Australian police last week made 55 arrests using evidence gathered with a backdoored messaging app that authorities distributed in the criminal community.

This story starts in 2018, when US authorities charged the operator of a Canadian company called “Phantom Secure” for facilitating encrypted communications among criminals. Once Phantom Secure went offline, authorities guessed that criminals would look for alternatives.

The FBI, working with Australia’s Federal Police (AFP), created that alternative in the form of a service called “AN0M” that ran on modified smartphones and required users to pay subscription fees for a secure communications service. AN0M also included a backdoor that allowed authorities to access messages sent using the service.

Crims didn’t know about the backdoor a

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