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CYBER

How the FBI Wiretapped the World

CYBER

VICE

Tech News, News & Politics, Technology, News

4645 Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For years criminal organizations around the world were buying a special phone called Anom. The pitch was that it was completely anonymous and secure, a way for criminals to do business without authorities watching over their shoulder. 


It turned out that the whole thing was an elaborate honeypot and that the FBI and law enforcement agencies around the world were listening in. They’d help develop the phones themselves.


The fallout from that revelation is ongoing and, here at Motherboard, we’ve just learned how the phones work. On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Joseph Cox comes on to discuss the code that powered the Anom phone.


Stories discussed in this episode:


This is the Code the FBI Used to Wiretap the World


We Got the Phone the FBI Secretly Sold to Criminals


FBI's Backdoored Anom Phones Secretly Harvested GPS Data Around the World


We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.


Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

It's got the code it's going to launch

0:09.8

It's a unit system

0:12.2

I know this

0:13.7

It's how the files of the whole park

0:16.5

It tells you everything

0:18.8

Sir he's uploading the virus

0:20.6

Eagle 1 the package is being delivered Hello It tells her everything. Sir, he's uploading the virus.

0:23.4

The Eagle One, the package is being delivered.

0:26.0

Hello out there on the internet.

0:28.6

I am Matthew Galt, and this is Cyber.

0:34.1

For years, criminal organizations around the world were buying a special phone called Anam. The pitch was that it was completely anonymous and secure, a way for criminals

0:38.2

to do business without authorities watching over their shoulder. It turned out that the whole

0:42.7

thing was an elaborate honeypot and that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the

0:46.7

world were listening in. They'd developed the phone. They had developed the phones themselves.

0:53.5

The fallout from that revelation is ongoing,

0:55.8

and here at Motherboard, we've just learned how the phones work, what the code was. Motherboard

1:01.1

staff writer Joseph Cox has looked at the code and understands how cops across the world

1:05.0

programmed a special phone that would listen in while criminals did business. He's here with us today

1:10.1

to walk us through the code.

1:11.8

We'll find behind the phone that the FBI helped build. It is the subject of his new story.

1:16.6

This is the code the FBI used to wiretap the world. In retrospect, I think I used code too many

1:22.3

times in that intro. But here we are. J.C., thank you again for coming on this week,

...

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