AN0M, the backdoored ‘secure’ messaging app for criminals, is still producing arrests after four years Australian police last week made 55 arrests using evidence gathered with a backdoored messaging app that authorities distributed in the criminal community. This story starts in 2018, when US authorities charged the operator of a Canadian company called “Phantom Secure” for facilitating encrypted communications among criminals …
>was a closed system, and messages sent with the app therefore didn’t go across a telecoms network
So was data was transferred by the Modulated Monarch Method proposed by PTerry ?
(A system which uses the fact that the heir becomes king/Queen instantaneously on the death of the current monarch and so faster than light communication is possible by endangering the monarch and measuring the resulting level of royalty in a distant heir)
Have an upvote for the Sir Pterry reference. Just to clarify something here from the article, it wasn’t a three or four letter agency that came up with or created An0m. Though they did end up with all the data and were the ones who ultimately pulled the strings they actually didn’t set it up. It was a bloke known by a pseudonym “Afgoo” who was a distributor for Phantom Secure. He was facing charges related to that phone system and decided to see if he could cut a deal with the FBI. He was thinking of setting up his own “secure app” and approached the feds to try and reduce his potential sentence by offering them full backdoor access. I read a very good book about An0m called Dark Wire by Joseph Cox which I highly recommend if you’re interested in this.
"The AFP and FBI stopped using AN0M because it produced more evidence than they could comfortably handle. The AFP, however, still wants access to encrypted communications"
When it's solid intelligence they can't cope but they still want haystacks in which there might be needles. It's just data fetishism.
"The AFP and FBI stopped using AN0M because it produced more evidence than they could comfortably handle. The AFP, however, still wants access to encrypted communications and last year called for operators of encrypted messaging services to practice “accountable encryption” to help authorities quickly investigate messages felt to represent a threat to safety and security."
I'm sure "too much evidence" is the reason they stopped using it. And having "too much money" is the reason His Muskiness is firing up all those exploding rockets.
If they had such an excess of evidence then why do they feel the need to backdoor other secure messaging services? Wouldn't that also give them a ton of evidence?
It's a similar situation to what the Allies faced during WWII after cracking the Enigma code. How do you apply the intelligence gathered from decrypted messages without alerting the Germans to the fact?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#German_suspicions
This balancing act was dramatised in the film "The Imitation Game". However, unlike the film representation, it wouldn't have been up to the boffins at Bletchley Park to decide what intelligence to reveal or act upon - EVERY message that was decoded was fed upwards to the intelligence services / military command.
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