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

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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 tape 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 cons, 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's not dissect the latest outrageous tweet from Elon Musk. His interests lie elsewhere. 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 CAD 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. Your 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 is 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. These cells encrypted phones that are so secure even Australia's electronic spy agency card cracked 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 a fancy rich dude who cares about privacy. Who is this phone actually for? This phone is actually for serious organized criminals such as members of Baikigangs who may assassinate one another or even members of the Sinaloa drug cartel. They're not your normal business executives. A lot of serious organized criminal activity in Australia is controlled by the motorcycle gangs. So you have the Cometeros, you have the Banditos, the Hells Angels as well and they all sort of, they're all in a melting pot with their different motivations, different territory. Three nomads were shot in Maricville. The Hells Angels Pedisham Clubhouse was firebombed. A Rebels member was killed, Banditos a notorious ambush channel. A shooting outside the Nomads Club near Penwreth yesterday morning, the victim and innocent newspaper delivery night. Shotgun blasts from both sides of the car park, left four common Cheros 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 breach of the 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 US 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? A Nom. A Nom 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 a Nom 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 a Nom app would reveal itself out of the car. 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 whose 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 I fell into the wrong hands, you know, maybe a border cop seized it, or another Laura 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, I cloud and Apple, they have something similar, but you don't go to Apple and be like, "Hey, my phone is in the hands of the cops, could you please, Tim cook isn't going to do that, as far as I know." An arm'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 could send emojis. This turned out to be a winning combination, criminals like everybody else are human, suckers for the latest and greatest in new due dads. It had all of these bells and whistles, which, while still being secure, showed that, hey, we don't have to have these 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. It's both secure and all the fun, exciting advances in smart phones that we've all gotten completely used to and don't actually feel an exciting, but it's 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-tun shipments of cocaine. Of course, while it's great to have a product with killer features, a phone can't sell itself. An arm, 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 law-breaking. The way an arm 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, entering the only people on an arm, 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 resell in that work that also keeps the good guys out and the bad guys in. So unlike, like, if I wanted to buy an iPhone, I'll go to the Apple Store. If I want to get an annum 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 a norm. Because if a top tier criminal had the top of their drug trafficking pyramid gets a phone, that means everybody underneath them needs to get a non-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 norm 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 norm. That'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 Hakkan 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. Hakkan Ayik is a very famous criminal in Australia. He's not the creator of a norm. 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 Hakkan Ayik, presumably from his own social media. Selfies. He's a jack, huge tattoo-covered chest, buzz cut, looks a little bit like Joe Rogan. Ayik 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 Criminegeros and the Hells Angels, groups that would usually be killing each other if they were in the same room. They banned together to basically put those differences aside and make a lot more money. Hakkan Ayik had been a devout user of Phantom Secure, and when it was shut down, he was very enthusiastic about its new successor. Hakkan Ayik gets very interested in a norm. 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 norm 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 norm than one of the world's top drug traffickers saying, "Hey, this phone is the real deal. So much so that I'm going to put my freedom and my safety behind it as well." It's funny, it's sort of like in my world, Ryan Reynolds is a spokesperson for Mint Mobile, the cellphone 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." 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 Riftkin, 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 US State Department. He looks, honestly, quite nerdy, not a bodybuilder like Hakan, more like an IT guy. A heavy-sat 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 that he works with his phone, what crimes is he using the phones to commit? So Microsoft, if you can think up a drug trafficking scheme, Microsoft has not only probably fought about himself, he's probably done it as well. Putting drugs inside energy drinks, using corrupt workers inside energy drink factories. He's talked about gay airstrips in Europe to deliver drugs. He's hidden cocaine inside two lips. He's built and fetamine 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, Anom 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. 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. To kind of act the mostly mastermind, and Microsoft, his nerdy underling, may have been the Ryan Reynolds's of Anom, 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 long time denizen of the criminal phone world. He'd actually even been involved for a bit in Anom's more primitive predecessor, Phantom Secure. And now AFKU is moving the whole industry forward. As the month went on, Anom, 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 Anom and be like, hey, you should put this feature in. No, no, no, no, you should take this feature out to the point where the Anom 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. I gave him a kind of quote. criminal superpower. Most of the time anyway. (upbeat music) In December, 2020, Microsoft began to hit a biblical patch, a bad luck. (upbeat music) The first major piece of bad luck for Microsoft is that Swedish police somehow find his amphesomy lab in the Swedish countryside. It turns out the cops followed one of his lab cooks who was making a switch of amphesomene in a shopping center car park. They follow him back and they discover this amphesomene lab. (upbeat music) 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 and ink glove, 'cause he puts his hands up and he's covered in an amphesomene and that's the first bit of bad luck and they seize all the drugs. But more importantly, if 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 there, 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 amphesomene smuggling operation. Like, okay, rather than building the lab, I'm just gonna 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 gonna 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 is introduced a colleague to the platform. He