FBI wiretap: How US agents tracked down a suspected drug lord in Aarau

Spring 2018 in Bellingham, an American coastal town near the Canadian border: Vincent Ramos was sitting alone in a fast food restaurant when the FBI arrested him. He doesn’t defend himself. The restaurant owner describes him in a local newspaper as a ‘gentle man’.

Ramos is the head of the Canadian company Phantom Secure. She has developed a crypto mobile phone for criminal organizations with which they can communicate encrypted. After the arrest, he gave investigators access to his IT system.

The law enforcement agency also hires one of the company’s developers as an undercover agent. He is currently working on the next generation of an encrypted chat system for criminal organizations. It’s called Anom.

The chat function is hidden in the calculator app and only becomes visible after entering a numerical code. Other functions for making phone calls, sending text messages or the GPS navigation satellite system are missing, making the devices not so easy to locate. The device has a ‘kill switch’ for this purpose: all data or evidence can be deleted at the touch of a button.

The FBI sets up a front company in Panama and markets the Anom devices first in Australia – together with the Australian Federal Police. The researchers have programmed the app in such a way that the messages are stored on the police servers and can be decrypted later. According to media reports, an Australian agent floated the idea while enjoying a beer with FBI colleagues.

The agents have the devices distributed via Phantom Secure’s former distribution network. The intermediaries themselves do not know that they are selling a cryptocurrency. Anom spreads through criminal organizations through word of mouth.

This is the largest international police operation against organized crime to date. The FBI calls it the ‘Trojan shield’: just like the Trojan horse from Greek mythology, the researchers sneak into the center of the opposing party unnoticed.

But the data movements in the system do not go completely unnoticed. Users of the Anom app question its security in online messages. Time is running out.

That is why the FBI and its partners will break their crypto trap in June 2021. In 18 months, they stored 27 million messages from 12,000 devices. 300 criminal gangs in more than 100 countries use it. Then task forces in 16 countries strike simultaneously: they arrest 800 suspects and seize 8 tons of cocaine, 22 tons of cannabis and 250 weapons. Not yet known: The action will also lead to investigations in Switzerland.

Number 1 in Switzerland? Or just a big mouth?

The Aargau Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating an Anom user in its area: Mehmet P. (name changed), a 30-year-old Swiss-Turkish dual national from Aarau.

The Aargau police already know him. During a traffic stop in Spreitenbach in April 2021, they caught a drug courier who said he worked for him. He also explains where the four kilos of cocaine with a street value of several hundred thousand francs that the police found during a house search came from: at least partly from Mehmet.

The residents of Aargau will therefore start their own monitoring in May 2021. The Public Prosecution Service has his Swiss mobile phone tapped and a GPS tracker attached to his car with the Aargau license plate. The coercive measures court approves this supervision. It later also approved GPS trackers on two vans he allegedly used to import marijuana from Spain.

Although the Anom platform came to light, Mehmet P. feels safe in Switzerland. He promises his fiancée a golden future and reserves the elegant wedding hall in Aarau’s city museum for their wedding.

In another intercepted conversation with an accomplice, he boasts that in the future he will be able to earn “15,000 to 20,000 Stutz” per month – “by doing virtually nothing.” He proudly talks about her career with the criminal organization. Perhaps 270 people in the whole of Europe would have something to say. They are “top 6” or “top 7” and “clearly number 1” in Switzerland. The Public Prosecution Service therefore assumes that there is large-scale international cocaine trafficking.

On February 22, 2022, police arrested Mehmet P. He has been in custody since then. The saying ‘big mouth, nothing behind it’ applies to the overheard conversations, he says. He summarizes his CV in a letter. He emphasizes that he was born and raised in Aarau and completed a commercial internship here. He later studied business administration and worked in the carpentry industry.

Mehmet P. describes himself as a “full-blooded Aarau resident” who has roots here. In doing so he wants to downplay the risk of escape. But the injunctive relief court describes these statements as “lip service.” There are also fears that he will discuss his statements with his colleagues upon his release. Because in an interview he also says that everyone who ‘sings’ is a dead man. Otherwise, he will stick to his lawyer’s strategy and refuse to testify.

