It was originally created by a private company, that went a bit too far in marketing it to criminals. Undercover agents asked the CEO "How do I use this to prevent the police from monitoring my drug smuggling", and he answered the question.
In order to keep the feds from throwing them in prison, the remaining execs needed to provide names, and what better way than to compromise the phone and market it to criminals?
Around the same time, law enforcement cracked a more popular custom phone used by criminals, so gangs started looking elsewhere. And the FBI was waiting for them.
It was an insane operation. It was being run from a local FBI office (San Diego), not headquarters. A bunch of low level agents.
But it provided massive police intelligence around the world.
It also screwed over a lot of the contractors who worked on it. The Android developers who designed the phone are now on organized crime's radar, even though they thought they were just making a secure phone.
The fact that it was really only criminals using it was the big selling point.
The sales chain was what made the operation so effective. The only people who had the phones were the ones the FBI wanted with the phones.
Each episode is chewed up slowly to the lowest common denominator, meaning half of an episode is condescending explanation of trivial matter. The misplaced air of faux mystery, true crime podcast style, does not help. The narrator being occasionally a free speech absolutist and explicitly in favour of money laundering services does not help.
Risky Biz covered Anom in https://risky.biz/RB751/ via a dense if a bit short interview with Joseph Cox, who wrote a book about it, starting around minute 35. Listen to that and respective Darknet Diaries episode to compare. In general Risky Biz offers more balanced, less boring, and up-to-date takes on cybercrime (sans interviews with actual criminals).
I'm willing to reexamine my appreciation for the darknet diaries,but I have never gotten this political take from the content itself. Rather he seems to simply be willing to engage with folks he disagrees with morally, as a matter similar to any journalist might. He does not engage with active crime or anything like that either.
I really like darknet diaries. I don't think it is just about cyber crime though. More like a human social journalism with a heavy cyber crime angle. So that's how you have such a range of content in my opinion.
Also, maybe listen at 1.3X? That makes the explanations and pacing imo easier
Of course, the real question is whether these led to any convictions. They did lead to a few prevented murders and the like, but given they're all sweeping / non targeted sting operations, they're not admissible in court in a lot of cases.
But even so, when stakes are high enough victim-blaming becomes both warranted and healthy. Even if there really was a deep-state conspiracy to embarrass the presidential cabinet (not that i think there was), the ultimate responsibility should still fall on their heads for not taking obvious precautions while planning an airstrike. If you can't verify that everybody in your signal conversation is actually supposed to be in the conversation, let alone that they are even who they appear to be, then it's obviously not an appropriate platform for this discussion.