Joseph Cox
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
So why not, Afgu's lawyer tells the authorities, would you want to use Anom in your investigations in exchange for, you know, leniency if Afgu ever faces charges, right? It became the ultimate bargaining chip, essentially.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, and this is very quickly done in the book. And that's not because I'm sort of glazing over it. It's because it just happened really, really quickly. And that's just a series of events that happened. Now, I don't know whether that was always the plan or something like that, or was it maybe always in the back of Afgu's mind? I don't know that. But very, very quickly...
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Anom was put on the table to the FBI back in around 2018, I think is when these conversations were happening.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yes, and the Australian Federal Police, who for years, they've been really stymied by encrypted phones, like probably even more than the FBI. In Australia, these sorts of phones are incredibly common among organized crime groups. You know, you'll have the Italian Mafia over there in Australia, them using it. You'll also have the biker gangs like the Comicheros and the Hells Angels. They all use...
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
these sorts of phones. And for years, if not more than a decade at this point, the AFP in particular has been running into these phones again and again and again. So the idea of a backdoor in an encrypted phone is incredibly attractive to them.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
I mean, what I've been told is that when the AFP agents were told about this possibility and the plan to go ahead, they looked like they were kids on Christmas morning.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
So it starts when Afgoo, the creator of Anom, offers the phones to a particular phone seller slash drug trafficker in Australia. His name is Domenico Catanzarati. And he used to sell Phantom Secure phones, one of those earlier companies. And when that company was shut down, He obviously doesn't really have any phones to sell.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Well, lo and behold, here comes AFKU with what looks like it's going to be the hottest new phone on the market. So he provides some of those phones to Catanzarati and just starts using them and just starts talking about them and spreading them around. I think initially the phones were actually just given... for free to Catanzarate.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
It's almost like a sort of Uber technique, Silicon Valley growth technique. I don't know, just get it out there for free. And we'll figure out the laws, we'll figure out the market later. But we just want to get devices into people's hands, basically.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
At least for the Australians, the AFP, it was relatively real-time, instantaneous. You know, they could see that, oh, the Comacheros are talking about beating up this guy. Oh, this biker gang is talking about... doing a weapons drop off of like high caliber assault rifles at this time in this location. It was really like peeling back the curtain on these conversations.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
At the start, the AFP, as far as I know, was simply collecting the intelligence. There is this massive trade-off constantly throughout this entire story, which is that, okay, you have a backdoor into a phone, but how do you act on that? Do you act on it? And when do you act on that information?
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Because if you go too loud too quickly, it's going to become obvious to the criminals that something bad is going on, at least for them.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah. It got to the point where the people I've spoken to, the law enforcement officials around the world, they had to do stuff like basically lie. They had to make up a story where it's like, okay, we are finally going to strike on this drug lab or this drug warehouse or whatever, because it's so large and we have to act, but we're going to write the intelligence in such a way that
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
It looks like it's coming from an informant or a source. There's going to be no mention of a NOM, no mention of a backdoor. And from a law enforcement perspective, that's great. Okay, we managed to get the drugs and arrest the people or whatever while without revealing... you know, the secret about a norm. On the flip side, there is a justice issue there.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
You know, that's basically parallel construction. It's very complicated. It gets very nuanced. But I do think that civil libertarians would be a little bit aghast at sort of the trade-offs that were being made on a daily basis.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Like licensing Anom and stuff. So the deal itself is between AFGU and the US authorities and got paid something like $120,000 and then $60,000 for travel expenses, I think is how it's phrased in some of the documents. But Anom basically became an FBI tech company. From what I've been told from people with direct involvement, you know, the FBI was picking up the bill.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
They were paying for infrastructure. They were paying for hardware, Android hardware for the phones, for the app to be flashed on. They were running a tech company. And I think that's just the craziest thing here. And beyond that, they were running a tech company for criminals.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
So yeah, I've spoken to people who actually coded the app and basically made the phone. And these were completely ordinary developers. One I spoke to, who I call, has hit in the book. I used a different name just to protect their identity. But they found a freelancing gig online about the secure communications app.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
They get involved and they're doing normal coding like they've done a million times before for an Android app. And what they're told is that... We make this app and we sell it to businesses. We sell it to corporations to protect their communications.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And as part of that, companies like to be able to audit their messages, you know, and that's very common in banking, very common in finance, all of that sort of thing for legal reasons.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, I mean, Customs and Border Protection, part of DHS, they use Wicker, the encrypted app that many people will be familiar with. But they use an enterprise or government version, which, yes, it's encrypted, but it has that extra archiving function. And the... Developers of Anom, that's what they thought they were building.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
They thought they were building a communications platform for businesses to, yes, talk somewhat securely, but have the messages archived. So then, for whatever reason, the administrator can go through them at a later date. That's what they thought they were doing. What they weren't told was that the phones are being sold to criminals and the archiving feature is actually for the FBI.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
AFGU left that bit out when telling the developers about that. And I mean, just very briefly on that, the compartmentalization that AFGU did, I think is very interesting, as in there were the people designing the app, and they were sort of in their own silo. There were then people making the custom fork of Graphene OS, the Android operating system, and there was those people.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And then somewhere else, there were the criminal resellers on the ground. And these groups never really communicated with one another. And I'm surprised it didn't leak. To be perfectly honest, I'm genuinely surprised, but somehow it managed to stay a secret, at least for a long time.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
The phones start popping up in Europe, and that's when broadly sort of the Swedish police get involved, and then also the Dutch. They are the two main European agencies that first come forward, because that's simply where the phones are ending up. And obviously the AFP doesn't really have jurisdiction. over Sweden or the Netherlands.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And the FBI, although they are reading the messages by this point, they're not in English, for a start. And the FBI can't really go over and start arresting people in the Netherlands, nor should they. So they decide to share some of the intelligence with... their Swedish and their Dutch counterparts.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And it starts to mirror what's going on in Australia with, you know, more intelligence gathering and the rest here and the rest there. But it's still very much under wraps, even though more and more cops are being looped in.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
At this point, I've read, I think, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Anon messages and messages from other providers as well. And what emerges through reading those is that a lot of people who sell these encrypted phones in a particular market or territory, they treat it like having a drug territory. Like in the same way that somebody may be the wholesale distributor for...
