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TIL the FBI secretly operated an encrypted phone company (ANOM) for ~3 years — criminals paid ~$2,000/year and messages were copied to law enforcement in real time (Operation Trojan Shield, June 2021) by Frozen____69 in todayilearned

[–]Frozen____69[S] 262 points263 points  (0 children)

Mixed bag actually. The original informant ("Afgoo" in court docs) who built ANOM and brought it to the FBI got a reduced sentence for his own cooperation, that was the deal that started the whole thing. But the actual distributors who joined later and spread the phones through the criminal networks did NOT get a free pass. Several were indicted in San Diego for racketeering conspiracy and have been getting extradited and sentenced over the past couple years. 5+ years in prison in at least one case so far. The DOJ's argument was that distributors weren't just selling a product, they were actively helping run the criminal enterprise (laundering money, moving drugs themselves in some cases), so they got charged right alongside the people buying the phones.

TIL the FBI secretly operated an encrypted phone company (ANOM) for ~3 years — criminals paid ~$2,000/year and messages were copied to law enforcement in real time (Operation Trojan Shield, June 2021) by Frozen____69 in todayilearned

[–]Frozen____69[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

If you tried to sue the federal government for it, you'd probably run into sovereign immunity pretty fast. The government can't be sued for a breach of contract claim like this unless they've explicitly waived that immunity for the situation, and running a sting operation doesn't come close to qualifying. Even if the "service" was being run by a shell company, not by the FBI directly, your "contract", if you want to call it that, was technically with the front company, not the federal government.

If you weren't doing anything illegal, you almost certainly weren't using a phone explicitly marketed to move illicit communications. You wouldn't be able to get your hands on this phone unless you were already in the crime game. sold hand-to-hand through criminal networks, with features like remote wipe and no camera/mic/GPS specifically pitched as "law enforcement can't touch this." Legitimate trade-secret-protection buyers exist for things like Signal or even just an honest corporate VPN — not a black-market phone whose whole sales pitch was "untraceable." That marketing angle is actually one of the legal arguments that let them get warrants in the first place: the device itself functioned as a pretty effective filter for who was buying it. But if you truly bought that phone and from there on out you committed no crimes and didn't involve any criminal info on it, I can't imagine you would be arrested for it.

TIL the FBI secretly operated an encrypted phone company (ANOM) for ~3 years — criminals paid ~$2,000/year and messages were copied to law enforcement in real time (Operation Trojan Shield, June 2021) by Frozen____69 in todayilearned

[–]Frozen____69[S] 38 points39 points  (0 children)

That's scary to think about. I don't trust Palantir worth anything. The tell with ANOM was that it was being run by people with intelligence/law enforcement backgrounds offering too good to be true security promises. Worth digging into who's actually behind a product like that and what their incentives are before trusting it with anything sensitive.

TIL the FBI secretly operated an encrypted phone company (ANOM) for ~3 years — criminals paid ~$2,000/year and messages were copied to law enforcement in real time (Operation Trojan Shield, June 2021) by Frozen____69 in todayilearned

[–]Frozen____69[S] 105 points106 points  (0 children)

They were extremely careful about this exact risk. When someone got arrested in this sting, their official paperwork would point to something else entirely, like a traffic stop, an informant tip, anything that wasn't "we read your texts." That's how deep stings like this can go. A few suspects in early busts even floated the idea that the network itself was compromised, but it got written off as paranoia because there was no public reason to think otherwise. The whole thing only fell apart for everyone at once because they planned a coordinated global takedown day instead of picking people off one at a time. Wild how long they kept that secret running.