in turn gets more friends onto a norm 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 norm is completely secure. He just blames other people and says they must be a rat or a snitch. For him, a norm is never the problem. And then one summer day, a law enforcement agent on the other side of the world in San Diego, 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 US 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 featuring a fabric COVID mask. It's 2021. They're here to announce the many arrests that are being made in the US 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 US 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 Anum, A-N-O-M. So the vulnerability for criminals was being run by a United States law enforcement agency by the FBI. The US 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 Anum 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 drugs mugler, and what the feds found on history's most ambitious wire tap. [MUSIC PLAYING] This episode of Surge Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI. If you're tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming algorithms designed for passive background noise, you need to check out MUBI. MUBI is a global film company, bringing great sentiments to the world, curating and elevating visionary filmmaking that's hand-picked always. It's the kind of platform for movies you'll actually watch, fall in love with, and keep thinking and talking about long after the credits roll. One of their newest exclusive titles is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp My Asma, directed by visionary writer, director Jane Schoenrun, who you might know from, I saw the TV glow. It's a world-expanding, genre-bending wonder, starring Hannah Einbinder and Jillian Anderson. This story follows a young director trying to resurrect the fated Camp My Asma/Franchise. But when she visits the original reclusive star, they spiral into this blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and sheer delirium. If you can try MUBI-free for 30 days at MUBI.com/SurgeEngine, that's MUBI.com/SurgeEngine for a whole month of great cinema for free. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back to the show. A nom, 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 Encrouchat or Sky, that were actually being run for the benefit of criminals. So tell me the story from the FBI's perspective. How did the FBI come to be running the criminal iPhone company? So in 2018, the FBI shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. It had seven to 10,000 users. It was very popular, very prolific. The Cindeloid drug cartel used the Baikigang's on Australia did as well. Phantom Secure. Remember, this was the same company that we'd heard the Australian news report about. The precursor to a nom. It sold tens of thousands of encrypted phones of were being taken down by American law enforcement. And finally tonight, some good news. US 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 Raymo's founder of Phantom Security was arrested. And when the FBI shut that down, they tried to get a back door into the company. That wasn't successful for a number of different reasons. The main reason being that the founder of Phantom Secure, 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'd noticed another character in the mix. Afgo. Remember Afgo? Before I know, he'd ask. actually worked with Phantom Secure. And he'd had plans to start his own criminal phone network. But now that Afgoos are the feds had arrested the head of Phantom Secure, he got scared. Were they gonna roll him up, too? So sort of backed into a corner and realizing, hey, maybe I'm next. This person called Afgoo 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 less assentance 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 Khan Ayak, the Australian drug kingpin, for instance, you could get him, you could get his underlings. But his phone might also connect to you to the head of the common charos, a totally different criminal organization. He was tight with them. If you control the phones, if you control 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 Afgoo. Like if you imagine, if you're an informant and a normal crime syndicate and say, 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 crimes syndicates around the entire globe. It's like, from this point on, the FBI can take a norm 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, Afgoo and the FBI building and 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 the Afgoo and then people sort of working with him, higher, ordinary Android developers, some of whom I've spoken to. And you know, they would log on to their job from a number of different Asian countries. When I spoke to have their MacBook on their chest or their stomach from bed, like, 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, OK, 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 line 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 dollars, 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. But they know that. That's fine. They also know there is a message copying feature inside a norm. 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. Maybe they're working banking. And this is very common where you'll have encrypted messaging inside a financial institution but to stop stuff like inside a 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, light 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 trying to build a surveillance apparatus. And who's idea is this? Who has the idea to try this? One of those key people is Andrew Yuh. Now, he's an assistant US attorney, but he's not a drug prosecutor. He's from the world of tax and white collar crime. So through a series of events when he gets involved in the phantom secure case and then the enormous 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 the border narrowly in San Diego, what prosecutors and other agencies are doing is we'll just see drugs at the border, we'll give these poor, disenfranchised people who are probably trying to make two or $3,000 spuggling coke across the border, we'll give them a pre-written plea deal and we'll move on with our lives. Andrew Yuh and other prosecutors in the FBI round him, they wanted to do something different. They wanted to do something they 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 up this spoke phone network, up 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 Microsoft's, 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 a nom, Euro poll'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 their estimate, basically. It was like, they already knew, of course, the contours of organized crime, but like an entire iceberg emerged underneath the water surface, whereas they all know, 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 gonna have corrupt law enforcement officials giving tips to their criminal cohorts. You're gonna 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 they use 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 they 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 whatever you've seen. So when the FBI started digging through the anonymous messages, what they found was that the content was overwhelmingly criminal. Usually of 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 the non-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 of 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 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 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. 