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
you know, a certain part of Sweden or maybe Antwerp or something like that, these phone dealers treat their product in the same sort of way.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, I think this is something that a lot of people reading the book are going to have an issue with, basically. I think that's the only way to put it, which is like, why is this US law enforcement agency intercepting and reading messages from all over the world? And the best answer I have is that, well, there's two.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
There's sort of the legal one, which is that, you know, the Fourth Amendment only protects people on American soil, right? Where you have to get a search and seizure warrant to go through communications or a wiretap order or whatever, right? Not to get too technical. The FBI does not need that for overseas.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And that's basically sort of the loophole that they used where they were able to go through all of this data. The second one is like sort of how they see themselves and maybe how they see their ethical obligation as well. But the prosecutors I've spoken to who were involved in this case, they just simply see this as a good thing.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And they want to go out and they want to shut down all of these criminal gangs. They want to intercept them. I think that there are valid questions about national sovereignty and all of that sort of thing. But that is what the FBI... They set out to wiretap the world, essentially, and they were very, very successful at it.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
I mean, it... It's partly they're doing it because they can. They can monitor these communications. Yes, they can't go arrest people themselves, but then they can provide that intelligence to foreign partners. I mean, it's sort of an overused cliche at this point, the idea of America being the world police or whatever. But there is...
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
There's an element of that stereotype here in that the FBI went out and they collect all these messages all around the world, even though they couldn't monitor what was going on in America. This is sort of the future of policing that we're in now. And there wasn't really a debate about it.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
It was just like one day or several days over the past few years, police have just decided that they're going to hack or otherwise intercept communications all around the world, basically. And we didn't really get a chance to talk about that as a society, about whether that's something we want. Maybe it turns out we do. Like, I don't know.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
But we can't have that conversation unless we know what's going on. And that's kind of what I was hoping to do with this book. pause and consider this.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
I think that is something that cryptographers and privacy experts I spoke to in the book were worried about, which is that some of them are less worried about the specific case of a norm, while some are, to be clear, but they're more worried about, well, what happens now? If we have a network that's 90% criminal and 10% normal users, is that a fair target? I don't know.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
What happens when it moves to 50-50? You know, and there's a really good quote in there from Matthew Green, the cryptologist, and he says that, well, maybe 50% of the criminals on this network are doing really, really bad stuff like trafficking or whatever. And then 50% are doing like, I don't know, copyright infringement of song lyrics, something that I don't think many people really care about.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
In the eyes of law enforcement, is that a fair target? And that's the discussion we're not having. And we need to have that as quickly as possible, because otherwise law enforcement are just going to go ahead and do it.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, yeah. It's a worry, and that was a big worry in the Snowden ones. And in this case, it was like, even though the FBI couldn't look at phones in America, the AFP agreed to keep an eye on the ones on American soil for threats to life. And, you know, on one hand, you could say that, well, it's good the AFP were monitoring that so nobody got hurt, hopefully.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
On the other end, well, why didn't the FBI just get a warrant and do it themselves? Yeah.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Some of the phones landed in Dubai and, you know, part of the UAE. And the UAE is very interesting because it's one of the very few places that you're not allowed to just go around and start selling an encrypted phone or an encrypted app. If it is not approved by the government, you can get into a lot of trouble. You know, I guess sort of in the same way as like the Russian Federation, right?
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
My name is Joseph Cox. I'm the author of Dark Wire, and I'm also a co-founder and journalist at 404 Media. Yeah, what's 404 doing? So 404 is a group of four of us, myself, Jason Kepler, Emmanuel Mayberg, and Samantha Cole. And we are all former staff members at Vice's motherboard, the technology site.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
It has to be approved by the government. It is basically a combination of a censorship and a surveillance sort of posture. Whereas if you are selling an encrypted app that the local authorities and national authorities do not approve of, you're not allowed to do that. And the reason being is that, well, they want to be able to access that.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And somebody running around selling Anom phones is not going to get on their good side.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
I mean, I walked through the same rooms that the FBI was reading the Anom messages in. I've obtained screenshots of what the FBI interface looked like. So I feel like I can put myself in the head of some of these FBI agents because I've also read a ton of these messages as well, right? And the system itself is called Holler iBot. You log in.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Initially, it was just from the San Diego FBI field office, but then they made it remote as well for the European partners. And also because of COVID, people couldn't go to the office as much. You log in, and there's sort of a green and black interface. And you can click on an individual Anom user. And it will show sort of a constellation of all of their contacts.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
There'll be a circle in the middle, and there'll be another circle of the person they spoke to, and then another circle which shows sort of the group chat. You can then zero in on those. It's almost like a Maltigo sort of interface. And then once you go to a specific user, you can see all of their messages. You can see all of their photos.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And rather handily, there was also AI-powered summaries of what was being spoken about, powered at least in some way by... Amazon, the FBI used some Amazon capability there. So you can look on the right side of the screen and it's like, Jerry is talking about a cocaine deal or whatever it is. And sometimes it's that blunt, which was just always hilarious to me.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Unfortunately, Vice made some very poor managerial decisions from the executives, and that company is now bankrupt. But we left to...
