Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever by Joseph Cox
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wild story about how the FBI ran an encrypted phone service called Anom used by a bunch of criminals in the drug trade! The story itself is so wild that a lot of the book talking about some of the nuts and bolts didn’t quite live up to the hype for me.
Odds and ends:
– Anom was not the first company to make ultra-secure phones – an earlier one was Phantom Secure. Their model was interesting – they would only sell phones to people if they were referred to by existing customers, which meant that almost everyone using them were criminals. (pg 14)
– In March 2014 a news report in Australia claimed that Phantom Secure phones were linked to some underworld killings, and that the police couldn’t get into the phone to read their messages. Obviously this made Phantom Secure much more popular! (pg 45)
– Phantom Secure’s CEO was arrested in 2018 and convicted of racketeering conspiracy for knowingly providing criminals with the phones. Phantom Secure’s sellers were looking for what to do next (and trying to avoid the FBI), but one of them who was technically-minded wanted to start his own encrypted phone company. And in exchange for a possibility of a reduced sentence, he reached out to the FBI and offered, from the very beginning, to let the FBI run it! (pg 84)
– There are several discussions about the age-old problem that intelligence services have when they’ve broken a high-value method of encryption; they want to use the knowledge they have to stop bad things from happening, but doing this too often will make it clear to the enemy that their encryption is broken and they’ll switch to something else. (see the Coventry Blitz from World War 2, although apparently it wasn’t very clear that Coventry was even the target!) (pg 120, 172)
– Anom phones claimed to have the GPS removed for security reasons. (some other encrypted phones also removed the camera and microphone, but Anom didn’t do this) Instead the phone attached the GPS coordinates of the phone to every message that was forwarded to the FBI! (pg 126)
– The pandemic affected criminals, too – apparently more money laundering was done with dead drops (which don’t require face-to-face contact) than before! (pg 137)
– A separate encrypted phone company called Encrochat had some of its servers in France, and the French police discovered this and managed to hijack the update process to backdoor all of their phones! After a few months the company figured out that the phones had been hacked and pushed an update to fix some issues and gather more information, but the police re-hacked the phones with a new update shortly thereafter. At that point Encrochat threw in the towel, told all their customers the phones weren’t safe to use, and shut the company down. (pg 149)
– One of the big gangsters that the book follows (known, confusingly, as “Microsoft”) realized at some point that something was up because a bunch of his operations were getting disrupted. But he thought it was yet another encrypted phone company they used (Sky), and so he forbid people he worked with from using that. Which meant more people using Anom! (pg 209)
– The knowledge that Anom was compromised was kept pretty close to the vest. In one case a Swedish police officer was ready to raid a warehouse and phoned another officer to ask if their source of the intelligence would be in danger. The “source” was actually Anom, so the other officer said they’d call back in ten minutes, twiddled their thumbs, then called back saying it was OK to go ahead! (pg 266)
– After the operation was done (and the FBI announced the truth about Anom), estimates put the number of arrests from the Encrochat, Anom, and Sky intelligence (yes, the police compromised Sky too!) at more than ten thousand people. They also led to the seizure of two hundred tons(!) of drugs and more than 760 million dollars! (pg 309) The police learned a lot about how drug smuggling operations work. And yet, it probably made only a small dent in the overall drug trade. (pg 311)
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