shaken not stirred
For many, the highlight of last year was the eventual release of the latest James Bond blockbuster, No Time to Die. The twenty-fifth 007 movie saw our favourite spy supposedly enjoying a hedonistic retirement before his old CIA friend, Felix Leiter, convinces him to rescue a treacherous scientist and put to his licensed sword, an evil villain who’s armed with a world-threatening new technology. Tense stuff for sure but what if I was to tell you of an intelligence sting that truly puts the stuff of Q to shame in its sheer chutzpah? In short, an international operation which witnessed thousands of criminals using an encrypted ‘secure’ phone which had actually been conceived, built and sold by the police?
In the past, secure phones marketed to hyper security users (aka mobsters, drug barons, cartels, henchmen, fraudsters, smugglers et al) were sold with the camera, microphone and GPS software removed and with the all-important option to remotely wipe the device’s data. ‘Remotely’ is the key here as, if the phone was ever captured by the police, the criminal could automatically destroy the info held within it. Supplied by Panama-based Phantom Secure and Europe’s own Sky Global, the networks were eventually shut-down and An0m, a scheme seeded in Vancouver was initiated. By 2018 it had become something of a viral sensation within the criminal underworld.
An0m, as it was called, looked like an off-the-shelf smartphone, but it could not be bought from Jeff Bezos. First you had to know a guy who knew a guy for a personal introduction, then you had to have the cash to pay $1700 for the handset and $1250/year subscription. Over ten-thousand gladly stumped-up the entrance-fee for the talk & text-only device as An0m included several highly attractive USPs. As well as automatically disguising the voice of the callers, on opening the phone’s calculator the user was made privy to a secret messaging application whereby, not only was every message encrypted, it could only be received by another An0m phone. Furthermore, rather than just having the remote wipe function, users could set an option for the device to automatically wipe itself if it went offline for a specified amount of time. Wow.
However, what the users failed to realise is that via a hidden ‘master key’, every single message sent with An0m, 19.4m of them in total, was effectively Bcc’d to the Australian Federal Police who, with the FBI, had conceived, built and sold the devices. Effectively operating as a small, bespoke start-up brand, An0m’s stated aim was to assure users of complete security, privacy and anonymity and so successful was its underground adoption that users quickly dispensed with euphemisms and aliases, naming names, detailing drugs, weights, destinations and means of transportation. The incriminating information gleaned from as far afield as Mexico, Thailand, the US to the Netherlands and Belgium, presented a pressing and ever-increasing dilemma: when to intervene and how long to preserve the integrity of the wider operation.
The date for the pushing the button, codenamed ‘Operation Ironside’, was set and on 7th June 2021, more than 800 arrests were made. By the end of July, 693 search warrants had been issued, 289 alleged offenders charged, and $49m in cash, almost 5000kg of drugs and 138 firearms seized in Australia alone, together with six illegal drug factories being dismantled. Now, if that true-tale doesn’t make it to the silver screen sometime soon, then I’ll be Blofeld!