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
But when it gets to the point where there are millions and then tens of millions of messages, the FBI had to turn to some of these AI capabilities because otherwise they're going to be swimming in data. And by the end, they were absolutely swimming in data.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
There was a real danger that if they did not analyze every single message, well, what would happen if the one message about a death threat got through and then somebody died? That was a constant threat, and it really, really ramped up as Anom became especially more popular.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
HoloEyebot was developed by FBI computer scientists. It was made in-house as basically like the surveillance interface of a knob.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, and I mean, if you think about it, imagine a normal wiretap in LA or something, and it's one guy talking to another guy on a normal phone, and they're talking about a drug deal. And if you're the FBI or whoever, you have to figure out who these people are. And that might be tricky. As you say, maybe they're using code names, maybe they're using pseudonyms.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
make our own company where well we we want to continue doing tech investigations we want to continue telling stories and how about we do it in a way where we own the company you know so we can not only make journalistic decisions and editorial ones but we can make business ones as well in the hope that we can just keep on doing what we love doing which is unearthing stories verifying information and publishing stuff that's in the public interest
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And then you go about, and you maybe get phone location data, you figure out who they are, whatever. Now imagine doing that
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
for something like 12 000 people in 150 different countries it's like i almost can't picture the task in front of them and that's why they had to turn to these pretty sophisticated systems for figuring out not just what people are saying but who the hell these people even are and they would do that and then even put you know the stereotypical graphs on the wall in the fbi with uh
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
the layouts of different criminal organizations. And in some cases, the FBI doesn't even know who these people are at first. They're just like, well, we have a new crime syndicate on the platform. Let's start mapping out how they're related to one another.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, so as well as the drug trafficking, the main thing that flowed across Anom were what the FBI calls threat to life. And this is where a criminal organization or just an individual criminal will want to harm, torture, or in many cases, kill somebody else. And this happened across Anom constantly to the point where one of the FBI agents who was reading the Anom messages at first
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
His task was just to go through every single image that was sent across the platform. And often these were weapons or locations or targets. And the way it was described to me is that it's trying to figure out a puzzle basically as quickly as possible. You have to take all these disparate pieces of information and maybe you only have a photo of... a weapon.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
So that indicates there's probably going to be violence here. Or maybe you only have a photo of the location and it's like, well, something's going to happen there. And the FBI would have to very, very quickly, as best as they could, figure out this puzzle, give information to foreign authorities who could then act on it, and then maybe save people or maybe not.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
I don't think it was always successful, but they did save lives in the process as well.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, there's a lot of posturing in there through the Anon messages I've read where there are people doing exactly that. Like, oh, I'm going to effing kill him or whatever. And then you'll come across messages where they are talking specifically about getting a getaway car to drive away from the restaurant after they've killed somebody. Then they need to rent an Airbnb to hide the assassin.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
When it starts to get specific and granular, at least to me, that's when it's like, oh, okay, we need to actually take this seriously. And that's what the Swedish authorities did, the Dutch as well, and especially the FBI.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, it puts the FBI in a complicated ethical spot, and it puts the foreign agencies in the same spot as well. What started to happen was that the FBI or its partners would intercept communications about a threat to life. The authorities would then act on it. They would somehow stop the killing, and that could be in various ways.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
But then what would happen would be that the criminals would continue talking, and they would go, huh. how did the authorities know we were going to kill this guy? And they wouldn't assume it was a nom. They would assume there was a mole or a rat in their organization. And then they would try to kill that person. So then the FBI has another threat to life.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And it almost became like this endless cycle or spiral where it just started to become exceptionally difficult for the FBI to maintain tempo, is the way they described it.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Anom phones, as I found through reporting this book, they absolutely landed on American soil. There were Anom phones being used inside the United States. there was a plan for the FBI to start reading those messages. But it was very difficult for them to figure out what to do with all this information they collected. They are basically stonewalled in being able to look at U.S. communications.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
There just didn't seem to be the appetite to go after people inside the states, even though the prosecutors and the agents on the case very, very much wanted to. They were ready to do it. They were collaborating with a field office in Los Angeles as well. It was just a matter of basically pulling the switch, but higher-ups in the DOJ shut that down, essentially.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, so what happened when it was first approved for the FBI to gain access to the messages in general was that most drug prosecutors in San Diego in a specific meeting I describe, they were like, no, this is a ridiculous idea. You can't do this.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yes, exactly. They were like, please don't look at the US messages. We will figure that out later. And what happened was that the prosecutors on that, they send their requests to a specific part of the DOJ called the Office of Enforcement Operations. And they're the ones who basically approve every wiretap. If you want a wiretap in the US, they have to approve it.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And the prosecutors on the Anom case sent that, and... OEO just sat on it for months and months and months. There was clearly this divide between the cowboys on the Anom case and then the more senior people in DOJ who were just like, we're absolutely not approving this.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And Anom obviously grew to a massive size even without that, but it could have grown even bigger with potentially even more disastrous consequences.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, I absolutely think there should be a debate around whether secretly running a tech company should be allowed. There should be a debate on whether we want to be able to hack into entire telecommunications providers. Maybe the end result of that conversation is that we as a society are okay with the trade-offs.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, of course. I mean, I have been working on this book for three, maybe four years at this point, speaking to essentially every sort of person involved. That's law enforcement. That's also a lot of very dangerous people. But I don't think I've ever been more obsessed with a story. I mean, I'm sure of that. I've never been more obsessed with a story than this one.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
But I don't think ordinary members of the public, one, first, even though this is basically happening, and second of all, aren't aware of what those trade-offs even are. Like, how can we even have that conversation when this is basically done in the shadows and then everybody moves on?
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
I mean, there's no two ways about it. The FBI facilitated crime with the development and the ongoing maintenance and the secret running of Anom. The FBI was a tech backbone of organized crime. Now, yes, of course, they also had the surveillance capability as well, but they were selling a product to criminals, and the criminals were making great use of it.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
It's like the ends justify the means in some way. I think that is how people who worked in the operation would phrase it. And as for the ethical responsibility, from everybody I've spoken to, they did take the ethical consideration seriously. Like, we're running this communications platform, and that's why if a murder does flow across...
