The FBI's Backdoor Dashboard

The FBI’s surveillance system for reading messages from Anom, an end-to-end encrypted messaging app the FBI secretly backdoored, was capable of much more than simply presenting the millions of intercepted chat messages, providing something closer to a complete monitoring of the digital activities of thousands of people in more than a hundred countries, according to never-before-published diagrams, screenshots, and technical documents that describe the system.

The system, called Hola iBot, allowed FBI analysts to plot peoples’ physical movements on a Google Maps style interface, provide summaries of their conservations, and draw social connections between users. In the eyes of one FBI agent, Anom became more of a social network for criminals than a messaging app.

“Welcome to Hola iBot!,” a login screen for the system says. “You are accessing a US. Government information system, which includes this computer, this computer network, all computers connected to this network, and all devices and/or storage media attached to this network or to a computer on this network. This Information system is provided for U.S. Government-authorized use only,” it adds.

“iBot” is a reference to how the backdoor in Anom functioned. As a search warrant application unsealed shortly before the FBI announced its control of Anom in June 2021 explains, a copy of each message on devices outside the U.S. was sent to a server before eventually being sent to the FBI. The FBI assumed control of Anom in 2018 after it shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. A confidential human source (CHS) who was developing Anom then offered the embryonic company to the FBI for its own use. The CHS was paid more than $100,000.

The diagrams and screenshots were included in various law enforcement records I obtained through sources and courts in Europe, or found in copies of documents posted online. As the FBI told me when I visited the San Diego field office and walked through the rooms where analysts read Anom’s messages, it was FBI computer scientists that built the Hola iBot system.

To log into the Hola iBot system, users needed to be granted access via the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP), a platform that offers various tools and services to law enforcement agencies. Once inside, an analyst could review data in cases assigned to them. The cases were named after Greek Gods, such as Zeus.

Above the raw content of the messages themselves, analysts could tick a box to mark the content as pertinent or “no intelligence value/not pertinent.” In some cases, Anom users used the phones for personal or non-criminal conversations, although the FBI said the vast majority of the messages were overwhelmingly criminal in nature, something which is reflected in hundreds of thousands of Anom messages obtained while reporting my book.

Sometimes Hola iBot also displays a translated summary of the conversation. As Anom expanded beyond Australia into Europe, then South America, South East Asia, and elsewhere, Anom collected many more messages that were not in English. To understand those, the FBI relied on in-house translators and used automated services from Amazon.

“On line 2, Ghost comments on Tommy’s Spanish skills,” one summary based on communications in Bernese German reads. “On line 6, Ghost asks what the other guy wrote.” Other languages mentioned in the Hola iBot screenshots include Swedish, Chinese, Serbian, Croatian, Italian, and Albanian.

Beyond messages, Hola iBot shows the connections between specific users. In one interface, a series of different colored circles represents who is talking to who. The red circle represents the targeted user, the blue circles are other users they communicated with, and the green circle is a group chat which the users are a part of, according to the document. This allowed the FBI analysts to not only see what Anom users were saying, but unambiguously who they were interacting with across the platform, building up a spider web of criminal organizations and how they worked with one another. One of the biggest revelations of the Anom operation, and others into encrypted phone companies called Encrochat and Sky, was how the idea of organized crime groups was now antiquated. Instead, criminals act in organized crime networks, transcending geographical borders and traditional ethnic divides.

Analysts could also listen to voice memos sent across Anom between users. Although Anom had a feature where users could distort the sound of their voice, giving the impression their voice memos were secure, the FBI was in some cases able to reverse the modifications, providing them with the original recorded audio.

Despite assurance to its users that Anom had removed all GPS functionality, many of the devices actually recorded the user’s physical location whenever they sent a message. This data is then presented inside Hola iBot as a map, showing analysts where their target has been over time.

The Anom operation was the largest sting operation ever, with around 10,000 law enforcement officers acting on the takedown day in June 2021. Since then, authorities have arrested more than a thousand people, and seized multiple tons of drugs around the world.

Some cases did fall through the cracks though. A murder in Sweden was planned on Anom, and the FBI did not provide the relevant intelligence to local authorities in time. The assassination was successful. 

Some prosecutions in Europe have ended in acquittals, while courts debate whether they can legally use the messages collected by Anom as evidence, according to a lawyer working on several Anom related cases.