A rare insight into criminal organizations

Normally the police only catch dealers on the street. The criminal organization behind it remains hidden. In the Mehmet P. case, the responsible public prosecutor cannot use his own resources to find out how much cocaine and marijuana he allegedly trafficked. This should be evident from the Anom data that she received from the US through legal assistance.

Because the international campaign has a problem. There is no legal basis for this in the US. The FBI therefore launched the operation abroad and used foreign servers. These are said to be in Lithuania, where a court is said to have approved the surveillance operation – but only temporarily. The FBI is keeping information about this secret because it has assured the country confidentiality.

Can the judiciary use evidence collected by the FBI and its partners without any legal basis? The public prosecutor first tries to submit a request to the court for coercive measures, which must approve the Anom data as an accidental discovery. This gives the green light shortly afterwards.

But the higher court declared this order “null and void.” Only if surveillance took place in Switzerland could such data be classified as accidental discovery. However, in the case of foreign supervision, only the substantive judge will provide clarity as to whether the evidence may be used. The decision is therefore postponed. The Federal Court has now confirmed this. It is the first time that the highest court has ruled on the handling of Anom data.

The Federal Court’s ruling means that the public prosecutor can now evaluate the Anom data. The big question in the main proceedings will then be whether evidence from a police operation without a legal basis is admissible in Switzerland.

A similar question arose during the first lawsuit over Sky ECC data in Switzerland. Sky-ECC was also a kind of WhatsApp for criminals. The French police hacked them and read the messages. This gave a European investigative team a deep insight into organized crime.

In this criminal case against a drug baron from Basel, the Basel criminal court admitted the data of the foreign surveillance operation. One reason for this is that a French court has approved the case. Because the police acted on urgent suspicion.

However, in Anom’s case, there has been no approval from a US court. The surveillance first created suspicion – and not the other way around, as usual. Anyone who does not have a strong suspicion of a serious crime should not actually be monitored.

Defense lawyer speaks of illegal eavesdropping

Kenad Melunovic is Mehmet P.’s lawyer and speaks about a deceptive maneuver by the FBI that is contrary to European and Swiss legal principles, so-called public policy:

It will likely be many months before the case goes to trial and the issue of evidence is clarified. And then years will pass before the superior and federal courts provide the final answers. That is why Mehmet P. is still in custody.

What distinguishes good from evil

The key question is: does the end justify the means?

If the case were a spy thriller, audiences would be perfectly happy with the FBI’s subterfuge. The police can demonstrate that the Anom devices are mainly distributed among criminals. So mass surveillance affected the right people. Who wants to be so petty and harp on paragraphs?

But that is exactly what a criminal case is about: upholding the rules of the rule of law. But if even the researchers don’t comply, they lose their status as law enforcement officers. If they lack important surveillance capabilities, they should organize them through legal means rather than obtaining them secretly.

In Germany, the Memmingen Regional Court in Bavaria will ban the use of Anom data in criminal proceedings for the first time in August 2023. The court describes the authorizations that the FBI has obtained abroad as ‘authority shopping’. In addition, there must be mutual trust in a legal assistance procedure through which data from the US reaches Europe. This cannot be the case if the state of the server location wants to remain anonymous.

However, the German case has a special feature: the prosecution is based exclusively on Anom data. No other evidence exists. This is different in the Aargau pilot case. The Aargau public prosecutor’s office has collected its own evidence, but needs the Anom data to prove the scale of the alleged drug trafficking.

And yet Mehmet P. probably wouldn’t be in prison today if the FBI hadn’t arrested a criminal CEO in Bellingham four years ago and launched Operation “Trojan Shield.”

Mehmet P. had presented his story very differently. He told his fiancée that if he was arrested, he would be released after three months due to lack of evidence. It’s been two years now.

(aargauerzeitung.ch)