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Andrew Young's Journey into the Tech World is very different from any
founder story I've ever heard.
It starts in 2018 in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
It was a sweet, it was a pretty nice sweet.
We needed a lot of room.
There was as approximately, I don't know, there was a lot.
I would say 20 people total in a hotel room in Vegas.
Sounds like quite a party.
Yeah, I felt like we're at 22 again.
The thing is, Andrew was a federal prosecutor.
And the people he was in the room with,
they were not exactly party people either.
Yeah, it's swimming with FBI agents.
This is Joseph Cox, the journalist I first heard this story from.
He covers technology and crime.
And he says, along with Andrew and those FBI agents,
there were officials from Canada and Australia.
And they're all waiting for a very special person to arrive.
The special person was the CEO of a phone company, called Phantom Secure.
And whereas a traditional phone company
pried itself in the clearest call quality
or highest megapixel cameras, Phantom was different
because Phantom made phones for criminals.
What Phantom did was take blackberry handsets.
They ripped out the GPS, the camera, the microphone,
and then they put pretty sophisticated encryption technology on it,
meaning that even if the police or the FBI
did manage to intercept a Phantom Secure message,
it doesn't matter. It's just going to be complete
garbage to them, a series of ones and zeros and letters.
And this was frustrating to law enforcement,
because even if they could get a wire tap of one of these phones,
they couldn't read what people were writing.
And so Andrew knew that if he could unscramble these messages,
he would have a treasure trove of evidence.
If we can get in there, we can do 100 years of worth of case work
in a matter of months because we have all the evidence
that would normally take years to gather.
But that would require cooperation from the CEO of the phone company,
Vincent Ramos. That was who they were waiting for in that hotel room in Vegas.
So Ramos knocks on the door.
And he sees two FBI agents there who identify themselves as FBI agents.
So he's obviously confused. I think he said something along the lines of
while I'm in the wrong place. They said you're not in the wrong place.
Andrew gets to work. Tells Ramos, here's the situation.
Here's all this evidence we have. We have a pretty solid criminal conspiracy case
against you. We could arrest you right now,
charge you in San Diego. But we'd rather make a deal.
We'd rather you flip and give us a back door into your servers.
They spend something like three days in that hotel suite
negotiating around the clock.
More and more officials keep popping out of the bedroom to talk with Ramos.
At one point, he asks how many people are even in that room.
Because it's just almost like a clown car in a way.
And all these officials keep streaming out.
They sleep there at the same time.
It's a really, really unusual situation.
And bit by bit, Ramos starts to come around to the idea of going back to San Diego
with the officials.
And so we are planning on leaving, regardless, the next day.
With him, like saying, hey, we'll give you a ride to San Diego.
He's getting a ride either way.
It was sort of where he was going to sit in the car.
What's our thinking?
But before the trek back to San Diego, they decide, let's get some rest.
One person watches Ramos. Everyone else heads to bed.
And I'm dead sleep when I got a call from one of the agents saying he's gone.
And I was like, what do you mean he's gone?
And he's, Ramos is gone. He's not here.
Ramos had escaped.
The FBI put out an alert for him, launched a massive manhunt.
And he's eventually found.
But Andrew soon learns that while Ramos was on the run,
he did manage to shut down a key server that the FBI would have needed for their backdoor.
And right there, Andrew's dream of having a backdoor into the criminal underworld almost died.
Except...
I get this call from this lawyer I've never heard of.
And who basically said, I want to meet you tomorrow.
See, all the publicity around Ramos and his manhunt had scared other people in the encrypted
phone industry. This lawyer worked for one of those people who had been working on his own
phone for criminals. And the lawyer said his client wanted to make a deal.
His offer is that the FBI can take this company and use it for their own investigations.
So in other words, rather than the FBI investigating a company like Phantom Secure,
inserting a backdoor, going through all of that pain, why doesn't the FBI just run its own
encrypted phone company and then put in whatever backdoor they feel like?
They could run a tech startup for organized crime.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Nick Fountain. What would that look like?
The FBI running a tech startup for organized crime. It is a very fraught proposition.
And yet, enticing? Today on the show, one of the weirdest tech companies of all time.
How the FBI got into the cell phone business and why, eventually, they had to get out.
