What's the best phone to do crimes on? (classic)

Hey, everybody. It is the holiday season, which is a great time to sign yourself or a loved one up for incognito mode. That's the premium version of our show. No reruns, no ads, bonus interviews, and invitations to our board meetings, which happen live on the internet. In fact, today, if you are listening to this before noon Eastern, we have our end of year board meeting where we will discuss the secret inner workings of our show. This time we'll be talking about what it's like to shop a podcast in the current environment, which is what we've been up to recently. So please sign up. We depend on your contributions to keep our strange enterprise afloat. You can join at searchengine.show. We also have gift subscriptions. And this week, here on the free feed, we are rebroadcasting one of our very favorite episodes, a criminal caper that contains some serious twists. We love this one. We're really happy to play it for you again. After some ads, here's the show. Whatever you do for work, if you do it long enough, you'll probably experience a moment where a new piece of technology shows up and overnight just changes your job, even in my field. When I started out in radio before the podcast boom, the big semi-recent invention everyone was still talking about was just editing audio on computers. The veterans who I learned from loved to talk about how just a few years before, interviews were still being recorded onto actual physical tape. And they'd tell me how they used to edit that tape by cutting it with a razor blade and sticky taping it back together. It had all been so different, so much less efficient, so recently. They were still marveling at it. For me, a few years later, the equivalent change was auto-transcriptions. The weeks of my life spent typing up transcripts of other people's interviews or my own, just gone. And now, I was the one telling the young producers about how it used to be. Every industry has these moments. Although technological change, as we know, is not always that good. Somebody recently told me one of these stories where a small tech breakthrough opened the door to innovations in the fields of professional violence and corruption. 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. You're going to get book tour fever. This is Joseph Cox. He just published a book called Dark Wire. Joseph's a tech reporter, but he's not one of the normal ones. His work won't tell you how many more camera lenses to expect on the next iPhone. He does not dissect the latest outrageous tweet from Elon Musk. His interests lie elsewhere. And what's your relationship with the criminal underworld? 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. 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. 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. Joseph's internet is one where ingenious criminals are constantly inventing apps and gadgets, sometimes giving themselves a significant edge against the cops they play cat mouse with. But in all his years covering this world, nothing he'd seen prepared him for the story of this one new kind of criminal smartphone. It had transformed the underworld so quickly and so thoroughly. And in the aftermath of that transformation, Joseph feels sure we are living in a new world, one whose implications he thinks most of us have not yet begun to grapple with. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story begins in a country with a much more active criminal underworld than I had ever known. Australia. Law enforcement agencies in Australia are confronting a new high-tech weapon in their fight against organized crime. Criminal gangs are now using encrypted mobile phones. This ABC News report is from about a decade ago, and it's about a trend that had swept through the criminal underworld. Encrypted mobile phone companies. The report explained how these phones worked by focusing on one company, popular at the time, called Phantom Secure. It sells encrypted phones that are so secure, even Australia's electronic spy agency can't crack their code. 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. The company's clients appear to be international men of mystery involved in high-powered business deals. So, like, looking at the ad, it looks like it's for fancy rich dudes who care about privacy. Who is this phone actually for? 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 organised criminal activity in Australia is controlled by the motorcycle gangs. 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. Three nomads were shot in Marrickville. The Hells Angels' Petersham clubhouse was firebombed. A Rebels member was killed. Banditos and notorious ambushed each other. A shooting outside the Nomads Club near Penrith yesterday morning. The victim, an innocent newspaper deliveryman. Shotgun blasts from both sides of the car park left four Comancheros and two Banditos dead. A schoolgirl was shot dead in the crossfire. And in some cases, phantom secure phones were used to plan the hits between these rival groups. Why did the gangs like Phantom Secure? Like, what was it about this product that they were drawn to? 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. Phantom Secure ran for nearly a decade, selling tens of thousands of phones, mostly to criminals. It was shut down, finally, in 2018, when the FBI tricked its Canadian CEO into visiting the U.S., where he was arrested. But with Phantom Secure gone, a much more unusual competitor took its place. A new encrypted phone company, also catering to criminals, but with much more audacious visionaries behind it. Startup founders with a plan unlike anything anyone had ever tried to pull off. The name of this new company? Anom. 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 that would make it look more like an ordinary phone and security benefits as well. 