unknown quantity as far as the federal government was concerned, and this kind of data acquisition and compilation was right up its alley.
That makes sense. Leaving aside the sloppiness displayed by Near Intelligence in leaving their data unsecured online, the fact that the feds were acquiring information on who was going to and coming from Epstein Island seems reasonable. It does raise some questions, however.
Effectively geofencing an entire island and then tracking the comings and goings of hundreds of individuals is a big project. It should be noted that Near Intelligence monitored these phones not only in the sense of seeing they moved on and off the island and how they got there, but also what patterns they displayed afterward. Based on this data, Near Intelligence was able to identify at which locations the phones’ owners “bedded down”, where they lived, and where they went to work. Near Intelligence, on behalf of whoever hired them, identified who carried the phones and established their pattern of life.
That’s a pretty dramatic undertaking for an investigation that we are now told was focused on one man, Jeffrey Epstein. If I am making a case against Epstein for sexual offenses involving minors, even if some of those offenses occurred on the island, I don’t really need to know the identities of every single person who ever visited Epstein there. That’s more than a little bit of overkill.
In short, the fact that Near Intelligence was hired to provide that massive amount of information suggests strongly that somebody was thinking a lot bigger than just charging Epstein. They were looking at every individual who came on and off that island. The investigation was not just about one guy.
The existence of this data also highlights dramatically how much we do not know about Epstein, the visitors to his island, and what really happened there. No one from the federal government has ever even acknowledged that Near Intelligence was hired to track people coming and going from Epstein Island, much less explained why. None of the information obtained by Wired Magazine has even been hinted at by federal authorities.
This throws into stark relief the contrast between what we know and what we do not know.
…
You can read the headers. You can glean some minor details. All of the substance has been redacted on virtually every page. The documents have not been released in any meaningful fashion. You know no more when you are done “reading’ than you did when you started.
All of this is troubling enough. If it was not the FBI that hired Near Intelligence, Inc., it all gets a lot worse. That would mean somebody else, somebody with resources and cash, was identifying all of the visitors to Epstein’s Island for some other, potentially more nefarious purpose.
In any event, we are left with the same question. Who wanted to track every visitor to Epstein Island and why? We deserve answers to those questions.
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Illegal immigrant arrested for crime spree, attempted carjacking after San Francisco judge grants him protection from ICE
An illegal immigrant in California who was temporarily shielded from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by a federal judge was arrested just weeks later for a violent string of alleged crimes, including an attempted carjacking of a vehicle with a 3-year-old child inside.
Guillermo Medina Reyes, a tattoo artist who has been living in the United States illegally since he was six years old, was granted a temporary restraining order by a judge in California’s South Bay barring ICE agents from taking him into custody earlier in July. The decision came as dozens of protesters rallied outside the courthouse in solidarity. Reyes had previously spent time in prison for attempted murder, as well as a year-and-a-half in ICE detention in 2021, according to The Berkeley Scanner and NBC Bay Area.
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