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
the chats, we need to respond to it aggressively and quickly. Now, that didn't always work out, unfortunately. But that was the approach they were coming from. But at the end of the day, Those messages were still on FBI chat app.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Sure. So the FBI and its foreign partners, they decide on a date, June 7th, 2021. The reason for that is that the country that was sort of part of the technical infrastructure, Lithuania, their court order was running out. But basically Anon was just getting too unwieldy. It was starting to get out of the FBI's control immediately. Sellers were pushing into countries as they wished.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Every time the FBI asked for more resources to monitor the messages, which was eventually like 130 FBI agents in total, then more messages came and they have to ask for more resources. There had to be an end point. And that was basically the date that was picked before it went over the edge.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
I spoke to multiple law enforcement officials who were part of that day, and the pressure and the stress they felt was incredible. The way it was set up was that it was almost a global line of dominoes, starting in Australia, and they would do their arrests first. It would then move over to Europe, and then they would do their arrests. And then eventually, when people woke up,
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
on the West Coast in San Diego, the FBI would come forward and they would take credit for running Anom. It was the single largest law enforcement action in any one day. Something like 10,000 police officers were involved in that one day in this world-spanning relay race domino track of activity. Good morning. Good morning.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yeah, if you're an ordinary person and you're trying to figure out whether an app is legitimate or not, it can be really, really hard to tell. Yes, you'd look at the owners, all of that sort of thing, and maybe some researchers dig through the code or whatever it is.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
But even beyond that, even beyond looking for specific answers, it's just that we know the FBI is prepared to do it now, which changes the conversation.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
I basically believe the FBI is absolutely exploring more of this. To get some of the information in the book, I snuck into a law enforcement-only conference in Vancouver, where two of the agents were talking. And towards the end of that talk, one of them said they look forward to what the next version is. of Operation Trojan Shield, which the Anom operation looks like.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
That's not an agency saying, okay, job well done, let's all go home. That's an agency looking for an even bigger thing to do next. And as well as Anom, there was the Sky hack, there was the EncroChat hack as well. Absolutely, law enforcement are continuing to push down this route. I mean, some of the police officers I even spoke to told me that.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yes. For years, I used an iPod Touch as a secure device, and now I've moved on to an iPad Mini because the iPod's no longer supported, unfortunately.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
So I call it an encrypted phone, which is simultaneously a helpful term, but then also not very helpful at all. We don't really have the terminology for it. But yes, it's a combination of things. It had a secure communications app that allows you to send end-to-end encrypted messages to one another with photos and...
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
voice memos and all of that, very much like a Signal or a modern WhatsApp or a Freema or whatever, right? And it also was a custom phone operating system. It is based on Android somewhat. It's actually a fork of Graphene OS, the privacy-focused operating system. Apparently, Anom had also removed all GPS functionality so that there would be no way
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
for law enforcement or Google or sort of third-party apps to track the location of those devices.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Which, hey, that's pretty good if you're having a private conversation and, I don't know, an abusive partner snatches your phone trying to rummage through your messages. Or if you're a criminal, a police officer does it or a border official or something like that. So there's that. There's also voice scrambling. So...
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
You know how on Signal you can send a voice note for one another, and that's very popular on other messaging apps. On Anom, you could do one where it would add either a high-pitched distortion or a low, deep distortion to it as well, and that would mask what your real voice sounded like.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
So Anon was created by someone called Afgu. I have to be a little bit careful about what I say about them for reasons that we'll get into. But they are, from what I've learned, a pretty sort of nerdy tech expert for the criminal underground. They were connected to a very well-known criminal called Hakan Ayik, who at one point was Australia's most wanted man.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And this AFCO character sells or did sell phones in this space before eventually deciding, well, I'm going to go make my own. Like rather than working underneath other sellers and sort of other encrypted phone companies, I'm going to create my own tech startup for the criminal underground.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
Yes. Legally, it's very, very messy because it's not illegal, generally speaking, to sell or use an encrypted messaging app, which is a good thing, to be clear. Like, that should not be illegal. But a lot of these companies in the, I would say, shadier part of the encryption industry... The thing that differentiates them is that they deliberately facilitate crime.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
As in, it's not like Signal, whose users will of course include criminals, or even Apple iMessage or something, just because they're very popular. One of the taglines was, I think it was... designed for criminals by criminals, which is just asking for trouble, really. But Anom had all of those sorts of bells and whistles you would expect, you know, wiping the phone, all of that sort of thing.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
And it really positioned itself as sort of the Royals Royce of the encrypted phone industry. If you wanted a super secure device from a company that didn't care if you were a criminal, if anything, it likes the fact you're a criminal, you could turn to Anom.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
That is basically what Anom was pitching itself as to its customers and even to its sellers. It was saying, your messages will be end-to-end encrypted. We can't see what's going on. We won't turn over data to law enforcement. Our servers are outside the reach of the Five Eyes. All of the normal sort of marketing and privacy benefits you would expect. Except, of course, that wasn't true.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
So it's very, very interesting on a technical level. And what it is, is that Anom basically created a ghost contact that was added to every conversation. And it received a blind carbon copy, a BCC, of every message sent across the platforms. So when Criminal A was talking to Criminal B about a cocaine shipment, that was secretly being sent off to Anom, and the users were none the wiser.
Darknet Diaries
146: ANOM
It was like having a spy in everybody's pocket, in their back pocket, looking over their shoulder. They could just see into everything.
Search Engine
What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Microsoft is a prolific drug trafficker and a prolific user and, importantly, a seller of these phones, including Anom. He puts his entire business and trust basically into this one platform.