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. 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 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, 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, could you please, Tim Cook isn't going to do that, as far as I know. Anam's promise was that not only were they on your side, unlike their competition, they'd also give you a great phone. A nice camera with tons of megapixels. You can send emojis. This turned out to be a winning combination. Criminals, like everybody else, are human. Suckers for the latest and greatest in new doodads. 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, 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. So it's both secure and like all the fun, exciting advances in smartphones that we've all gotten completely used to and don't actually feel fun and exciting, but it's like a criminally secure phone with features. 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. Of course, while it's great to have a product with killer features, a phone can't sell itself. Anam, like any startup, needed to acquire customers. And it would use the same marketing strategy deployed by seemingly every online brand in the 2020s. Influencer marketing. The influencers in this case, high-level criminals with reputations for excellence in lawbreaking. The way Anam worked, if a criminal sold a phone to their felonious friend, they got a significant commission. It was a way to grow the network, while at the same time ensuring the only people on Anam had been vetted by a fellow criminal. 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. So unlike, like if I want to buy an iPhone, I'll go to the Apple store. If I want to get an Anam phone, I would have to know someone through my existing criminal networks and they're selling it. It's sort of like Girl Scout cookies. Yes, it's exactly like Girl Scout cookies. And that's also sort of a business benefit for Anam 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 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. He is the head of the so-called Aussie cartel, which is a multi-billion dollar super cartel. Good evening and welcome to the program. Tonight, we take you inside the hunt for Australia's most wanted criminal. Hakan Ayik is a very famous criminal in Australia. He's not the creator of We'll get to that later. But he's its most well-known user, an early adopter responsible for much of its success. He was even a system administrator on the network. He's a rat-cunning, ruthless gangster who's made an eye-watering fortune in porting massive quantities of drugs into Australia. You see pictures of Hakan Ayek, presumably from his own social media. Selfies. He's a jock. Huge tattoo-covered chest. Buzzcut. Looks a little bit like Joe Rogan. Ayek in Australia had managed to pull something off that was pretty exceptional. He wasn't just running a single criminal organization. He was running a criminal network, uniting different gangs in different countries to come together to make money. He's teamed up with the Cromangeros 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. Hakan Ayek had been a devout user of Phantom Secure. And when it was shut down, he was very enthusiastic about its new successor. Hakunaik gets very interested in a nom. On one side, he needs a secure device to continue to smuggle his drugs. On the other, if he can get in early when a nom 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. Like, 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 top drug traffickers saying hey this phone is the real deal so much so that I going to put my freedom and my safety behind it as well So it's funny, it's sort of like, in my world, Ryan Reynolds is a spokesperson for Mint Mobile, the cell phone company. And I think he has shares in the company, but he makes a lot of money being like an influencer who says, like, I'm Ryan Reynolds, you love my films, you should use my phone. In the criminal world, this guy Ayik, he's saying like, hey, I love selling large quantities of cocaine and I'm never arrested, be like me. Like he's like a criminal influencer selling these phones. Yeah, exactly. And very soon he brings in even more people. There's one called Maximilian Rifkin, who uses the nickname Microsoft. If Hakan Ayik was the phone's most famous user, his underling, Microsoft, perhaps outmatched Ayik in his enthusiasm for the phone. You can see Microsoft in the wanted photos, later distributed by the U.S. State Department. He looks, honestly, quite nerdy. Not a bodybuilder like Hakann. More like an IT guy. A heavyset Swedish national with scraggly facial hair. So tell me more about Microsoft. Like, what is he using his phone for? Like, he's selling phones. He's getting a commission on selling phones. He's asking the people he works with to sell phones. What crimes is he using the phones to commit? 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. 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. So 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. With Microsoft and others like him on board, Anam begins to dominate the international crime world, not just the Australian market. Joseph says that criminal networks these days are much more multinational than they once were, with cooperation between a drug cartel in one country and a distributor in another being fairly common. But for this global village of lawbreakers to talk, They needed a secure way to do it. And now, that was Anom. 