Documentaries from other newsrooms. Phone tracking, spyware, data brokers, and police surveillance. Ten minutes to an hour.
Dangerous apps — In the web of data brokers
DW Documentary, with ARTE and Bayerischer Rundfunk. 52 minutes. 2026.
Journalists went through about ten billion location points that ordinary phone apps had sold on. The film follows an Egyptian journalist in exile in Berlin, staff at the EU Commission in Brussels, soldiers in Ukraine who recognize their own positions in the data, and a dealer in Florida who sold the locations of people in Germany and France.
Open in BitChute (True Nature of Reality) · BitChute (StopCensorshipCanada) · Dailymotion · YouTube
The film in the player is DW’s English version, from BitChute. Dailymotion has the ARTE version. The broadcasters have it too:
- English, on DW
- Spanish, on DW: Aplicaciones peligrosas
- German, on ARTE: Gefährliche Apps
- Spanish, on ARTE: Nuestras apps nos espían
- French, on ARTE: Espionnés par nos apps
- English, on ARTE
ARTE won’t play this outside Europe. DW also posted it in Arabic, Hindi, and Indonesian.
How Your Phone Can Be Weaponized Against You
Amnesty International. 10 minutes. 2022.
Amnesty’s Security Lab started from a Pegasus attack on one of its own staff in 2018, then checked the iPhones of journalists and activists. Of 67 phones examined by July 2021, 37 showed traces of Pegasus. The leaked list held at least 180 journalists in 20 countries, including relatives of Jamal Khashoggi. The lab published the checks as the Mobile Verification Toolkit.
Open in YouTube
FRONTLINE’s long version of the same story: Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus (about 54 minutes, two parts).
This Secret Tech Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You
Mother Jones, with Lighthouse Reports. 16 minutes. 2025.
A company called First Wap sold a tool named Altamides. It asks the mobile network where a phone number is. The handset does not have to be infected. A leaked log holds about 1.5 million of those queries. One row is the Italian Vatican reporter Gianluigi Nuzzi, tracked in May 2012, days before his book on corruption.
Open in Odysee · BitChute · YouTube
The film in the player is a copy on Odysee.
The investigation, at Lighthouse Reports. German cut, 24 minutes, on ZDF frontal.
We Tracked the Secret Police Microphones Hidden Everywhere
WIRED. 8 minutes. 2024.
A leaked SoundThinking file lists 25,580 ShotSpotter sensors across 84 metro areas. In the neighborhoods those sensors cover, about 70 percent of residents are Black or Latino. A study cited in the film found that 89 percent of Chicago alerts over two years came with no evidence of a gun crime.
Open in YouTube · Dailymotion
Facial Recognition: Tech Firms and Surveillance
ARTE, in the series Data Sources. 24 minutes. 2025.
Police at Almaty airport stopped a political opponent after a face match scored at 94.3 percent. The system tags people “category: activist.” Frame by frame, the film reads the software in Kazakh police control rooms, including IBM, BriefCam, Hikvision, and Dahua.
Open in YouTube
Same film: German, Spanish, on ARTE (won’t play outside Europe).
How China’s Surveillance Is Growing More Invasive
The New York Times Visual Investigations. 14 minutes. 2022.
Reporters read more than 100,000 government bidding documents. One system in Fujian was built to hold about 2.5 billion face images at a time. A county in Guangdong asked for gear that could spot a phone running a Uyghur–Chinese dictionary.
Open in YouTube