Search Engine
What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And now, that was Anam. And it starts to spread in Colombia or then in Sweden and Denmark and Norway and Finland. So you have all of these influencers providing exceptional marketing to Anom. If Anom did not have those big names, those Ryan Reynolds, I guess, I don't know if Anom would really take off. And it absolutely did after that.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
I mean, he would constantly contact sort of the customer support side of Anam and be like, hey, you should put this feature in. No, no, no, you should take this feature out to the point where the Anom customer support staff are like pulling their hair out at this guy who's like clearly crazy.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
But they're told, just hear Microsoft out, entertain his pleas, because he's such a big influencer that we need him on our side.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
The first major piece of bad luck for Microsoft is that Swedish police somehow find his amphetamine lab in the Swedish countryside. It turns out the cops followed one of his lab cooks who was making a switch of amphetamine in a shopping center car park. They follow him back and they discover this amphetamine lab.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And they do this really dramatic raid with two parallel SWAT teams going through two different entrances, striking simultaneously. They capture the cooks, basically red-handed, or I guess gloving, hand in glove, because he puts his hands up and he's covered in amphetamine. Hands on your back! Hands on your back! And that's the first bit of bad luck, and they seize all the drugs.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
But more importantly, they seize the drugs, but of course they shut down the lab, and that's Microsoft's sort of drug infrastructure pushed out of the window. So that's very concerning.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Microsoft continues doing odd jobs here and there. He's then trying to do another sort of twilight drop of cocaine. in the ocean near japan and something happens where there's a combination of a lot of bad weather and then also apparently the japanese navy get a tip-off that something is going on and they raise the boat and that operation falls apart as well finally
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
he spins up another amphetamine smuggling operation. Like, okay, rather than building the lab, I'm just going to go to somebody I know who already has one, who can make it, and then I will smuggle it across Europe or wherever. And he does that. There's a seizure here or there. It's like, okay, the cost of doing business. But then again, again, and again,
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
the cops keep raiding his safe houses, even though it's a different safe house every time. And it's like, how the hell are the cops finding out where my drugs are every single time? And he's running out of money, especially because he operates on credit a lot, where he will sell drugs when they haven't actually arrived yet.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So he's trying to balance his master spreadsheet while his drugs are all being seized, and it's a complete mess. He ends up with these stress rashes all across his body. He's figuring out where his next sort of paycheck is going to be until eventually he basically admits defeat. And it's like, I'm out. I'm to zero.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And he's gone from this incredibly prolific drug smuggler to like a mess, basically. And it's not just Microsoft who is losing shipments. Some of his associates are having their drugs seized as well. There's even one point where Microsoft has introduced a colleague to the platform. He, in turn, gets more friends onto Anom, and they're raided immediately.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And there's just something off, and some people believe it's the phones. And they say there has to be something wrong with these devices. And Microsoft just won't hear it. He believes Anom is completely secure. He just blames other people and says they must be a rat or a snitch. For him, Anom is never the problem.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
The U.S. government was the secret venture capitalist and puppet master and manager of Anom for its entire existence.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Hey, Joseph, how are you doing over there? All good, all good. A little bit of a sore throat from talking constantly. I'm going to get so sick of my voice.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So in 2018, the FBI shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. It had, you know, 7,000 to 10,000 users. It was very popular, very prolific. The Sinaloa drug cartel used it. Biker gangs in Australia did as well. Phantom Secure.
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And when the FBI shut that down, they tried to get a backdoor into the company. That wasn't successful for a number of different reasons.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So sort of backed into a corner and realizing, hey, maybe I'm next, this person called Afgu approaches the FBI and the prosecutors and says, hey, I have this embryonic company right now. It's more of my brainchild. It's called a NOM. Would you like to take control of it? And in exchange, please give me a lesser sentence for any charges I may or may not face in the future.
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I can't stress enough how big of an ace that is being played by AFKU. Like, if you imagine if you're an informant in a normal crime syndicate and say, oh, I told the FBI about the boss or whatever. Now imagine if you were offering the FBI the technical backbone to organize crime, at least potentially, for hundreds of crime syndicates around the entire globe. It's like, from this point on,
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
The FBI can take a NOM and they can grow it, at least theoretically, into infinity. You know, it's only dependent on how popular can we actually make this company.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
But they need to make the app better, first of all. They need to make it so it's a project that people actually care about. And the way this comes about is that Afgoo, and then people sort of working with him, hire ordinary Android developers, some of whom I've spoken to, and they would log on to their job from a number of different Asian countries.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
One I spoke to had their MacBook on their chest or their stomach from bed, like I think a lot of work-from-home people probably do nowadays. And he would just fix bugs, he would improve features in the app and in the device, because, okay, it's all well and good that we have this encrypted phone company, but if it's of low quality, nobody's even going to use the phone. It would be embarrassing.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Kind of close, actually, weirdly. I've carved a niche in my journalism career by speaking to criminals, essentially. And that could be drug traffickers. It could be cyber criminals, hackers especially. And I was always interested where we would read press releases about hacking operations or law enforcement campaigns. And you would never hear from the other side.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah, so these coders, they think they're just working for a normal Android development company, which is making an encrypted messaging app. They know that. That's fine. They also know there is a message copying feature inside a NOM. But what they're told is that, oh, this is for corporations who, yes, they want to have secure chats, but they need to keep an archive of the messages.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Maybe they work in banking, and this is very common where... you're having crypto messaging inside a financial institution, but to stop stuff like insider trading, there will be like a secure archive of all of the messages as well. So that's what the developers think they're making. They're not told who it's actually sold to, which of course is criminals.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And then you have those criminal resellers like Microsoft who are siloed from the rest of the company. But of course, they're also not told that the actual client above them is the FBI trying to build a surveillance apparatus.