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. Like, 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. Akana Iyek, the muscly mastermind, and Microsoft, his nerdy underling, may have been the Ryan Reynoldses of Anam, but they were not the masterminds who had created it. The mastermind was actually an associate of theirs, a man known as AFKU. Where did AFKU get all the capital to start this? Probably would have been a good question to ask. But here's what people did know about AFKU. AFKU was a longtime denizen of the criminal phone world. He'd actually even been involved for a bit in Anam's more primitive predecessor, Phantom Secure. And now, AFCO was moving the whole industry forward. As the months went on, Anam, just like a legit tech company, kept adding more features. Sometimes at the specific request of its biggest power user, Microsoft. 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 non-customer support staff are like pulling their hair out at this guy who's like clearly crazy. 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. So the developers would do what Microsoft asked. Put in a new voice feature, delete it when he decided it was a bad idea. And Microsoft remained totally enamored with this new gadget. It gave him a kind of criminal superpower. Most of the time, anyway. In December 2020, Microsoft began to hit a biblical patch of bad luck. 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. 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 glove-in, hand-in-glove, because he puts his hands up and he's covered in amphetamine. And that's the first bit of bad luck, and they seize all the drugs. 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. With his lab destroyed, Microsoft is now down bad financially, which means he has to do more risky jobs in order to make his money back. 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 raid the boat. And that operation falls apart as well. Finally, 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, and it's like, okay, the cost of doing business. But then again, again, and again, 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. 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 emits defeat. And it's like, I'm out. I'm to zero. 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 a nom and they're raided immediately. 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 a nom is completely secure. He just blames other people and says they must be a rat or a snitch. For him, a nom is never the problem. And then one summer day, a law enforcement agent on the other side of the world, in San Diego of all places, holds a surprise press conference. Good morning. I am Randy Grossman. I'm the acting United States attorney for the Southern District of California. Welcome. Thank you for being here. This U.S. attorney, looking quite pleased, stands at a podium in a municipal law enforcement press room. Yellow-looking veneer wood, old blue curtains. Behind him, several other law enforcement officers, each wearing a fabric COVID mask. It's 2021. They're here to announce the many arrests that are being made in the U.S. and simultaneously in other countries. This is part of a worldwide law enforcement operation that has resulted in hundreds of arrests for drug trafficking, money laundering, firearms violations, and crimes of violence. These international arrests and the U.S. charges were possible because of a San Diego-based FBI investigation like none other in history. Operation Trojan Shield. For the first time, the FBI developed and operated its own hardened encrypted device company called Anom. A-N-O-M. So the phone company for criminals was being run by a United States law enforcement agency, by the FBI. The U.S. government was the secret venture capitalist and puppet master and manager of a norm for its entire existence. The worldwide implications of this investigation are staggering. In total, the criminals sold more than 12,000 anon encrypted devices and services to more than 300 criminal syndicates operating in over 100 different countries. Oops. After a short break, how the FBI came to start a criminal phone company preferred by the discerning international drug smuggler, and what the feds found on history's most ambitious wiretap. Thank you. Welcome back to the show. Anam, the phone company used almost exclusively by criminals, designed exclusively for criminals, was a multi-year, very expensive FBI project. The Bureau cooperated with law enforcement in countries across the world. This was unprecedented. In the past, the FBI had used informants, but the idea that the FBI would run, from the beginning, a company for criminals? This was audacious. And they hadn't just started a company. They'd done it and then managed to successfully compete with the other real criminal phone companies. Companies like EncroChat or Sky that were actually being run for the benefit of criminals. So tell me the story from the FBI's perspective. Like, how did the FBI come to be running, you know, the criminal iPhone company? 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 that biker gangs in Australia did as well. Phantom Secure. Remember, this was the same company that we'd heard the Australian news report about, the precursor to Anon. They'd sold tens of thousands of encrypted phones before being taken down by American law enforcement. And finally tonight, some good news. U.S. federal authorities arrested the CEO of a Canadian communications company for supplying encrypted cell phones to criminal organizations, including the Mexican cartel formerly headed by El Chapo. Vincent Ramos, founder of Phantom Security, was arrested. 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. The main reason being that the founder of Phantom Security, Vincent Ramos, had initially promised to cooperate with the FBI, to actually let them hack into his unhackable network and trace the criminals using it. But at the last minute, he'd changed his mind and tried to flee instead. He was too scared of reprisals from former customers, which for a moment had left the FBI at a dead end. Until they noticed another character in the mix. AFKU. Remember AFKU? Before Anam, he'd actually worked with Phantom Secure, and he'd had plans to start his own criminal phone network. But now that AFGU saw the feds had arrested the head of Phantom Secure, he got scared. Were they going to roll him up too? 