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your money in different currencies easy. With Wise, you can send and spend money internationally
at the mid-market exchange rate. No guesswork and no hidden fees. Learn more about how Wise could
work for you at Wise.com. All right, so this episode is largely based on a new book by Joseph Cox.
The book is called Dark Wire. It's terrific. There are so many incredible details in it about
global organized crime, about laundering drug money. But today, we are going to focus on the story
of the kind of real but also kind of fake business the FBI would end up running.
One of the people behind that business was Andrew, the prosecutor from earlier,
who had dreamt of a backdoor into the criminal underground only to have that dream
slipped through his fingers. For him, the idea of the FBI running a tech company was a no-brainer.
I was thinking I want to do it. I at least want to see if we can run it ourselves. I was coming
off of what I felt like was a huge loss. I still had this void. That was the big game. That was
the Super Bowl and we lost. You may never get back to that. When this opportunity was pitched,
I was like, this is a way to get back to the big game. Did you guys know how to run a tech company?
No. None of us had run a tech company. We recognize we're going to have to do this.
It was too good of an opportunity to pass up because if they did this right, they could create a phone
that was so specifically designed for doing crime only criminals would want it.
And if people use the phones, which the FBI could monitor, to document their crimes,
well, that's a prosecutor's dream. Andrew and his team get to work. They strike a deal with the guy
who had been working on the phone. He becomes in law enforcement speak a confidential human source.
They put him on the payroll in part because he already has the right reputation in the criminal
underworld. They called the phone company a nom, maybe a playoff the word anonymous. And then they
run into a challenge that has doomed many early stage tech companies. We needed a quality product
that worked. Yeah, this is key for any business. But Joseph says it was especially true for the FBI's
phone company, a nom. The product had to be not just good. It had to be better than all of the
other encrypted phone companies that were used by criminals because you wanted them to move over
to a norm as well. The FBI had to not only make a pretty good encrypted phone company,
they really had to try to make the best. Yeah, there were already some competitors out there.
Other encrypted phone networks that criminals were using. And also criminals could just
go out and buy normal phones and use encrypted messaging apps like Signal or Telegram.
The FBI needed to do better than all that to attract the right customers. They need to make it
seem like a nom was developed for criminals by criminals who wouldn't respond to a subpoena,
like a big tech company might. They'd have to build a phone that was both feature packed and super
secure. They decided to use off the shelf Android phones, Google pixels actually with a special
secure operating system. And I love this part. The NAMM messaging app, it was going to be hidden
behind a fake calculator. When you type in a certain pin code and press equals,
the calculator fades away and the NAMM app reveals itself. And Andrew and the FBI go further.
They start requesting features that'll make NAMM even better than their competitors.
It's a pretty funny idea, but just fed sitting around brainstorming different features they think
criminals will like. But then how to use those very features to spy on their users.
If we were going to give them the ability to take a photo and send a photo of that's blurred,
we needed the ability to undo it. If we're going to let them do, you know,
voice disguises their voices, then we needed to be able to undo it. And so we wanted to add as
many features as we could because we knew it made a better product. But then we also had to figure
out a way to undo it. They also got to do some things that normal businesses can't.
For example, in their advertising, they could just lie. Like the phones would be advertised as
having the GPS permanently disabled. Of course, that was not true. Another thing, if your
non-phone got confiscated by the police, they said you could wipe it remotely. This of course didn't
matter because the FBI had already read and archived all your messages. So they've designed their
feature-packed phone, both for criminals, but also the cops buying on them. The next challenge
anger-faced, what to charge for the phones? I vividly remember having discussions about setting
the price of it because we didn't want it to be too cheap because we felt like we could have
set any price we wanted to, right? We could have set it for $400, $500, $300. And the idea being
because the government would happily subsidize the cost of the device or whatever. But we made a
conscious decision not to do that because for one, we were concerned that they would think,
why are we getting this for so cheap? And two, it's more of, I can't remember the economic principle,
but it's that people will buy a luxury item that's veblin good. Yes, that one. And we're like,
if we price it above everybody else, it's just going to think it's better.
