(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Tech publication Wired published an extraordinary article Thursday about mobile devices that visited multimillionaire financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious Caribbean island, Little St. James.
According to Wired, the mobile device data was collected by Near Intelligence, a location data broker that does business with the U.S. military and a variety of other clients. Wired reported that the data can be found by a simple Google search.
“The coordinates that Near Intelligence collected and left exposed online pinpoint locations to within a few centimeters of space … 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,” Wired reported.
Wired said it reviewed 11,279 coordinates, pointing to 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,” Wired reported.
“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 publication added.
“The recorded surveillance concludes on July 6, 2019—the day of Epstein’s final arrest.”
The article did not identify any of the owners of the devices that were tracked to Epstein’s island.
The Justice Department reportedly declined to comment on the matter, including about whether it did business with Near Intelligence.
In an email to WIRED, Kathleen Wailes, speaking on behalf of Near Intelligence—which has rebranded as Azira—acknowledged that the firm deliberately collected the data on Epstein’s island for its own purposes. Wailes declined multiple invitations to discuss how the data was collected, Wired reported.
Epstein and his longtime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell were accused of flying underage girls by private jet to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands for sexual exploitation. There, it’s widely thought that they used the underage girls to entice and blackmail a variety of politicians, businessmen and other powerbrokers.
Epstein faced criminal charges in Florida in 2006 but was able to get a more lenient plea deal that saved him from a long prison sentence. He was sentenced to 18 months but served more than a year in a Florida state prison.
In 2019, Epstein died while awaiting trial in New York after prosecutors concluded they were not bound to the terms of Epstein’s 2006 deal.
Authorities said he committee suicide by hanging himself in his jail cell, but that ruling has been widely scrutinized because of the circumstances related to his death and the potential number of high-profile co-conspirators he could have implicated.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