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. For the FBI, the size of this opportunity was staggering. Typically, when someone in an organized crime group flips, the best case scenario is that the informant might lead you to the head of the group they belong to. But here, entire networks could be exposed. A con Iick, the Australian drug kingpin, for instance. You could get him, you could get his underlings. but his phone might also connect you to the head of the Comancheros, a totally different criminal organization. He was tight with them. If you controlled the phones, if you controlled them entirely, you might wrap up entire criminal social networks. I can't stress enough how big of an ace that is being played by AFCU. Like if you imagine if you an informant in a normal crime syndicate and it like 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, 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. So then what does it look like, AFGU and FBI building a phone network for criminals? What's the process? Well, 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 AFGU 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. One I spoke to had their MacBook on their chest or their stomach from bed. 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. American law enforcement found themselves in a strange predicament. The FBI employs a lot of smart people, but presumably few who know how to program a new smartphone. So now they were outsourcing the work to these coders who were in the dark about the actual mission. And so these remote coders who are building this, I mean, it's funny, it's like one of those, the Russian nesting dolls, because theoretically the company is saying they're a phone company, but they're really a phone company for criminals, but they're really a phone company to catch criminals. Who do these coders think they're working for and what do they think they're making? 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. You know, maybe they work in banking and this is very common where you'll have encrypted 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. 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 is trying to build a surveillance apparatus. And whose idea is this? Like, who has the audacious idea to try this? One of those key people is Andrew Young. 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 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, and will move on with their lives. Andrew Young and the 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. It's easy to imagine the downsides of a plan like this. Law enforcement running a bespoke phone network at Verizon, but for people who sell heroin by the shipping container and murder the people who wrong them. the moral hazards were staggering. And the FBI's attempt to negotiate all that, it actually helps explain what was happening with a criminal like Microsoft, why his deals kept getting confounded, even though he was never quite arrested. The feds were invisibly managing the lives of many Microsofts, all the while getting a clearer, more high-res view into the modern crime world than perhaps anyone had ever glimpsed. One of the big things they learned was just the sheer scale of the underworld. Before Anam, Europol's best estimate was that the value of proceeds of crime in the EU was something like, in 2016, $122 billion. That estimate turned out to be quite low. 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 like an entire iceberg emerged underneath the water's surface, where it's like, oh no, this is way bigger than we anticipated. And something that doesn't normally come up in ordinary criminal investigations, but it did with a nom, 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're going to have people in ports, in airports as well. 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. So it's both the illegal world is bigger than we realized and there's more corruption than we thought. 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 sort of anticipated. You've seen some of the material that they saw. Like, what have you seen? So when the FBI started digging through the Anon messages, what they found was that the content was overwhelmingly criminal. Usually if a wiretap, it's 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 hundreds of thousands of Anon 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. We're going to kill this person. We're 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. For you as a person moving through the world, what is it like spending that much time inside the minds of people for whom, you know, murdering people is normal and something that they text about? I read so many messages sent by and about Microsoft that I genuinely started to realize what this person was like. Like I would be reading the chat messages and I think to myself, oh, Microsoft's not going to like that. He's going to get rid of it. 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. I think he's probably going to chill out now. He's got to have his system. And sure enough, 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. 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 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 is real. And it really blew me away. And what, sorry, several questions. One is, what is the emoji for an assassination? Or is it more like, good job killing him, smiley face? 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. But from a law enforcement perspective, like, if you have Microsoft ordering deaths on your phone network, aren't you, don't you need to do something about that? Yeah. Even though legally Anon 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. 