Veblin good is the rare product where as price increases, so does demand. Think an expensive
handbag or a luxury car. And criminals, of course, don't want bargain-basement prices when it comes
to their security. If you signal that they're getting an ultra-premium product by charging an
ultra-premium price, maybe they'll want it more. The non-sticker price would be $2,000 for a six-month
subscription. That is, if they could get criminals to actually use these things, that is after the break.
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we follow up and we bring you along to hear what we learn. Get closer to the issues, the people,
and your vote at the NPR elections hub. Visit npr.org slash elections.
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Hey, it's Greg Rzalski. For generations, American politicians have talked about
freedom as if it only means freedom from government. No one prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
in a new book opposes that narrow view of freedom. So it's really what you are free to do.
Somebody who is at the point of starvation doesn't really have much freedom. He does what he has
to do to survive. In our latest bonus episode, I talk with Stiglitz about his conception of freedom
and what he calls progressive capitalism. His vision of the government playing a more
active role in the economy. That's for Planet Money Plus listeners. If that's you, thank you very
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Just go to plus.npr.org.
So Andrew, our federal prosecutor and the FBI, they have their phone. Anom is ready to go.
But here is one weird wrinkle. Andrew never got permission from the higher-ups at the department
of justice to spy on a non-phones in the US. See, in the US, running a wiretap requires convincing
a judge that a crime is likely being committed. An entry says he was willing to go through that
process every single time, but the powers that be at the department of justice never even let him
get that far. In the end, the FBI decided to partner with law enforcement from other countries,
including Australia, where in the fall of 2018, the first phones hit the streets.
So a norm, it starts in Australia and it's slow at first that the product does not really
take off with any great speed. This is kind of the make or break moment for a knob,
and for the FBI's ambitions of making a tech company. If their phones never take off,
the whole thing would be a waste. Now, the FBI could not go out and sell the phones as the FBI,
and so they turned to a familiar marketing technique. Were you guys doing influencer marketing
of these phones? Yes, it's essentially what we were doing, and the influencers in this context
happened to be the heads of these organizations. Yeah, they seated the phones with real kingpins,
people running international drug smuggling rings. This had a couple of upsides. For one,
it showed that real legit bad guys were using a knob, and they thought it was safe. And also,
because a knob devices could only communicate with other a knob devices, it created a sort of
walled garden. This is what economists call the network effect. These kingpins of criminal networks
would essentially tell people, you know, I'm talking to me unless you're using a knob.
And so then all those four guys below him get a knob, and then they go to their crews and say,
well, if you want to talk to me, you got to be on a knob. The FBI gave these influencers commissions
based on their sales and their underling sales. And sometimes they even offered ownership of the
company. In other words, equity. I do think at some point we had given away more than 100 percent,
but that's fraud, Andrew. That's curious, fraud. But, you know, it's all right. Andrew says these
marketing techniques, they worked surprisingly well. Pretty soon, they had hundreds of people across
many countries using the phones. And the FBI could see people were using them for all sorts of
crimes, massive drug deals, money laundering, ordering hits on their enemies. And also for other
things, they loved to send each other photos, which was always shocking to us because so many of them
were so unnecessary. What sort of photos are we talking? They take pictures of their faces.
So you can think of it. Selfies, other types of photos. They love to send those
through each other's. Yeah, I was very proud of the belt photos.
My friends, which was an interesting subculture phenomenon. And yeah, those. That's quite funny.
It also just shows how absolute the criminals trusted a norm. Not only were they prepared to send
information about their crimes across a norm, they were prepared to send photos of their
genitalia across it as well. Okay, we've talked about all the clever design that went into these
phones at the software and the pricing decisions and the clever marketing. And all that is true and
helped a norm grow. But what really helped the FBI was a trick they had up their sleeve.
Yes, the FBI is in a great position in that it doesn't have to play by the rules of ordinary
business. It can disrupt its rivals in a very, very aggressive way. Remember, a norm was not the
only game out there. There were other more popular encrypted phone companies like Enkrochat and Sky.
The FBI and others had been investigating them for a while. And Andrew knew if those did get shut
down, well, people would come to a norm. I said, by 8,000 phones because when you're going to need them,
because there's all those people going to know where else to go and they're going to come to a norm.
It's a business technique that not many businesses can do is get the authorities to shut down their
competitors. But it works. Well, that's, I reject the premise that that's what we were doing.
