Comment by cromka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromka | Hacker News Reader

What we've learned is only what was in Austrlia's piece of the cake, given they started their day already. New Zeland had theirs already, too. I imagine thousands of arrests are still happening worldwide and several press conferences are going to be held today. Looking at the seal of the operation (https://www.anom.io/trojan_shield_seal.jpg), following countries participated in the operation: Canada, Australia, US, Sweden, The Netherlands, Lithuania, Finland, Hungary, Norway, Austria, UK, New Zeland, Estonia, Scotland, Germany, Denmark.

I expect this to be bigger than Panama Papers. Way bigger. I expect a few prominent politicians to be soon either arrested or "convinced" to step down. I expect the US to have gained a lot of intel and leverage over those from the countries who did not participate in this. We will absolutely not learn about everything they discovered. CIA will and the respective intelligence agencies will.

EDIT: Europol will hold their conference live on YouTube at 10 AM CST: https://twitter.com/janoorth/status/1402164252266409987

EDIT 2: given how Serbia was in the top 4 of messages sent, I really hope that the info gathered will help Interpol fight child trafficking and exploitation in the EU.

From the VICE article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgkwj/operation-trojan-shie...) quoted elsewhere here:

"Additionally, the review of Anom messages has initiated numerous high-level public corruption cases in several countries. The most prominent distributors are currently being investigated by the FBI for participating in an enterprise which promotes international drug trafficking, money laundering, and obstruction of justice."

"Late Monday, the FBI said that it would be holding "a news conference announcing a massive worldwide takedown based on the San Diego FBI’s unprecedented investigation involving the interception of encrypted communications" on Tuesday."

Hee hee! The parent domain now has a useful form for criminals to turn themselves in with: https://www.anom.io/

"To determine if your account is associated with an ongoing investigation, please enter any device details below:"

and then it asks for your username, country and IMEI....

That is a law enforcement mic drop and it's well earned by doing good police work.

Honey pot?

The police are so considerate. Not that long ago they were offering to test your meth to see if it contained coronavirus ;-) https://www.news4jax.com/news/weird-news/2020/03/03/is-your-...

I giggled, but then realized former an0n users might take it as an opportunity for cooperation. Whether or not it is, it may be effective in getting some to turn themselves in for that reason.

Sweden just announced 155 arrests: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/europol-berattar-om-det-o...

Which amounts to almost 20% of those arrested. Maybe it's partly due to Sweden historically having strong computer literacy. Only time will tell.

Also just a lot of organized crime right now

Note that 155 is the grand total over the entire duration of the operation. The tally (given in your linked video) is:

* 70 yesterday in Sweden

* 5 yesterday in Spain (related to Swedish investigations)

* 80 earlier, candidly

I believe 70 is the figure that should be compared with the 800 total [1].

> A series of large-scale law enforcement actions were executed over the past days across 16 countries resulting in more than 700 house searches, more than 800 arrests [...]

1: https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/800-criminals-ar...

Europol press conference is available for playback now at https://youtu.be/e443mE8l-_0

There is another press conference at 09:00 PDT too (FBI I believe).

Side note: Scotland is recognised separately from the UK in the list of participating countries. ;)

The comments on the video of the people who call this operation communist and so forth are infuriating, i must say.

The first 14:30 of that video has no audio and basically B-roll footage. I'm sure a lot of people wont watch the whole thing and miss the actual conference.

Scotland has a separate police force.

I think you're drawing an extremely long bow on this.

Qantas was just implicated as being corrupted from within, complaining that no one had told them who or what corruption until the day before this was announced.

There isn’t much of a stretch of the imagination required to see that there is a deep rabbit hole that just got filled with cement.

I was thinking about that same story when I saw the mention of “trusted insiders”

The shield and your comment list the UK and Scotland separately here, which (at least for now) is not accurate as I'm sure you're aware. Are there separate agencies involved that merit including both flags?

Scotland has an entirely distinct legal system with a single unified police agency (with it's own serious and organised crime division). There has never been a connection between the legal system in Scotland and that of England and Wales. Scots laws are primarily passed by the independent Scottish Parliament with only a small number of matters reserved for the UK Parliament in London which passes distinct statutory instruments for Scotland to create approximate equivalence between the 'English' and 'Scottish' laws. These result in anomalies like the violent imagery laws in Scotland are more strict than those of England, meaning a cartoon image in England can be legal to possess but have strict liability severe punishment in Scotland; Scotland retains a right to silence upon arrest but in England remaining silent can be considered by a court to be an admission of guilt (sorry US readers, there is no 5th amendment in England and Wales; you do not have the option of "never talk to the police").