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. 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 a NOM. And the issue was that the FBI did not provide those messages to the Swedish authorities in time. 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? Right. You have to decide when the trap closes shut. After the break, the trap does close shut. The end of Operation Trojan Shield. And a very bad day for some enthusiastic phone recommenders. Let's after some ads. Welcome back to the show. Of all the criminals caught in Anam's dragnet, the one Joseph found most fascinating was Microsoft, the drug dealer of all trades who was one of Anam's biggest evangelists, accidentally leading so many of his friends and associates directly into the FBI's trap. In your reporting, you focus on Microsoft, but the sense I got is that the authorities were also focusing on Microsoft, that of all the sort of dots on the map that they could pay attention to, It almost, I got the sense that at some point, they were almost like playing God with him and like Old Testament God with him in a really unusual way. 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. And the Swedish authorities that 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. 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. And the idea is that the more they fuck with him, the more he has to reach out to other people to do more business with. And he's like a barium that is going through this criminal network and they're going to see more and more of it. 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 Anon 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. It's just funny, like I've had spells in my life where I felt like something beyond me was confounding every, like every time I needed luck to work out, it didn't. But it's never been the case that there was actually someone pulling the strings to mess with me. It's just strange to think that once for someone, that was actually the case. 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. So, Microsoft, how does Microsoft find out? Does he find out from the press conference? Like, at what point does he finally realize like, oh, the thing everyone was saying to me was in fact true? 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 they'll 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 realize, hey, something's going on. As criminals all over the world were arrested, suspicions grew, but nobody knew for sure that Anam was an FBI operation until that gleeful San Diego press conference with the U.S. attorney, announcing the program's success, and finally, closing the trap. According to Joseph, part of the FBI's calculation for ending the operation, weirdly, had just been due to the overwhelming success of Anam. Towards the end, so many criminals were on the network, sending so many millions of texts, that for the government just monitoring them and preventing murders was beginning to require too much manpower So after about three years of running a NAM that why the FBI decided to shut it down By the time of that press conference announcing the trap over 800 arrests had been made. But I was surprised to learn that Microsoft and his buddy, Hakan Ayek, were not among them. Despite being high-value targets, they'd slipped the net. At least at first. Half a year after the big bust, Joseph Cox is tooling around online, And he sees Hakon Ayik, now an international fugitive, behaving on the internet in an astonishingly brazen way. I see a Google account in Hakon 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. Wait, he's an international fugitive. He's the most wanted person from Australia. And he's just saying, like, this donor kebab place rocks? 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. Is it risky behavior? Yes. But who among us has not had an especially good meal and felt like they just had to share their feelings with the internet? Consequences be damned. 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 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. He was Australia's most wanted man, but tonight, Hakan Ayik is behind bars in a Turkish prison. Ayik, who's accused of running a global drug empire, was sensationally arrested in Istanbul, where he'd been hiding out since fleeing Sydney. What's going on? What's going on, police? What's going on? Turkish police video of these raids included not just body cam footage, but also cinematic drone shots and Hollywood scoring. You see the cops bang on Ayek's door, and then they're in his apartment. He's on his knees, shirtless, hands cuffed behind his back, surrounded by masked Turkish cops. They pick up 36 other Hassan Ayek associates, including Microsoft. 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 Hakann'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. 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. And so what is the fallout from all of this? What in the world after this operation has happened has been revealed? What is the world we are now living in? Well, the drug trade continues. 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 sizable dent in the drug trade, like maybe there should be a different approach. 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. 