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One of those key people is Andrew Yang. Now, he's an assistant U.S. attorney, but he's not a drug prosecutor. He's from, like, the world of, like, tax and, like, white-collar crime. So, through a series of events, when he gets involved in the Phantom Secure case, and then the enorm opportunity comes up, he doesn't have...
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
the institutional baggage of the doj sort of hanging over him he sees this as a really cool chance to disrupt the drug trade whereas ordinarily in san diego what prosecutors and other agencies are doing is like we'll just seize drugs at the border we'll give these poor disenfranchised people who are probably trying to make two or three thousand dollars spuggling coke across the border we'll give them a pre-written plea deal you know and we'll move on with our lives
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Andrew Young and other prosecutors and the FBI around him, they wanted to do something different. They wanted to do something that would actually disrupt, of course, not just the encrypted phone industry, but disrupt how drug crimes are investigated in the US or around the world.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
When they started looking at this data, they realized, oh no, we need to triple that estimate, basically. It was like, they already knew, of course, the contours of organized crime, but an entire iceberg emerged underneath the water's surface, where it was like, oh no, this is way bigger than we anticipated. And
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Something that doesn't normally come up in ordinary criminal investigations, but it did with Anom, is the sheer amount of public corruption involved in the drug trade. You're going to have corrupt law enforcement officials giving tips to their criminal cohorts, You can have people in ports, in airports as well.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And there's sort of this interface between the criminal world and the legitimate economy. And it turns out these actually overlap way more than many of the officials reading the messages actually previously understood.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So I made a habit of, I want to go talk to the people with hands on keyboards, is what I say. I want to talk to the hackers. I want to talk to the people using strange technology. So I've, for years, approached it from the crime side of things. And they'll talk to you some of the time, at least.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
It's bigger than we all thought, and it intersects with the surface world or the legitimate economy in way more ways than I think anybody anticipated. You've seen some of the material that they saw. Like, what have you seen? So, when the FBI started digging through the unknown messages, what they found was that the content was overwhelmingly criminal.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Usually, if a wiretap is like, oh, there's a little bit of crime, but maybe they're talking to their wife or husband or whatever. Here, it's like, no, they're just straight up talking about cocaine all the time. No code words, nothing like that. And I later obtained...
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
hundreds of thousands of Anom messages and spent months reading them, waking up, reading them, going to my day job, reading more in the evening to build up a picture of Microsoft and his associates and other criminals as well. And I think I felt the same sort of sensation that the FBI must have felt because it was insane. Just every single chat in there is about some sort of really serious crime.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
We're going to kill this person. We're going to hunt down this one. We're going to torture this one. We're going to throw grenades through this window. It was genuinely overwhelming.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
I read so many messages sent by and about Microsoft that I genuinely started to realize what this person was like. I'd be reading the chat messages, and I think to myself, oh, Microsoft's not going to like that. And then a couple of pages later, he's popping off, shouting at people, saying he's going to kill them. And I'm like, well, I know Microsoft at this point.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
I think he's probably going to chill out now. He's got to have his system.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Four pages later, he's all chill and we're back to dealing amphetamine. And that is the sensation that some of these agents got, I've heard from. And, I mean, I talk to a lot of criminals. I see a lot of criminal behavior. But it was incredibly unusual to just have... sort of the callousness presented in front of me where they're literally ordering assassinations with, like, emojis.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And at one point, Microsoft asks, can I get a bulk discount if I have a hitman do three or four hits at once? And, like, that is something you would think would be in a movie, but it would be a little bit too on the nose. And it's like, this... This is real, and it really blew me away.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah, I think when you meet people sort of where they are, of course, for war reporting, that would be actually going to the scene of the conflict. For me, that's like downloading the very particular weird apps that these criminals use. They respect you jumping through those hoops.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Smiley face, sunglasses, emojis, thumbs up, crying, laughing came up a lot. Whether like, ha ha ha ha ha, you know, we've done that. Or just strings after they'd actually successfully done an assassination. Like, they don't care. This is just part of their business, and they order an assassination with the casualness that, like, you would order, like, takeout food.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah. Even though legally Anom wasn't a wiretap for various quirks in US law, they treated it ethically as such, which means that if you're listening to a wire and there's a clear threat to life against somebody, like, we're going to go kill this person at this time with this weapon, The FBI or other law enforcement typically acts and maybe they go and arrest the hitman if they know who that is.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Maybe they send a squad car to the approximate location and turn on their sirens and that will scare some people off. Or often it's the case they'll warn the victim and be like, we're not going to tell you how, but we know there is a tangible threat to your life and we recommend that you change up your routine or we can offer you protection. And that happened tons of times throughout Anom.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
In one case, a murder was planned on the FBI's app from sourcing the weapon, to tracking the target, to luring the target to a specific place, to then gloating about the murder. And it was successful. The entire thing was planned on Anom. And the issue was that the FBI did not provide those messages to the Swedish authorities in time.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Now, on the flip side, the FBI says it intervened in something like 150 threats to life. But hey, at least one person died as well. And I don't know, are we okay with that trade-off? Are we okay with that sort of balancing act there?
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah, Microsoft was designated a high-value target by the Swedish authorities. And they already knew about Microsoft, like he'd been arrested a little bit before, but they had no idea about his amphetamine lab in the Swedish countryside. They had no idea about some of these other drug operations until they got the insight from Anom.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And the Swedish authorities I spoke to, they said they deliberately wanted to sort of put the pressure on him. They wanted to squeeze him a little bit. So when they shut down his amphetamine lab, they didn't actually arrest everybody just then, even though they could have done. They wanted to lay in wait and let's see what these people do. Like, maybe they'll do more incriminating stuff.