But if it happened, it was, I think it worked out better for everybody. Okay, whatever the reason
the competitors did indeed get shut down. And Andrew was right, demand for a norm exploded. At one
point, Joseph says the FBI had to charter a plane to Europe and whisk eight duffel bags full of
phones through Dutch customs. And this is normal, right? For any successful startup, there comes a
time when their dreams take off. And then they hit the problem of scaling. Though in this case,
the FBI had some unique additional problems with scaling. If we know somebody's going to get killed,
we have to try to do something about it. We don't have a choice. We have to do it. Which means they had
to read every single message that went across their network. And if there was a threat to life,
they had to intervene. And as the number of a non-phones out there grew from 100 to 1000 to 12,000,
reading all those messages became really hard. The FBI had dozens and dozens of agents working
around the clock reading messages. And those threats to life, they started to multiply.
So what would happen is that the FBI would detect a threat to life and they would mitigate it
somehow. They would warn the authorities or otherwise act. And then that one would be stopped,
thankfully. But the criminals would start asking themselves, how the hell did the authorities
know this? How did they know we were going to murder this person? And rather than suspecting the
phones, they suspected each other. And then you have another threat to life because they want to kill
who they believe as a snitch or a rat. And it started to create this never-ending cycle of
violence and paranoia. All the while, the FBI is intercepting more and more messages. It has to
call in more agents from around the country. Please come to San Diego and help us dig through this
information. It's too much. It's absolutely getting to the point where the FBI are finding it
very, very difficult to maintain momentum or tempo on the amount of data that's coming in.
Yeah. In the end, what led a norm to shut down was its own success. Two and a half years in,
it just became too unsustainable, too dangerous for the FBI. So the FBI and their many foreign
counterparts at this point decide on an end date. The police raids would begin on June 7th, 2021.
They followed the Sun, the Australian Federal Police and state agencies there, they launched
their own raids and then held their own press conference. Gentlemen, it's good to have you with
us today saying that we have messages from a norm. As the Sun moved over to Europe, European officials
did basically the same thing. They launched their own raids with drones and SWAT teams and everything
you would expect. And then they held... Distinguished guests, press conference, and Europe also announcing
their involvement. This law enforcement operation is exceptional. Until eventually,
the Sun got over to the west coast to San Diego. These international arrests and the US charges were
possible because of a San Diego-based FBI investigation like none other in history. And the US
Attorney's Office there announced that the FBI and US authorities having running a norm for
essentially its entire existence. Thank you all. This was a big moment. The big reveal.
The FBI and their counterparts have been running what Joseph calls the largest sting operation
in history. A norm resulted in more than a thousand arrests. There was something like 150
threats to life. Mitigated, they seized tons upon tons of cocaine, methamphetamine, and other drugs,
weapons as well. It really did generate a massive impact on the criminal syndicates that were swept
into a norm. One important note. No one in the US was arrested because of a norm. Remember,
Andrew never got permission from the higher ups at the Department of Justice.
To this day, he still finds this disappointing. But he says this operation was about more than
arrests. It was about sowing out in the minds of organized crime. Sowing out in the very idea
of encrypted phone. See, authorities had not just shut down phantom secure and their main
competitors. They had also pushed users into what turned out to be an FBI front. And that kind of
left organized crime with a conundrum. Who do you turn to now? Because the established legacy
companies were all gone. And so any other company that shows up is brand new. And how do you know
with certainty that that's not being run by the FBI, the DEA. So to me, our goal ultimately
became to take this away as a tool. And I think for the most part that worked. I do.
Andrew readily admits that this operation didn't end crime forever. Other criminals have
filled the vacuum that it left. But maybe now there's just a little more friction. It's just
a little bit harder to do the business of crime. At least that's his hope.
Joseph's book is called Dark Wire, the incredible true story of the largest sting operation ever.
He's also the co-founder of a new news organization called 404 Media.
Y'all published basically a thing that makes me jealous. If not once a day every week. That's
what we aim to do. We aim to please our subscribers by infuriating the other journalists by what we're
publishing. This episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Desjang. He's fact checked by
Sierra Wattes and engineered by Sina LaFredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Nick
Fountain. This is MPR. Thank you for listening. It's a high stakes election year. So it's not
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