For nearly three years the encrypted phone that organised crime trusted most was built, handed out and read by the FBI. It was called Anom.
Together, we have managed to do it again, just like we did during the investigations into crypto communication services like Sky and EncroChat. We were able to intercept and read messages exchanged between serious criminals, this time via a communication service developed by the government itself. And that's amazing. My compliments.
On the eighteenth of May, twenty twenty-one, an FBI agent in San Diego swore an affidavit asking a federal judge for permission to read one Gmail account. To explain why, the agent first had to explain something else. For nearly three years, the encrypted phone that organised crime trusted most had been built, handed out and read by the FBI. Near the end of the affidavit there is one more sentence.
The investigation, it says, is expected to end when a foreign court order expires on the seventh of June, and it will be publicly announced on the eighth. Three weeks before it happened, the FBI wrote down the day it would reveal itself. When it wrote that, close to nine thousand people were using the phone.
It began with a company the FBI had already shut down. Phantom Secure sold stripped-down, encrypted phones to criminal organisations, and in twenty eighteen its chief executive was arrested. The market it left behind did not disappear. It went looking for the next phone.
The affidavit calls the man who supplied that phone a confidential human source. He had sold Phantom Secure and Sky Global devices to criminal groups himself, and he had spent a great deal of money developing a new one, called Anom. He offered it to the FBI. According to the affidavit he had a previous conviction for importing narcotics, he was facing new charges, and he was working with the FBI in the hope of a reduced sentence.
He was paid a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for his services, and fifty-nine thousand five hundred and eight for living and travel expenses. The CHS offered this next generation device, named "Anom," to the FBI to use in ongoing and new investigations.
Before a single phone went out, the FBI, the Australian Federal Police and the informant built what the affidavit calls a master key into the encryption. It attached itself, silently, to every message, so that each one could be decrypted and stored as it was sent. In the affidavit's words, a user of Anom is unaware of this capability. A user of Anom is unaware of this capability.
A hidden copy of every message went to a server outside the United States, was decrypted there, re-encrypted with the FBI's own code, and passed to a second server that the FBI owned. The United States itself was fenced off. Messages from phones inside the country never reached the FBI's server at all.
I'm Reece Kershaw, the Commissioner for the Australian Federal Police. The AFP and FBI have been working together on a world-first operation to bring to justice the organised crime gangs harming our communities with drugs, guns and violence. The FBI provided an encrypted communications platform while the AFP deployed the technical capability through Operation Ironside. This enabled the AFP to inflict maximum damage to transnational and serious organised crime with devastating consequences against those who seek to harm Australians and Australia's interests.
The phones could not be sold in shops. A distributor of encrypted devices has to vet a buyer, and the vetting runs on criminal reputation. So the FBI used the informant's own network. In October twenty eighteen he offered the phones to three former Phantom Secure distributors, mostly in Australia, and about fifty devices went out as a test.
According to Australian law enforcement, one hundred per cent of the people using Anom in that test used it to commit crimes.
From October twenty nineteen, a third country copied the server under its own court order and handed the data to the FBI, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. By then there were several hundred users, most of them still in Australia. Then police in Europe broke EncroChat, another encrypted network, and demand for Anom went up. In March twenty twenty-one the chief executive of Sky Global was charged, and Sky went dark.
The affidavit gives the numbers. Before that, about three thousand active Anom users. After it, close to nine thousand. Every rival the police took down sent its customers to the phone the FBI was reading.
Before Sky's dismantlement, there were approximately 3,000 active Anom users. Since March 12, 2021, as a direct result of the Sky Global charges, there are now close to 9000 active Anom users. By the time the agent swore the affidavit, the FBI had catalogued more than twenty million messages from eleven thousand eight hundred devices in more than ninety countries, used by more than three hundred criminal organisations. The agent wrote that he believed the phones were used exclusively to discuss crime.
The stated goal, in the affidavit's own words, was to shake the confidence in this entire industry. A goal of the Trojan Shield investigation is to shake the confidence in this entire industry because the FBI is willing and able to enter this space and monitor messages. What people wrote on a phone they believed no one could read is in the affidavit too. On the fourth of January twenty twenty, one user sent another a photograph of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine stamped with a Batman label, and they agreed that a hundred and sixty thousand Australian dollars a kilo was the most they would ask.
In March, another user offered two kilograms a week, sealed inside French diplomatic pouches out of Bogota, and sent pictures of the pouches.
Kia ora, I'm Andrew Coster, the Commissioner of New Zealand Police. Today we announced our involvement in a large disruption of organised crime in the form of one of the largest takedowns of an organised crime encryption network, Operation Trojan Shield. I'm very proud of the work that our police staff have done in this major international operation. It reflects the importance of our partnerships internationally, particularly with organisations like FBI, AFP, Europol and many others.
The operation has been a tremendous success and it underscores the importance of our relationships to disrupt organised crime, which this operation has achieved in a significant way. This week, the AFP and our state partners will execute hundreds of warrants and is expected to arrest hundreds of offenders who are linked to this platform. This is the culmination of hard work, perseverance and an invaluable, trusted relationship with the FBI. Operation Ironside has allowed the AFP to inflict maximum damage to transnational and serious organised crime.
We thank the FBI for their long and successful partnership with the AFP. Crime is local, but when we work together, our reach is global. Thank you. The Swedish police has cooperated with the FBI as one of the first international parts in this operation.
Thanks to valuable intelligence that the FBI has shared with us, we have been able to arrest a significant number of leading actors within the violent crime and drug networks in Sweden. The criminality spreads across borders, and international cooperation is crucial to fight serious crime. We highly appreciate this type of cooperation between police organizations. Such large-scale investigations can only be achieved if we join forces at the international level, with each country contributing its own unique expertise.
The Central Unit of the Netherlands Police contributes by developing high-quality, technological tools and making them available to the other participating countries. Thus enabling the analysis and the interpretation of the millions of messages gathered. This provides us with a host of information about many national and international criminal organizations, and enables us to further enhance the information we gathered during other crypto communication investigations. In the future, too, And we will continue, unabated, to track down and dismantle criminal organizations, both nationally and internationally.
Working together, we get the job done. Thank you.
On the seventh of June the foreign court order expired and the server went quiet. On the eighth, police in more than a dozen countries announced what they had done. The FBI said it had supplied more than twelve thousand devices to hundreds of criminal organisations, and that more than a hundred agents and analysts and eighty linguists had worked the messages in San Diego. The phone that organised crime chose because it could not be read had been read, every message, for nearly three years.
The people who bought it were not tricked by the technology. They were tricked by the thing encrypted phones are sold on: trust in the person who sells them.
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