A court was about to rule that a government surveillance operation was illegal. So the government did not wait for the verdict. It passed a new law declaring, retroactively, that what its own police had already done was legal all along. That happened in Australia, in December 2024, while the case was still live in the High Court. In October 2025, the court upheld it.
Prefer to watch this instead? — same story, six minutes.
Here is what that law was protecting.
The FBI built the trap itself
In 2018, the FBI shut down a company called Phantom Secure, which sold encrypted phones to cartels and organised crime groups around the world. One of the developers facing charges offered the FBI something else entirely. He was already building a new encrypted platform. Instead of shutting that one down too, the FBI built it with him.
They called it ANOM.
It looked untouchable. Modified Android phones running a stripped-down operating system, with the messaging app hidden behind an ordinary calculator icon. Every message was supposedly locked between sender and receiver, end to end, the way any encrypted app is meant to work. In reality, a copy of every single message was routed straight to a server the FBI controlled, decrypted, and read.
This was never just an American story
The FBI could not legally run an operation like this against people inside the United States, so the Australian Federal Police became the backbone of it. Australia hosted the technical infrastructure. Distribution started there too, fifty devices in late 2018, spreading through word of mouth from criminal sellers who used to move Phantom Secure phones. Within Australia, the domestic effort built around this evidence became known as Operation Ironside. Internationally, the wider takedown was announced under the name Operation Trojan Shield.
By 2021, more than twelve thousand ANOM devices were active in over one hundred countries, used by more than three hundred criminal organisations. Over roughly three years, law enforcement read something close to twenty seven million messages. People planned drug shipments, money laundering, and killings, openly, on a network they believed belonged to them.
On the eighth of June 2021, the FBI, the Australian Federal Police, and Europol announced it all at once. Europol coordinated raids across sixteen countries in a single operation. Hundreds of arrests. Tons of drugs seized. Hundreds of firearms. Tens of millions of dollars in cash and cryptocurrency. In the United States, seventeen foreign nationals were indicted for distributing the devices, and that is largely where the American side of it stopped, because the same legal protections that limit surveillance of US citizens still applied, even to a network their own government had built.
Then the courts started asking questions
In Australia, the people arrested through Operation Ironside fought back. They argued in court that the entire collection method amounted to an illegal interception under Australian telecommunications law. The case reached the High Court after the court granted the defendants special leave to appeal in November 2024.
And while judges were still deciding, the Australian Parliament stepped in. It passed a new law, the Surveillance Legislation (Confirmation of Application) Act 2024, declaring that the method the Australian Federal Police had used had always been lawful. Not before the operation began. Not before the arrests. While the court was actively weighing whether it was legal.
In October 2025, the High Court upheld that law. The evidence stands. Hundreds of prosecutions can proceed.
What actually happened here
I want to be careful with this one, because legal challenges to ANOM evidence remain active in other countries, and this is not a settled matter everywhere. But sit with what is already confirmed and on the public record.
A government agency built and ran the exact kind of criminal enterprise it prosecutes other people for building. And when its own justice system started asking whether that crossed a line, the same government rewrote the line, retroactively, while the question was still being decided.
That is not a loophole quietly exploited in the small print. That is a government catching itself in a courtroom, and changing the rules before the verdict could land.
FAQ
What was Operation Trojan Shield? Operation Trojan Shield was the international name for a multi-year FBI-led sting in which agents secretly built and distributed an encrypted phone network, ANOM, to criminal organisations. It ran from 2018 to 2021 and involved law enforcement across more than a dozen countries.
What is Operation Ironside? Operation Ironside is the Australian name for the same underlying operation. The Australian Federal Police used the intelligence gathered through ANOM to build the case against hundreds of alleged offenders inside Australia.
How many people were arrested because of ANOM? Authorities reported hundreds of arrests worldwide when the operation was announced on 8 June 2021, following raids across sixteen countries coordinated by Europol.
Was the ANOM evidence obtained legally? That was the exact question before Australia’s High Court. Defendants argued the AFP’s collection method counted as an illegal interception. Rather than let the court decide first, Australian Parliament passed a law in December 2024 declaring the method had always been lawful, and the High Court upheld that law in October 2025.
What is the Surveillance Legislation (Confirmation of Application) Act 2024? It is the Australian law passed while the ANOM legality case was still before the High Court, retroactively confirming that the Australian Federal Police’s collection of ANOM messages did not count as an unlawful interception.
Get More Guidance Like This, 100% Ad-Free.
This is a classic blog from my public archive. If you loved it, MONDAY INFLUENCER insiders get real education from real experts, delivered every single week, so you can trust what you learn again. When you join, you unlock:
- A library of downloadable audios, templates and cheat sheets.
- A new curated classic from the 500+ episode archive every week
- A mentor bot trained on real expert insight, a straight answer instead of another AI guess.
- A weekly digest that cuts through copy-paste headlines and algorithm noise.
- Exclusive Members-Only Workshops and live Q&A sessions.
Sources
All fetched and checked directly against the primary document where one exists, not taken on a summary.
- FBI — FBI, Global Partners Announce Results of Operation Trojan Shield (8 June 2021). Official announcement of the takedown; origin from the Phantom Secure case, scale of the operation.
- U.S. Department of Justice, Southern District of California — Distributor of ANOM Hardened Encrypted Devices Sentenced to 63 Months (15 November 2024). Confirms the 17 San Diego defendants and “more than 27 million messages” — fetched and checked directly.
- High Court of Australia — Judgment summary, CD & Anor v The Commonwealth of Australia [2025] HCA 37 (8 October 2025). The ruling itself: confirms the Confirmation of Application Act was enacted after special leave to appeal was granted, and that the Court unanimously found it valid — fetched and checked directly.
- Australian Public Law blog — AN0M in the High Court – CD v Commonwealth [2025] HCA 37. Case timeline, including the 7 November 2024 grant of special leave to appeal.
- Paul Fletcher MP, Parliament of Australia — Surveillance Legislation (Confirmation of Application) Bill 2024, Second Reading. Legislative background and the bill’s stated purpose.
- CBS News — FBI uses ANOM messaging app to trick criminals (10 June 2021). Device count, syndicate count, and country count.
- VOA News — 800 Arrested in Global Organized Crime Investigation (8 June 2021). Australia-specific arrest and seizure figures.
- Wikipedia — Operation Trojan Shield. Overview and timeline cross-reference; 27 million message figure corroborated here independently of the DOJ release.
- Lawfare — Legal Tetris and the FBI’s ANOM Program. Background on how the FBI structured the operation around US legal constraints.