With the use of widely accessible cell-phone monitoring technology, the Heritage Foundation—the same organization that spearheaded Project 2025—has started looking into some odd activities involving Trump’s potential assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. The program is managed by the Oversight Project section.
Investigative journalist and Blaze Media correspondent Steve Baker says, “This is not just law enforcement or agencies that do this… When you go into a shoe store in Nashville, they will track you, and then you start getting these ads.” He also notes that this type of technology is known as “ad-ID.”
All of our cell phones, according to Baker, “have the equivalent of a social security number on them, so once they ID that phone, they can track that phone wherever it goes.”
According to federal authorities’ accounts, Crooks had no discernible reason for his conduct; therefore, tracking him may be useful in learning more about him, even if many people find tracking irritating.
Sadly, we can’t rely on such reports to be accurate, which is perhaps why the Heritage Foundation has become more vigilant.
According to Baker, “This summarizes what [the Oversight Project] has found via their own tracking.”
“At the shooter’s residence, they were able to ping and identify around nine different phones.” Then, “They were able to determine which of those phones were traveling to the elderly home where he works.”
After locating “the correct ID,” the group was able to follow Crooks everywhere he went.
“They found that this kid was essentially conducting reconnaissance at [the rally location in Butler, Pennsylvania] on July 4th and July 8th,” according to Baker. He subsequently “turned his phone off after the 12th or so, or at least shut down all of the applications on his phone, so he couldn’t be monitored on the day itself.”
However, it improves much further.
After going through every phone that had been to Crooks’ house and the assisted living facility where he worked, “they discovered a phone that had actually rung seven or eight times in D.C. at a building known as Gallery Place, which has a very large amount of FBI offices and where meetings take place on a regular basis.”
Baker acknowledges that there are “many, many, perfectly legitimate reasons why someone might be at that building in Washington, D.C., but it is quite strange.”
Matthew Peterson, editor-in-chief of Blaze Media, queries, “Do they feel as though they’ve mined everything connected to the comings and goings using cell phone data?”