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? Remember, this had been one of the FBI's goals to delegitimize the encrypted phones made specifically for criminals as a piece of technology. To shut down not just one tech company, but an entire category of technology itself. The way Google Glass killed eyeglass computers for a decade, or the way that crashing flying cars set those vehicles back for quite some time. And in this, law enforcement was successful. But Joseph says, that success has created a new problem. Because now, some criminals who want privacy have learned that they're better off using the same tools everyone else does. Encrypted messaging apps like Signal. Which means if the FBI runs another, similar sting operation, they might be scraping up messages not just from the Microsofts of the world, but from you, or from people you know. Joseph believes we need to decide if that's a trade-off we're comfortable with. do we want law enforcement to touch these consumer platforms at all and it's incredibly complicated and fraught issue but we're even seeing it like 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 like it's not even in the shadows they're like the european legislators are just coming out and saying we want to do this so maybe it's time we sort of pay attention to what these people are asking. I mean, it's funny. I found reading your book, it confounded some of the ideas I'd walked into it with, which is to say, as a journalist, I feel like it wouldn't be terribly surprising for me to say, my biases are towards privacy. And obviously, the same encryption technology that is going to be used by political dissidents is going to be used by people doing all sorts of terrible things. And my feeling tends to be that privacy is worth it. Reading this particular story where it's a phone company used by almost exclusively criminals and where the crimes that are being documented are like incredibly violent, incredibly heinous, I was very much like rooting for the surveillance state in a way that I don't always do. First of all, I'm just like curious how you felt. Did you feel that way? Because I feel like you are also a privacy-minded person, but this is like at least one case where I feel like perhaps, I don't know, you can see the FBI side of things. 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 that 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 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. 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. 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 three options I see in front of me. 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 will undermine the security of the apps okay sure 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 a nom 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. 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 like 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? 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. Like, do you want them to do that? Or do you want them to do something less invasive? Right. Because I mean, the thing that you're pointing to is, I don't traffic cocaine. The podcast industry is not doing that badly. I mean, we'll see, you know. But like, so I don't have to worry because if all the cocaine traffickers are on one app, yeah, the FBI can listen in. It really is not a big deal. Signal, which everyone I know uses as just a communications platform, one of the things it offers is that it's encrypted. But I have journalist friends who just like the idea of an encrypted app. I have people who use Signal because people they know use Signal. The Microsofts of their life came and said, just use this thing. It's cool. I know people who participate as customers in illicit drug markets and use Signal. When I first got it, everybody I knew was a journalist or a low-level lawbreaker. And when I saw someone on, I was like, oh, which one are they? Maybe they're both. At this point, a lot of people are on it. And so if the FBI monitored every single signal message and then they chose what to discard, yeah, I would feel like my privacy was being compromised. And what you're saying is now that this has happened with Anam, the next frontier are these places where criminals and non-criminals mix and meet. And so we kind of have to decide. And you're saying your proposal would be, rather than letting law enforcement eavesdrop on an entire network, why don't we make it so that law enforcement has to go to the phone? And if they think that I'm a cocaine trafficker, they have to get into my phone rather than going to the Signal Foundation. 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. 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 like I don't know just figure it out and of course that's kind of easy for me to say but like I would take that over 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 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 the search engine listener who is also a criminal, what is the perfect phone for a criminal to use in 2024? I mean, I would probably use a Graphene OS phone, which is a custom security focused fork of Android, but it 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 through your web browser. I've done it. It's really cool. It takes 30 seconds or a couple of minutes. 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. So, if you're a search engine listener who wants privacy, for any reason, no judgments here, you criminal freaks, your question has been answered. Joseph, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Joseph Cox is the co-founder of the independent website 404 Media, one of my favorite homes for tech reporting online. His very wonderful book about Anam is called Darkwire. Go read it. There is a ton more story than we were able to get into here, and it is now available in paperback. Thank you. senior producer. Emily Malterra is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Kern, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Sheff. If you would like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus interviews, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can join Incognito Mode at searchengine.show. Follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week with a new episode. Thank you.