Call the cops!!

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Gob
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Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:40 am

Call the cops!!

Post by Gob »

Interesting story...
Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police


The rain pattered lightly on the harbour of the Belgian port city of Ghent when, on 21 June 2021, a team of professional divers slipped below the surface into the emerald murk. The Brazilian tanker, heavy with fruit juice bound for Australia, had already crossed the Atlantic Ocean, but its journey wasn’t halfway done as the divers felt their way along the barnacled serration of its hull. They were looking for the sea chest, a metallic inlet below the water line, through which the ship draws seawater to cool its engines. Tucked inside, they found what they were looking for: three long sacks, each wrapped in a thick black plastic bag and trussed with black and white striped nautical rope.

The sacks were heavy. Each one weighed as much as a sheep and, shaped like a body bag, could feasibly have contained one. As the Belgian police opened the first bag, a stack of crimson bricks slid out. Had this cargo reached Australia, where high demand and meagre supply has pushed the price of a kilo of cocaine to eight times its equivalent cost in North America, the haul would have been worth more than A$64m (£34m).

Smuggling tens of millions of dollars of class A drugs across the ocean requires total secrecy and a significant amount of international logistical coordination. But the police knew about the alleged plot thanks to intelligence gleaned from a device that had, since its launch in 2018, become something of a viral sensation in the global underworld.

Chin’s team had watched a torrent of information flow toward them, like a thousand wiretaps chirruping simultaneously
An0m, as it was called, looked like any off-the-shelf smartphone, a polished pebble of black glass and aluminium. The device had been modified to remove many of its core functions. An0m could not be bought in a shop or on a website. You had to first know a guy. Then you had to be prepared to pay the astronomical cost: $1,700 for the handset, with a $1,250 annual subscription, an astonishing price for a phone that was unable to make phone calls or browse the internet.

Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay, not for the phone so much as for a specific application installed on it. Opening the phone’s calculator allowed users to enter a sum that functioned as a kind of numeric open sesame to launch a secret messaging application. The people selling the phone claimed that An0m was the most secure messaging service in the world. Not only was every message encrypted so that it could not be read by a digital eavesdropper, it could be received only by another An0m phone user, forming a closed loop system entirely separate from the information speedways along which most text messages travel. Moreover, An0m could not be downloaded from any of the usual app stores. The only way to access it was to buy a phone with the software preinstalled.

Users’ confidence in An0m was, it seemed, bolstered by some novel functionality included on every device. In the past, phones marketed to hyper security-conscious users were sold with the option to remotely wipe the device’s data. This would enable, say, a smuggler to destroy evidence even after it had been collected. To counter the ploy, police investigators had started to use Faraday bags – containers lined with metal that would prevent a phone from sending and receiving a kill signal. The An0m phone came with an ingenious workaround: users could set an option to wipe the phone’s data if the device went offline for a specified amount of time. Users could also set especially sensitive messages to self-erase after opening, and could record and send voice memos in which the phone would automatically disguise the speaker’s voice.

Big Bang’s targets’ alleged crimes ranged from drug trafficking to attempted murder. What they had in common was their choice of texting app
An0m was marketed and sold not so much to the security conscious as the security paranoid; its embedded suite of anonymising digital tools went far beyond the requirements of the average user. According to Australian police, it was the ideal telecommunications channel to arrange the safe passage of A$64m of cocaine across the world. An0m was not, however, a secure phone app at all. Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 – 19.37m of them – had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices.

On 7 June 2021, more than 800 arrests were made around the world, all of people who had in some way fallen under suspicion thanks to a treacherous device that sent information into the hands of the AFP. In Belgium, two weeks later, the divers did not have to hunt for the sacks of cocaine for long; they already knew precisely where to look.


Continues here..

“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Scooter
Posts: 16540
Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2010 6:04 pm
Location: Toronto, ON

Re: Call the cops!!

Post by Scooter »

I'm very much of two minds about this.

On one hand, when the hubris of criminals makes them believe themselves invulnerable and they fall for the trap laid for them by law enforcement, I am satisfied that they got what they deserved.

However, in a case like this, I ask where is the line between legitimate monitoring and interception of criminal activity by law enforcement, vs. law enforcement handing criminals the tools with which to commit their crimes? This has echoes of Operation Fast and Furious to me. Not much difference between providing the gun used by a drug cartel to kill someone, and providing the phone and secure network they use to order the hit.

The legalities are also concerning. There is no way the FBI could have gotten a warrant to collect this information. And while Australian law would have permitted its collection, the AFP could not have shared it with the FBI. So the laws of both countries were skirted by engaging a third country to host the servers collecting the messages and passing them on, a country whose privacy laws are clearly lax or nonexistent. What is this unnamed third country, and why does its identity remain a secret after the operation has been terminated? Surely the success of the operation is something that any country's law enforcement would want to take credit for. So it must be the U.S. or Australia or both who don't want the world to know which tinpot dictatorship they are in bed with.

I doubt there will ever be a reckoning made public of how many crimes detected by this operation were allowed to slide unpunished, or how many more were never detected. Apparently murder was a line in the sand that neither country wanted to countenance, but among 27 million messages, who can say if every plan to commit murder was actually caught.
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