Aside from that, it sounds like a pretty decent secure phone, too.
Did they hire one of those TV show genius detectives to plan all this?
It sure seems more advanced than the usual FBI operations (or maybe we don't hear much about the good ones).
>Seeing a void in the underground market, the F.B.I. recruited a former Phantom Secure distributor who had been developing a new encrypted communications system called Anom. The informant agreed to work for the F.B.I. and let the bureau control the network for the possibility of a reduced prison sentence, according to the court documents. The F.B.I. paid the informant $120,000, the documents said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/world/australia/operation... (from when it was first revealed to the public last month)
Edited to add: It's fairly obvious that Phantom Secure was setup specifically to cater to organised crime communications - it appears the CEO experssly admitted this. I wonder if the company would have been better off marketing to 'security and privacy' conscious individuals, rather than, specifically, drug cartels, leaving the door of plausible deniability open.
Why go through the trouble of running a VPN company yourself? That is sooooo 5-10 years ago.
Rolling your own fixes one issue and raises another.
In that way, an ambitious project that gives away certificates that were formerly worth a lot of money would be a pretty slick honeypot because now you could stow away private keys and have a copy of most of the encrypted webs certificates to decrypt in-flight communications.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
The log is like a git hash-chain: you can never erase the past without affecting the whole chain after the erasure.
If you want hidden backdoors, put them in hardware, not software. Chips are the best place.
And even if a VPN company isn't compromised, there are so many legal loopholes that would allow government to access your data. Kitten on a tree can quickly become a matter of national security.
maybe lester freamon? this is essentially a more sophisticated version of what he did in season 3 of the wire. nothing new under the sun, I guess.