♪ >> this is al jazeera and the is our top stories. two palestinian intelligence officers have been killed by israeli forces during an incursion in the city of geneva in the occupied west bank. reports an israeli officer was killed in action should buy or the operation. u.s. president biden has arrived in u.k. on his first official trip abroad since taking office. during the eight days he is here he will take part in g7 and nato summits and meets with russian president put in.

>> the consequences for -- democracies in europe and elsewhere. of i will make it clear the transatlantic alliance will win main a vital source of strength of the u.k., europe, and the united states. i will make sure there is no doubt that the united states will rise to defense of our fundamental values and interests. >> jailing of alexei navalny, he cannot run in elections. the base of baghdad international airport has been hit by at least one rocket near the capital and is used by u.s. military aircraft. at least three rockets hit the airbase where u.s. contractors are housed. of massive loss of life in eastern myanmar if no immediate

action is taken, former prime minister has been elected as president and this will consolidate power for the move -- ruling mongolian people's party. the other was forced to resign due to protests. crowds take to the streets to demand results of the election, between the president and his right wing rival. more news coming up right after inside story. by for now. ♪ >> police arrest hundreds around

the world in an unprecedented sting operation. their weapon an app they control. the applications for law enforcement, will tech keep police ahead of criminals question mark this is inside story. -- ahead of criminals? this is inside story. ♪ >> welcome to the show, for three years many in the criminal underworld. they were operating under the radar. organized crime gangs plotted drug deals, money laundering and murder. they had no idea detectives were monitoring them the entire time. police arrested hundreds of suspects in a global operation called trojan shield. as the name suggests, it

involved trickery. gangs thought they were messaging on a secure encrypted platform called anom but it was controlled by australian police and the fbi and gave law enforcement agents insight into criminal activity. paul explains. >> global police included the italian mafia, drug cartels, motorcycle gangs. more than 800 arrests in 16 countries. the gangs thought there -- the communications were secure but the devices had been developed by the fbi and collaboration with australian and european police. >> the criminals using these devices believed they were planning crimes'neath the radar of law enforcement but in reality the criminals were not underneath the radar, they were on it. >> criminal gangs today rely on secure digital communication and the fbi plan was a slow burn.

the first handful of compromised anom devices were provided to criminals in australia 18 months ago and built a solid reputation in the underworld. when law enforcement knocked out the arrival networks earlier this year, more than 12,000 of the compromised devices were in circulation around the globe. multimillion dollar international crime ever dutch empires were visible to police. >> criminals communicated in 45 lang which is about things like trafficking drugs, arms, -- languages about things like trafficking drugs, armed robberies, contract killings. >> the coordinator rates have bound more than -- found more than 3200 pounds of drugs, hundreds of firearms have been collected and nearly -- and

millions of dollars have been seized. >> it's been compromised by law enforcement in a short. of time and i expect others are coming. who can you trust? >> there are other methods of operating but police used this and called it at a watershed moment and it is difficult to disagree. ♪ >> let's bring our guest into the show now, we have joining us from boston glenn, former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats and the national intelligence council. in cardiff, michael levy, professor of criminology at cardiff university and alexander virginia, former u.s. to part and prosecutor. welcome. if i could start with glenn, this is an innovative and eative approach.

almost coming out of a movie. how did it come about? >> i don't know the details of this specific operation, although it is creative and i am happy to be able to talk for once about a real triumph and dramatic success of the fbi, law enforcement, intelligence and international cooperation. it is not an unusual operation in many ways. i have worked closely with the bureau for decades and they can do simply spectacular work. law enforcement is what they do. the agency tends to find fault with them more frequently on intelligence issues because that is our daily work and there are rivalries. but in law-enforcement they can be spectacular. >> but this is another level, this seems unprecedented to convince criminals to actually

-- basically turn themselves into informants. >> i think the extent is surprising, the extent that this seems to span 17 countries or i forget the exact number but it is global, 800 people arrested and a whole range of criminal activity. the scope i think is surprising at least to me. but that there are multilateral law-enforcement operations, this happens frequently and it is a joy frankly to be able to speak about large successes so all of us only become aware most of the time of problems that my colleagues sometimes have. i'm surprised of the scope but not the nature. >> it is 18 countries, hundreds of arrests in 18 countries. professor michael, how much of a blow has this delt to organized crime?