The difference has long irritated 'the English Establishment' so much that an informal verse was sung at one point as an adjunct to what is now the UK National Anthem (but was not officially added contrary to some popular belief[1]).

It also gave rise to the deeply racist phrase "Scot Free" in relation to people being acquitted in trials - during 'show trials' to crush anti-establishment figures, Scots juries would regularly return 'not proven' verdicts as it was necessary for all parts of an indictment to be 'proved' and juries used the verdict to rebel against unjust trials of English opponents. The phrase was used to denigrate those thus freed by juries and persists throughout the English speaking world today and is in common usage despite it's origin as a racist epithet towards Scots and the Scottish legal system.

[1] http://www.sath.org.uk/edscot/www.educationscotland.gov.uk/s...

To save everyone a google, the etymology of scot free is not based in Scottish juries.

The phrase in its oldest form literally refers to getting away without paying tax. Scot is cognate with the Danish (Scandinavian) word skat which means both tax and treasure - the latter meaning incidently being why it can be used as a term of endearment.

This later was broadened to mean getting away without any punishment. I could find no reference online to its use for show trials.

Sources:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/scot-free

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/scot-free.html

https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-27...

https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/phrases/scot-free/

https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sco1.htm

For those interested in what the gp could be referring to: There is a Wikipedia article and other sources on the "not proven" verdict of Scottish juries which was/is in practice an acquittal. It's apparently still used in roughly 1/3rd of cases. There is a list of significant cases for which the verdict was used, though none seem to be related to political protest.

> There has never been a connection between the legal system in Scotland and that of England and Wales. Scots laws are primarily passed by the independent Scottish Parliament

To add some important context here, the Scottish Parliament came into existence in 1999. So it’s by far not the case that the majority of laws in effect in Scotland were passed by the Scottish Parliament.

Bitcoin price might take a hit or two.

It already dropped significantly after the Feds announced that they'd seized most of the Colonial Pipeline ransom [1]

Right now $31,916/BTC, down over 11% from ~$36,100 24 hours ago... and falling.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bitcoin-btc-price-slides-as-...

> I expect a few prominent politicians to be soon either arrested or "convinced" to step down.

Won't happen because the media and FANG runs cover for politicians in the west as opposed to reporting on them.

They keep burring anything that can be slightly damaging to politicians while they dox private individuals with impunity.

> I expect this to be bigger than Panama Papers. Way bigger. I expect a few prominent politicians to be soon either arrested or "convinced" to step down.

I highly doubt it. The main drug operations run with state approval. If anything this was just an attempt to either clean the country from competition or just keep law enforcement busy. If you read the reports, what they have collected, this is nothing if you compare what kind of volumes are being moved every day.

For example, in the UK alone it is estimated that yearly volume of illegal cannabis sales is in the region of 6 billion of pounds and the haul of entire operation was like how much, a 100 million?

What it is going to achieve is a slight vacuum, new youth "get rich quick type" will take place and resume operations.

If this wasn't announced in the media, I doubt drug consumers would have ever noticed something happened. If someone is using illegal market, they have plenty of alternative contacts if their main dealer goes bust.

Also these things are already included in the pricing, so this will be just written off as cost of doing business.

In other words, police and customs forces never bother to measure their “success” (seizures) in percent.

If they did, they’d get defunded. We’d get more off the streets by just buying it.

When you put a bounty on dead rats, you don't get a reduction in the amount of rats in your town. What you do get is people breeding rats, to turn in for the bounty.

Drug markets will operate with similar incentives.

If you want to kill the drug trade, what the government needs to do is to start selling drugs. When drugs are cheap, violence and interest in the drug trade plummets. Nobody wants to go to jail over their drug dealing 'job', when its earning them $8/hour.

> When you put a bounty on dead rats, you don't get a reduction in the amount of rats in your town. What you do get is people breeding rats, to turn in for the bounty.

The "Cobra effect".

> If you read the reports, what they have collected, this is nothing if you compare what kind of volumes are being moved every day.

I saw this. Watched the whole Europol conference. Those numbers are indeed low: 9 tons of cocain, 5 tons of cannabis/hashish. Some guns and 15m USD, if I remember correctly.

I still don't think I exaggerated. There's no way that's all they got from it after 3 years of eavesdropping. There's just no way that those tens of thousands of messages only incriminated some drug lords. What they did with these press conferences was a pure PR, they just wanted something for the press, but I still believe that the actual aftermath of this will much larger.

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