Which app was that? There's been a few instances like that, Encrochat, ANOM and Sky ECC were all intercepted in one way or another by law enforcement.

Of course, the real question is whether these led to any convictions. They did lead to a few prevented murders and the like, but given they're all sweeping / non targeted sting operations, they're not admissible in court in a lot of cases.

Darknet Diaries is not a good podcast.

Each episode is chewed up slowly to the lowest common denominator, meaning half of an episode is condescending explanation of trivial matter. The misplaced air of faux mystery, true crime podcast style, does not help. The narrator being occasionally a free speech absolutist and explicitly in favour of money laundering services does not help.

Risky Biz covered Anom in https://risky.biz/RB751/ via a dense if a bit short interview with Joseph Cox, who wrote a book about it, starting around minute 35. Listen to that and respective Darknet Diaries episode to compare. In general Risky Biz offers more balanced, less boring, and up-to-date takes on cybercrime (sans interviews with actual criminals).

Could you reference some of this free speech absolutist background?

I'm willing to reexamine my appreciation for the darknet diaries,but I have never gotten this political take from the content itself. Rather he seems to simply be willing to engage with folks he disagrees with morally, as a matter similar to any journalist might. He does not engage with active crime or anything like that either.

I really like darknet diaries. I don't think it is just about cyber crime though. More like a human social journalism with a heavy cyber crime angle. So that's how you have such a range of content in my opinion.

Also, maybe listen at 1.3X? That makes the explanations and pacing imo easier

Yes. Sorry, I edited my comment for brevity. The episode about Tornado Cash was the one I pulled the plug on Darknet Diaries. His suddenly very opinionated take just did not jive with reality, and considering it is targeted at laypeople I wasn’t a fan of that.

Author of TFA here: I like Risky Biz a lot.

An actual strongly encrypted messenger app like Signal is not really like a FBI fake-encrypted honeypot app like Anom

That was a lot more than a secure messaging app. It was an entire Android-based operating system, preinstalled on physical devices.

It was originally created by a private company, that went a bit too far in marketing it to criminals. Undercover agents asked the CEO "How do I use this to prevent the police from monitoring my drug smuggling", and he answered the question.

In order to keep the feds from throwing them in prison, the remaining execs needed to provide names, and what better way than to compromise the phone and market it to criminals?

Around the same time, law enforcement cracked a more popular custom phone used by criminals, so gangs started looking elsewhere. And the FBI was waiting for them.

It was an insane operation. It was being run from a local FBI office (San Diego), not headquarters. A bunch of low level agents.

But it provided massive police intelligence around the world.

It also screwed over a lot of the contractors who worked on it. The Android developers who designed the phone are now on organized crime's radar, even though they thought they were just making a secure phone.

I heard this story elsewhere, and the attitude of law enforcement infuriated me. It was basically, “Only criminals would care about their privacy to purchase this premium phone, so of course we needed to crack it”. Screw everyone else who did not want more ad tracking or whatever.

Law enforcement was paranoid about making sure it only went to criminals. It was producing so much intelligence, any non-criminal usage wasted lots of time.

The fact that it was really only criminals using it was the big selling point.

I agree in part, but nobody legit is paying $200/month to use signal or other free secure private messengers. If it was a free platform I can see innocents getting caught, but considering it was sold by criminals, to criminals for a criminal fee — I think they were mostly correct.

Granted I’m hazy on the details of the story, but I did not recall a service fee. Just a few hundred dollars premium Android phone geared towards secure privacy. Sure, there was a nudge and a wink towards crime, but I could easily see it appealing to a civil protestor, journalist, or philanderer.

It was only available from a salesman, you couldn't order it via a website. The salesmen knew their clients, and knew they were criminals.

The sales chain was what made the operation so effective. The only people who had the phones were the ones the FBI wanted with the phones.

But there are many open source, free, and actually secure messengers...

not in the late 2010s when this was happening.

There was (is) one though, audited by NCC Group in 2015. A vuln has been found but fixed by 2016. Not sure about other messengers.

I've often wondered if automatic updates and nag-screens are being used by bad-faith actors as vectors to sneak trojan horses into nominally-open-source apps. I tend to assume that any sufficiently-large open-source project will be well-enough scrutinized enough that they can't be used in this way but when you're obtaining binary builds somebody else made, and especially when those builds are being pushed out on an almost-daily basis for extremely mundane reasons the chain-of-trust is has several weak links. Only accepting signed binaries is not a good answer to this problem because if you aren't involved in a project then you have very little insight into how those binaries were signed or whether the private key is even private.

But even so, when stakes are high enough victim-blaming becomes both warranted and healthy. Even if there really was a deep-state conspiracy to embarrass the presidential cabinet (not that i think there was), the ultimate responsibility should still fall on their heads for not taking obvious precautions while planning an airstrike. If you can't verify that everybody in your signal conversation is actually supposed to be in the conversation, let alone that they are even who they appear to be, then it's obviously not an appropriate platform for this discussion.