FBI built fake phone company in global wiretapping operation of historic proportions
June 8, 2021 3 Comments
THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL Bureau of Investigation built a fake telephone service provider for a secret worldwide operation that officials described on Monday as “a watershed moment” in law enforcement history. The operation, known as TROJAN SHIELD, began in 2018 and involved over 9,000 law enforcement officers in 18 countries around the world. When the existence of TROJAN SHIELD was announced in a series of official news conferences yesterday, officials said the operation had “given law enforcement a window into a level of criminality [that has never been] seen before on this scale”.
The operation centered on the creation of an entirely fake telephone service provider, known as ANØM. The fake firm advertised cell phones that were specially engineered to provide peer-to-peer encryption, thus supposedly making it impossible for government authorities to decipher intercepted messages or telephone calls between users. The FBI and law enforcement agencies in Australia and New Zealand used undercover officers to spread news about ANØM in the criminal underworld. The fake company’s modus operandi was to let in new users only after they had been vetted by existing users of the service. Within two years, there were nearly 10,000 users of ANØM around the world, with Australia having the largest number —approximately 1,500.
On Tuesday morning hundreds of raids were conducted in over a dozen countries, beginning with New Zealand and Australia, where over 500 raids were carried out, resulting in the arrests of 224 people. News reports suggest that over $45 million in cash has been seized in the past 24 hours in Australia alone, where law enforcement authorities dubbed the operation IRONSIDE. More raids have been taking place around the world, including in the United States. However, as raids were continuing into the evening, the FBI said it would not discuss the results of Operation TROJAN SHIELD until later today, Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the undercover operation as “a watershed moment in Australian law enforcement history”, which would “echo around the world”. An early report on the operation, which was published by the San Diego Union Tribune in the United States, said the purpose of TROJAN SHIELD was two-fold: to dismantle organized criminal syndicates through evidence acquired from wiretaps, and to spread confusion and mistrust of encryption devices in the worldwide criminal underworld.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 08 June 2021 | Permalink
intelNews.org 
Maybe officially FBI badged, but given the NSA has been in the same mass communication hoovering business since 1952, the NSA no doubt assisted.
As to legalities – does the enormous scope of TROJAN SHIELD mean that each and every connection relationship was/is covered by US and/or other countries’ judge issued warrants? Or is TROJAN SHIELD effectively a return to Warrantless Wiretaps? see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(2001%E2%80%932007)
Is it a modernized iteration of the FBI’s “Carnivore” system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software) – which hoovered up a vast amount of innocent data of US members of the public and US private businesses – in order to identify less than one percent wrongdoing?
Anom was the idea of an Australian Fed Police “tech geek” posited over beers one night with an FBI agent, that had been working with them. From that idea I believe the AFP tech wrote the code for the app.
What’s silly and a huge waste of resources is the fact that they destroyed this entire operation.
Wouldn’t it have been far better to slowly bust each organisation one by one. This could have been a tree that just keeps on giving but no the conservatives had to go for the big flash bust. Drugs and guns on the table media conferences.