Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by rkk3 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

rkk3

> the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices.

> $1,700 for the handset, with a $1,250 annual subscription

> Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay

So the FBI built a 8 figure ARR hardware business...

View on HN

Funny but that is exactly where my brain went too, it was like "Wow, that is some serious market validation."

Of course, but there would be similar market validation for being able to hold up a bank without ever being recognized or to be able to steal money from bank accounts anonymously.

That 'market' is called crime, and obviously criminals will be more than happy to fork over money for tools that help them to commit crimes without being arrested. In reality though, that market doesn't exist because if you or I would address that market we'd be hit hard by the authorities, and for good reason.

As far as I can tell, An0m has the same marketing pitch as Purism.

... or the "Freedom phone"

You should be able to have the american flag being waved or tastefully fluttering in the breeze in the background of your comment.

There are more reasons then committing a crime for wanting anonymity. If I was someone with money like a celebrity I would want this phone. If I was a business with sensitive information I would want this phone. And so on.

>If I was someone with money like a celebrity I would want this phone.

I think this part is underestimated by most people. Celebrities are frequently under a microscope and having to live your life while worrying about somebody overhearing it and taking it to the press must be frustrating. Everyone has bad moments in their lives, but at least for most of us these won't be dragged up and published to the world. A device like this could help alleviate that fear a little bit.

Further down the article, when talking about the project history, it notes that the company that inspired An0m, Phantom Secure, ostensibly started selling heavily-locked-down BlackBerry phones for this audience.

They quickly found their primary market was, well... crime.

To be fair, I remember the story of the guy that designed the drug cartel's radio system[1]. And I share your dislike of facilitating bad actors.

That said, having met the "ad tech" industry[2] when doing a search engine I can say there are a large number of people who are perfectly happy to take the money from bad actors with a "perfectly legal" product and reasonable deniability.

But all of these schemes have a certain "addressable market" and an "expected return" which are hard to judge. Putting numbers to the "completely anonymous" phone scam was interesting.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/

[2] And to be clear, there are legitimate folks trying to do ad tech in legitimate ways, but there is also a lot of fraud in ad tech which involves setting up networks to take money from advertisers and feed it to bad actors.

It doesn't indicate how high the marketing costs were. Probably too high to sustain a business.

Sounds like it was mostly word of mouth

Those mouths probably didn't work for free

Free to the makers of the device though, it's not like they were charging the manufacturers for paid promotions like an Instagram influencer would - they recommended this device to their associates because they thought this would help them coordinate their activities more efficiently whilst reducing their personal risk.

But they probably had a lot of money to start it right?

The FBI sure, but who knows what kind of budget the team was given.

But they did leverage their position as law enforcement to arrest all of their competitors

They arrested their customer, which isn’t great for retention.

but it's a captive market!

I disagree, they'll retain them for many years if they're the right target.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com