>> i'm afraid it is not a knockout punch but it will have been a blow and one thing they would like to see going forward is a lot more analysis of what it tells us about the nature of criminal organization and crime networks. and money moving networks. because it is relatively rare, except what was said earlier, but it is rare you get this kind of -- in the real world as opposed to relayed by informants from a into the type of discussions they were having amongst themselves. it will lead to a lot more distrust in technology by offenders and in that respect it is a punch, but we have yet to see what impact it will have on terminal markets. it is a terrific law-enforcement triumph.

and it is a very unusual -- it is unusual in terms of scale whether it will stop that many more drugs getting on the streets or that many frauds from happening, it is already disrupted some killings and that is a good thing. but the longer-term impacts on criminal markets we don't yet know about. >> arthur, how much insight has a given authorities into the world of global crime, organized crime? as professor michael said, it is rare you have this sort of level of direct access, i guess in the old days law enforcement would work maybe four years just to plant one informer or informant inside a network. now suddenly you have a lot of people giving you first-hand what they are talking about. >> yeah, you have all of the

details. often when you are building cass, you -- cases you have to fill in details, one interesting aspect is the closed the trap. i would like to know why they closed the trap and i'm speculating but it is probably because they had something big that happened because this would be an incredible tool to be able to use and continue to use. just because you can't necessarily prosecute each case that enters your trap, there are other law enforcement tools you can use in order to make this effective. you can take little bits and pieces of information you gather and trickle it out to different law enforcement agencies across the world, but because they closed the entire loop i would suspect there is something major that happened with a new they wanted to lay it out or maybe it

was breached and it was going to come out this was going on. i think one of the most unique aspects of this is what you were getting into, >> professor michael wanted to say something, go ahead. >> i think it was partly that security was breached but it was also the missions and some of the jurisdictions were expiring. i think they wanted to do a big concerted push, which is what has generated this international -- >> i'm sure people were disappointed, a lot of people wanted them to keep going. this unique and we have been tricking bad guys for a long time, iver number working on a case where we told people they had won a prize at all they had to do was show up -- i remember working on a case where we told people they had won a prize and they just had to show up and

they showed up and we arrested them. interesting to see the scope. it is impressive. >> glenn, along those lines, a officials to the effect that we always knew there was going to come a particular point where we would need to shut this down, from your experience in intelligence work, what imposes that expiry date? is in a breach or an expiry of your ability or some license or warrant? >> warrants are the case sometimes for law enforcement, less so for us in the intelligence community. but like our colleague said a moment ago, when i first heard about this, one of my reactions was a lot of people are not going to be happy. no operations officer ever wants to reveal the source or method because it is compromised and you cannot use it again.

there were compelling reasons, i think a couple were mentioned, such as there might have been events that needed to be stopped and could only be done so by acting or warrants were expiring , there might have been freedom of information requests that come into play. i do not know. but the reasons must have been compelling because you would not want to give up this kind of tool. i think this is a triumph but like our colleagues have said, i will echo, it is not -- it is a medium-term success, short term it's a problem for people who have been detained. long-term, so long as there is a demand, people will find a way to provide a supply and that fundamentally is the issue. i spoke with the head of our naval forces, coast guard, narcotics -- about narcotics

operations for the southern united states and he told me a few years ago he had 12 ships to cover an area going from north carolina to the tip of south america. that is a lot of water to cover with 12 ships. and the head of the narcotic center told me that all of the operations that that institution and the fbi had done over the years had never materially affected the price of any illegal drug on the street. so long as there is a demand, people will be creative and we will have to use a new iteration of what we just discovered. >> professor michael, can law-enforcement continue to use this technique going forward now that the cat is out of the bag? >> i think they will have to find a similar entree. for the smooth running of a criminal enterprise, they would want that level of clemency as

they believe it is secret interchange. and it smooths the paths of offender cooperation. so i think that creates the opportunity for the insertion of this kind of technique. people on both sides will be searching both to insert it and to stop it being inserted. but like the sting operations mentioned earlier, they have a disruptive effect for a while and then they need for criminal collaboration generates its own demand. if the authorities can produce a supply, this sort of thing might happen again. >> so this might continue. arthur, are there civil liberty issues? you are traditionally doing many

kinds of traditional law-enforcement spying and eavesdropping, you might need to get clearance from a judge or court order, you might need if you are trying to use an existing app to go through the company and say can you give us access. but if you own the app yourself and you push it out for wider and wider use, do you see any lack of oversight? >> yeah. this is a debate we have to have and when you volunteer, you do lose some of these rates. one issue i see is our laws, especially in the states, are designed and written for the old trap and trace and title three wire traps where you are plugging -- the operator is literally plugging plugs into different holes to connect lines. that is the way our title iii, our wiretap law, and other laws were drafted. many other countries have modeled their laws after hours.

