For the past few years, Australian police have been loudly whinging to journalists about their inability to tap encrypted messaging apps, and demanding parliament give them all kinds of Orwellian powers to force developers to add back doors. This puts a whole new light on that! Let's hope it was reverse psychology directed at the crooks, and they'll stop it from now on.
This story is wild.<p>The AFP and FBI apparently hatched up this encrypted chat app between them, then seeded it into the criminal world through undercover agents passing it on to a known drug trafficker.<p>Three years later it's ended up with 11,000 people using it all over the world, all their conversations going straight into the rozzas' databases. Hundreds of simultaneous raids and arrests across 18 countries.
If I read correctly between the lines, while the FBI had 'the lead' on the app, the ability to decrypt was made possible by amendments to Australian Telecoms legislation (TOLA) in 2018, and hence the Australia (via the AFP) was the only country legally allowed to intercept this communication ('AFP provided the technical ability'). Can someone with more in-depth knowledge confirm if this is accurate?
Has anyone found the app?<p>EDIT: Website <a href="https://www.anom.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.anom.io/</a> (presumably the app has been taken off of app stores).