Executive Summary

Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance’s (UTS)* exploitation by security services and non-state actors for counterintelligence purposes is driving a need for next generation tradecraft to ensure operational security for intelligence and law enforcement officers. Corporate interests, low barriers to entry, historical patterns of technology’s advance, and the rise of AI make it almost certain that the coverage and capabilities of UTS will only expand in the near term, presenting a growing, extant threat to security-related operations worldwide.

*UTS tracks the digital footprint left behind from online, electronic, visual-physical (CCTV), financial and travel activity, which presents an invisible threat to agents in maintaining cover, conducting clandestine acts, carrying out law enforcement investigations. Reconstructing past events is no longer just a feature of security services, as seen in the investigation of the Mossad assasination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in 2010, but a possibility for global non-state actors. As one example of the magnitude of the problem, the June 2025 FBI report on UTS unveiled that it has been exploited by the Sinaloa cartel since 2018 for tracking personal meetings and was used to identify and execute a confidential federal informant.