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Maybe they'll make some mistakes. We also want Microsoft to have to owe people money. Like this will fuck with him, basically. And that played out beautifully for the authorities.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah, he's going to get more and more desperate. He's going to look for other ways to make money. He's going to bring in more criminals to Anom because, again, he wants to do more trafficking operations, but he needs more people to come on the network so he can make more money. And it's like this endless cycle where if we just keep pushing him, he will accelerate and just keep going as well.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
I hate it. I read this and I'm like, oh my God, like all the things going wrong in my life. Is there something going on behind the scenes now? And it's like fueling my paranoia. It's not pleasant. I have to forget. No, no. This was a very specific incident where this happened. Don't read into it too much.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So in the lead up to the press conference, what law enforcement do is they follow the sun, which means that they start with their wave of arrests in Australia, then it will move over to Europe until eventually they do the press conference in San Diego announcing the operation. But during that time, of course, with the Australian arrests, some people in Europe realized, hey, something's going on.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
I see a Google account in Hakan Ayik's name, and I'm pretty sure it's him, starts leaving more Google reviews at restaurants across Turkey, and this is about six months after the operation.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah, he's like, this restaurant is great, five stars, amazing service. Oh, I really like the food in this place. And I put them on a map and I'm following them. He's like, oh, he's having a great time, like going around Turkey, going to these tourist spots.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So I'm following that, and to me that shows, damn, this guy is so bold, and he's flexing to the authorities. Like, you just ran the biggest sting operation ever, and I'm out here having a really good meal and pulling it basically on Yelp or Google reviews or whatever. Yeah. That audacity...
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
does come to a halt when, very surprisingly, Turkish authorities launch a large series of coordinated raids against organized criminals inside the country. That sweeps up Hakan. It also gets Microsoft and a ton of other people connected to their network.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Microsoft looks completely dumbfounded and surprised in that footage. And all we know now is that they're probably sat in a cell somewhere in Istanbul or otherwise in Turkey, but their fate remains unclear. And one... associate of Hakan's I spoke to immediately after that. He said that, of course, it's a speed bump, but I don't think it's the end of this story.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
This is one of the most successful criminals ever, and especially successful at getting away from the cops whenever it feels like they finally have him in their grasp.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
They haven't stopped. They haven't stopped. And of course, it would be a bit unfair to lump the entire drug trade on one operation, but even when the largest sting operation ever can't really put a sizeable dent in the drug trade, like, maybe there should be a different approach.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And even some of the Swedish officials I spoke to, they brought this up, like, we're seizing these shipments of cocaine, we're arresting these people, more criminals take their place and then more cocaine comes. Like, maybe this is the wrong approach, right? So you have that. What you also have is that I think the FBI was really successful in sowing that mistrust in the encrypted phone industry.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And drug traffickers I've spoken to and people who sell these phones since the operation, they say it's basically impossible to build a customer base at this point because everybody suspects, well, what if the FBI is behind that phone as well?
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
It sells encrypted phones that are so secure, even Australia's electronic spy agency can't crack their code.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
do we want law enforcement to touch these consumer platforms at all? It's an incredibly complicated and fraught issue, but we're even seeing it. In Europe, they're proposing legislation to scan the content of encrypted messages for child sexual abuse imagery and then potentially other crimes as well. It's not even in the shadows.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
The European legislators are just coming out and saying, we want to do this, so maybe it's time we pay attention to what these people are asking. I mean, it's funny.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So the Australian media actually showed one of the adverts from Phantom Secure. And there's a guy in a dress shirt doing his tie. There's a limousine with blacked out windows.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
I think that's why it's so fascinating because you'll have privacy-focused people read the book and they've told me, oh my God, this is terrifying and horrifying. They did this. And then you'll have people who are more on the law enforcement side and they'll read it and they'll go, this is fucking awesome. This is really cool. And then I think a ton of people will be in the middle
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
and genuinely won't know what to think about it because you absolutely can see it on both sides. And again, I've heard from people who also lean more on the privacy side. They've actually shifted somewhat. They're like, to be fair, as you say, this was a network primarily for criminals. And I think that is the key thing, right? This is not Signal.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
It's not WhatsApp or it's not one of these consumer apps, but it is a warning shot of the incredible amount of resources that law enforcement may put towards fighting this problem. And it's what happens now that I think people may want to worry about or may want to think about.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
But for years, we've had to speculate or just basically make up, what would it be like if the FBI got a backdoor into a tech product? Well, now we know. This is literally the case. It actually happened. So if we can digest this and we can figure out, okay, now do we want authorities to read all encrypted messages or not? And personally, there are like three options I see in front of me.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
The first is that secure apps give more data to the authorities. You know, oh, you send a subpoena to Signal, they give information about the user. That's pretty problematic because that could be very easily abused for various reasons and it would undermine the security of the apps. Okay, sure.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
You have the second one, which is like, well, let's just run the apps and get all of the messages on it like they did with Anom, which obviously to me is insane, compromising the entire communication platform. You then have something else, which I believe, and I know people will disagree with me, there is another option of targeted hacking.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
You have malware that can be delivered to a specific device, to a specific user, and harvest only a small particular amount of information which is allowed under that country's or agency's laws or whatever. If those are the three options, I would take the hacking one just because it's the less bad out of all of those. And some people will come forward and say, why do you have to pick one?