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 chilling. We're back to dealing a fetamine. And that is the sensation that some of these agents got that 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 hit man do three or four hits at once? And like, that's 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, 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 with like, ha, ha, ha. Haha, you know, we've done that or just strings after they've 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 takeoff food. - And 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 a norm wasn't a wiretapped for various quirks in US law, they treat it ethically as such, which means that if you're listening to a wire and there's a clear crepto life against somebody, like we're gonna go kill this person at this time with this weapon. The FBI or other law enforcement typically act, so 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 is the case that warn the victim and be like, we're not gonna 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 a norm. 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 norm. 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 have just some ads. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome back to the show. Of all the criminals caught in a norms dragnet, the one Joseph found was fascinating with Microsoft. The drug dealer of all trades, who was one of a norms 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 have 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 a norm. 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 and 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 barrier that is going to 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 a norm. 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, and the 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 of 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. 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 that 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 it will 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 a nom was an FBI operation until that gleeful San Diego press conference with the US 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 a knob. 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 nom, that's 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 Ayak, were not among them. Despite being high value targets, they'd slip the net. At least at first, half a year after the big bust, Joseph Cox is tooling around online, and he sees Hakan Ayak, now an international fugitive, behaving on the internet in an astonishingly brazen way. I see a Google account in Hakan Ayak'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, "This donor Kabab plays 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" until 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 all over. 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. Hakkan, who also gets migrants off, and a ton of other people connected to their network. He was Australia's most wanted man, but tonight, Hakkan 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, sir? What's going on, man? What's going on? The Turkish police video of these raids included not just body hemorrhage, but also cinematic drone shots and Hollywood scoring. You see the cops bang on Ayik'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 Ayik associates, including Microsoft. Microsoft looks completely dumbfounded and surprised in that footage. And what 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 Hakkan'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 for what 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 resting 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 sewing 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 de-legitimize 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 the iGlass 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 microsoft of the world but from you. Different 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 contents of encrypted messages for child sexual abuse imagery and then potentially other crimes as well. Like it's not even in the shadows that 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 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 like my biases are towards privacy and obviously you know 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 and incredibly heinous. I was very much like rooting for this surveillance state anyway that I don't always do. First of all I'm just like curious how you felt. Did you feel the way because I feel like you were 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 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 I've 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 but it's not one of these consumer apps but it is a warning shot of the incredible amount of resources the 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 like speculate or just basically make up what would it be like if the FBI got a back door into a tech product well now we know there's literally the case is it like 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 like three options I see in front of me the first is that secure apps give more data to the authorities you know are you send us a peanut to signal they give information about the user that's pretty problematic because that could be very easily abused for various reasons and undermine the security of the apps okay sure you have the second one which is like well that's just run the apps and get all of the messages on it like they did were not which obviously to me is insane compromising entire communication platform you then have something else which I believe but I know people 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 countries or agencies 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 and 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 like I have journalists friends who just like the idea of an encrypted app I people who use signal because people they know you signal you know the Microsoft's of their life came and said like 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 knew it was a journalist or a low level law breaker 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 is being compromised and what you're saying is now that this has happened with a non the next frontier are these places where criminals and non criminals mix and meet and so we kind of decide and you're saying your proposal would be rather than letting law enforcement ease drop on an entire network why don't we make it's that law enforcement has to go to the phone and if they think that I'm a cocaine trafficker they have to get in 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 Ray Ray 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 so it's something like five million dollars 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 I 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 they I would take that over well now we have a turnkey solution where we could just read all 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 anomal operation is and and for 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 for 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 a norm is called dark wire go read it there is a ton more story than we were able to get into here and it is now available in paperback you search engine is a presentation of Odyssey it was created by by me, PJ vote, and Shruthy Pinominating. This episode was produced by Noah John and fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire 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 Miranda, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Collingator, Moore Kern, Josephine Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schaff. 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 Search Engine.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. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)