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.