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
The company's clients appear to be international men of mystery involved in high-powered business deals.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And I think it's because the status quo is just not sustainable. We had the status quo for ages, and then the FBI decided to run its own tech company. That's what happens when there's a status quo. They'll keep doing these crazy brazen operations. Do you want them to do that, or do you want them to do something less invasive? Right, because the thing that you're pointing to is
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah, and there's a lot of nuance to it in that, you know, the FBI will have an exploit to get into an iPhone, and that will allow them into it. And then Apple will learn about that and get very, very mad, and then they'll fix it. And then the FBI will have to buy another exploit. And yes, there's a lot of money involved. I've reported a lot on the people who sell exploits for iPhones.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And it's something like $5 million for a full iOS end-to-end chain, which is break into the phone and get the data and extract it. That's a lot of money, but I don't know, FBI, just get more money or something. I don't know, just figure it out. And of course, that's kind of easy for me to say, but I would take that over.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Well, now we have a turnkey solution where we could just read all messages all the time. And again, I'm not saying they've done that. I'm not even saying they would do that, but I know... the FBI is looking for the next iteration of this operation because they've said so as much.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Like, I've heard from the agents and they say they're looking forward to whatever the next version of the Anom operation is. And for...
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
This phone is actually for serious organized criminals, such as members of biker gangs who may assassinate one another, or even members of the Sinaloa drug cartel. They're not your normal business executives. A lot of serious organized criminal activity in Australia is controlled by the motorcycle gangs.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
I mean, I would probably use a Graphene OS phone, which is a custom security-focused fork of Android, but is not one of these like shady companies you go buy it from. It's like an open source project that's made by security researchers and that sort of thing. And you download it and you install it for your web browser. I've done it. It's really cool. It takes 30 seconds or a couple of minutes.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
I would do that. I would then use an app like Signal. And of course, I'm not actually giving advice to criminals. I'm doing this because if I was just an ordinary user looking for the most secure phone solution, it would also probably be something like that.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So you have the Comacheros, you have the Banditos, the Hells Angels as well, and they're all in a melting pot with their different motivations, different territory.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And in some cases, phantom secure phones were used to plan the hits between these rival groups.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Phantom secure promised to keep criminals' messages outside of the reach of law enforcement. You didn't have to trust an ordinary mobile phone anymore. You could buy phantom secure, and you could continue with your drug trafficking without the cops coming and arresting you.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Anom presented itself as the next generation of encrypted phone, something like the Royals Royce of the industry. So even though it was highly secure with encrypted messaging, it also included a bunch of sort of Additional features will make it look more like an ordinary phone and security benefits as well.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So you would open up the phone and to get to the Anom messaging application itself, you'd actually have to go through the calculator app. You had to type in two times two and press equals. The calculator would fade away and then the Anom app would reveal itself. Oh, that's cool. Which is a very cool little gadget. You know, I wish I could do that on my normal phone.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
It then had all of this other stuff, like you could send scrambled voice memos. So even if the cops managed to intercept it, the voice would be all garbled and they wouldn't be able to tell who was actually talking. You could also redact images. So if somebody's face was in there, you could then blur it. And again, the cops get the image. They're actually not going to know who's in there.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And probably most importantly, it had this really powerful wipe system where if the phone fell into the wrong hands, you know, maybe a border cop seized it or another law enforcement official got hold of it, you could tell a NOM, hey, quick, my phone is in the hands of the cops, please wipe the device. And they would do that. And it would remove all data from the phone. Of course, you know,
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
iCloud and Apple, they have something similar. But you don't go to Apple and be like, hey, my phone's in the hands of the cops. Tim Cook isn't going to do that, as far as I know.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
It had all of these bells and whistles, which, while still being secure, showed that, hey, we don't have to have these sort of like sluggish cameras cumbersome encrypted phones anymore. We can have the phone of the 2020s with all of the cool features while still catering to our criminal clientele. Got it.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah, exactly. It brings them well into the 2020s, and criminals can now send, you know, their sunglasses emojis or their heart emojis while they're doing their multi-ton shipments of cocaine.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
And that's a security benefit as well, right? You can't just rock into a normal phone store and get one of these phones, because if you could, the cops would buy them, and then they would get on the network as well. So you have this human-level reseller network that also keeps the good guys out and the bad guys in.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yes, it's exactly like your scalp cookies. And that's also sort of a business benefit for a NOM, because if a top-tier criminal at the top of their drug trafficking pyramid gets a phone, that means everybody underneath them needs to get a NOM phone as well, because they only talk to one another. So everybody needs to move to that network and that gets more money for a NOM as well.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
It's not like normal phones where obviously an iPhone can send a text message to an Android. You can't do that with a NOM. It's just an insular sort of internal network. So soon after launching In Australia, the company got more demand for phones outside, and especially in Europe. And sort of the key person behind that expansion was a drug trafficker called Hakan Ayik.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
He is the head of the so-called Aussie cartel, which is a multi-billion dollar super cartel.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
He's teamed up with the Cromanjeros and the Hells Angels, groups that would usually be killing each other if they were in the same room. They band together to basically put those differences aside and make a lot more money.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Hakan Ayik gets very interested in Anom. On one side, he needs a secure device to continue to smuggle his drugs. On the other, if he can get in early when Anom is just growing and maybe get a sizable share of the business, he can make an absolute ton of money selling the phones as well.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Drug traffickers have figured out that you don't just sell coke, you sell the phones that also power the trade of the cocaine. as well. And what better ambassador for a nom than one of the world's top drug traffickers saying, hey, this phone is the real deal, so much so that I'm going to put my freedom and my safety behind it as well.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
Yeah, exactly. And very soon, he brings in even more people. There's one called Maximilian Rifkin, who uses the nickname Microsoft.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
So Microsoft, if you can think up of a drug trafficking scheme, Microsoft has not only probably thought about it himself, he's probably done it as well. Microsoft has spoken about putting drugs inside energy drinks, using corrupt workers inside energy drink factories. He's talked about getting airstrips in Europe to deliver drugs. He's hidden cocaine inside tulips.
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What's the best phone to do crimes on?
He's built amphetamine labs in the Swedish countryside. He's orchestrated drops of cocaine to speedboats in the middle of the ocean. Wow. Done that multiple times. They call that a James Bond job when they drive a speedboat. They throw it overboard and they catch the nets or the duffel bags or whatever. Yeah.