Interview with an architect of JSOC's adtech program, 'VISR'

Just over eight months ago, I published a video interview with the journalist Byron Tau to discuss his newly released book on the post-9/11 relationship between data brokers and U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, “Means of Control.” One of the central characters in the book was

Michael Yeagley

, who received international attention after the book reported that the cellphone location data he gathered from advertising exchanges for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had at one point been able to track Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage.

The program, originally known as “Locomotive,” for “location” plus “motive,” later transitioned to a more traditional Pentagon-jargon backronym of “VISR,” for “Virtual Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.” The program was also said to have led to Yeagley tracking a group of soldiers from the bedroom community of a “Special Mission Unit” outside of Fort Liberty in North Carolina to a covert U.S. facility on Syria’s northern border with Turkey hidden within a Lafarge cement factory. (Incidentally, Lafarge plead guilty to providing material support to ISIS through a revenue-sharing agreement in Syria in late 2022, agreeing to pay a $778 million fine.)

Mike was kind enough to sit down with me earlier today for a wide-ranging interview, on not only the history of VISR, but also how he sees the adtech location-tracking industry evolving from so-called “third-party” collection through opaque software-development kits installed in dubious apps towards “first-party” collection directly by major brands.

Other than cutting out a section of the recording roughly 72 minutes in where the connection dropped, I am publishing the unedited interview. Roughly the last 20 seconds of closing pleasantries appears to have also been lost — mea culpa.

You can also find Yeagley at

Michael’s Substack

, where he has promised to soon publish an article on both the Section 702 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the implications of the Carpenter v. U.S. Supreme Court decision on the legality of the U.S. government monitoring cellphone locations through third-party data.