In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.

The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.

What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.

The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry.

This week on Reveal, we join 13 other news outlets to expose the secrets of a global surveillance empire.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2025.

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Earlier this year, Daniel Holz from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its experts were moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight. The hands have been moved only 27 times since the clock’s creation in 1947, and they’re now the closest they’ve pointed to imminent global destruction. On this week’s More To The Story, in an update of an episode that first aired in July 2025, Holz sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the history of the Doomsday Clock, why we’re closer to destruction than ever before, and what we can do to reverse course.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: Weapons With Minds of Their Own (Reveal)

Learn more: NUKEMAP

Read: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Read: Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Is So Essential to Its Identity (The Guardian via Mother Jones)

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Alessandro Chesser is a 40-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He’s married with two kids and was the first in his family to attend college. His grandfather immigrated from Sicily and worked as a school janitor so his family could have a better life.

Skip forward a few generations, and Chesser is noticing the way wealthy investors hide their money to avoid paying taxes. He’s outraged and wants to upend the tax system, which he thinks is unfair to the everyday American worker. In Chesser’s mind, the realistic solution isn’t to reform the tax code, but to make it easier for average Americans to access one of the best-kept secrets of the superrich: trusts.

Trusts have become big business in the US. They are now an industry worth trillions of dollars. But no one knows the exact number, because the trust industry is extraordinarily private. Trusts can last forever (literally), but there is no public registry for them. In fact, they are one of the main reasons why watchdog groups consider America to be the most secretive financial jurisdiction in the world.

This week on Reveal, journalists Sally Herships and Leah McGrath Goodman investigate America’s shadowland of trusts. As the nation’s wealth gap keeps growing—and Americans brace for Tax Day—we uncover what’s at stake as US states race to become the most trust-friendly jurisdictions in the world.

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