The Absolutely Wild True Story of Anom, the FBI’s Secret Telephony Startup

In today’s episode of Decoder, I spoke with Joseph Cox, one of the best cybersecurity reporters around. Joseph spent a lot of time working on Deputytechnology vertical Motherboardbut last year, after Deputy imploded, he and three other journalists co-founded a new website, called 404 Mediawhere they are doing a great job.

Criminals like drug traffickers represent a market for secure, encrypted communications, away from the eyes of authorities. In the early mobile era, this gave rise to a niche industry of specialized, secure phones that criminals used to conduct their business.

Joseph has reported extensively on this over the years, and the book ends up telling a truly extraordinary story: After hacking into some of these encrypted smartphone companies, the FBI ended up running one of those secure phone services so he could spy on criminals around the world. And that means the FBI had to actually run a company, with all the problems of any other tech startup: cloud services, manufacturing and shipping issues, customer service, expansion and scaling.

The company was called Anom, and for about three years it provided law enforcement agencies around the world with a crystal-clear window into the criminal underworld. In the end, the feds shut it down largely because it was also successful – again, a truly wild story. Now, with the emergence of apps like Signal, most criminals no longer need specialized hardware, but this, of course, raises a whole new set of questions.

The book is a great read, but it also touches on a lot of things we talk about a lot here at Decoder. There really are bad people out there using technology to help them do bad things, but the same tools that keep your communications private also help give privacy to everyone else – whistleblowers, dissidents, regular people like you and me.

There’s a deep tension between privacy and security that constantly permeates technology, and you’ll hear us really digging into the way that tech companies and governments are always going back and forth on this. There’s a lot here and it’s fun.