one issue with this is because technology has changed so quickly, the civil liberty trail is not keeping up, i don't know if there was any judicial interference or oversight over this. there will be, something glenn said that was profound is he talked about the procedures and the methods -- it is really one of the things they want to protect and there is always tension between intelligence and law enforcement because intelligence wants to protect source methods and law enforcement want to put bad guys in jail. that tension is where civil liberties come to play. we have a classified information procedure act which allows us to do certain things behind the veil, but if we want to put bad people in prison in the united states we have to release discovery. one of the things about this effort is because now it is in the open, they can actually do discovery. because they can do discovery,

they can start putting people in prison. and that is key. the civil liberty aspect of it, we are constantly having that interplay between civil liberties, technology, and the way bad guys do business. it is a very hard way -- race to keep up with. i enjoy the fact that i'm reading a cyber story where we are on offense instead of defense which is -- the last year has been defense so this is a great year. >> i would at a point if i could. >> go ahead, glenn. >> if the convention in the united states and everywhere for the -- for 20 years has been that the u.s. intelligence community specifically, not atkinson -- a concern for me in my career, is a threat to the civil liberties and has broken the law. and ignore them, flaunted its power as opposed to its

obligations. repeated independent analysis of the natural -- national security agencies, the people who capture radio transmissions and so on, or the intelligence officers in the cia who have operations and do physical penetrations of the facility, as somehow infringed -- have somehow infringed civil liberties. but the dozens of incident -- incident says -- instances of caps or conversations, i think there were 80 that roco law and 75 or something of those were -- at broke the law and 75 or something were rectified, they were expunged or not used. i can tell you from -- >> but of the known and analyzed cases, right? >> that dramatically

mischaracterizes, not intentionally, the extent of analysis. congress, the department of justice, independent investigators, all of the above looked at several of the national security programs and found that they did not in almost any case break the law. what they did was, and this is objectionable to many, but not illegal, they would capture transmissions. you call me or i call somebody, they did not use it. they can only be accessed if there is probable cause. it's not even used. >> that's a big discussion about the capture of metadata and the pick -- the picture you can form an how intrusive and illegal that is. i'm wondering, doesn't make

sense, if law-enforcement was already putting this program together, might there be -- might they be tempted to think they may have also thought about stage two already? there may be other apps out there, should we assume this was not the only one they thought to put together? >> that is a doubt they are hoping to keep in the minds of offenders so that they won't use the next one unless they have it, in which case, one of the rival apps is called sky global and the authorities closed that down and it drove more offenders toward the anom. >> how do we know authorities will only use this to spy on who we call the bad guys? suspected criminals? >> yeah, that is the objective.

the fbi did not use this in a widespread way within the united states, and that is one reason this is an international case because of concerns about their powers and intrusive surveillance. >> if you are giving out 12,00 -- 12,000 handsets, is a possibly good one to someone who is not in criminal activity? >> yeah. >> we will come back to you. >> given the utility of these handsets, it did not realistically have any other app, it would not have been much use to a sexual partner except for communicating with one of

the principles, so i don't think that was much of a risk in this. >> go ahead, arthur. >> -- there are strict rules on how you minimize conversations that are not relevant out but the thing that does most of the protection -- >> who has those strict rules? is there oversight? >> while it is an internal rule but i was going to say the most protection comes from just the man hours. we do not have the hours in the day to listen to conversations between lovers, and my experiences -- experience is when you hear conversations between lovers or attorneys and clients turn the conversation off, they are actively trying to get evidence in order to proceed with intelligence and cases.

you don't have a time to listen to all of that. there is a body on the end of every civil one of these conversations reading these. when you talk about international, there are translators involved. we have computer programs that can help with buzzwords but bad guys are sophisticated, i cannot tell you the coding system the cartel would use to talk about their business and away we could not recognize. at the end of the day, man hours is a huge part in ensuring we are on the things important to us. >> man hours, internal rules, that might be dust might work while in theory but it needs to have independent oversight if this is a thing of the future. not only criminals are going to have to go deeper and deeper into this kind of technology, but law enforcement will. is there a need to have independent oversight? >> there is. there is always a dilemma in intelligence, how do you keep something secret and have

outside oversight which is of -- acquired for objectivity and fairness. in the west system we have twisted ourselves into knots trying to solve this dilemma. but i think it is done well. one, all institutions are law-abiding and infinite -- and if an officer breaks the law or do something questionable, they will at the very least suffer. how is this ascertained? there are inspector generals who travel from station and offices all the time and conduct reports. they are powerful and do their jobs well. supervisors will have huge consequences if they have allowed something to occur. >> slightly different perspective on some of that of course because all of that is sort of internal relying, isn't it? >> the only oversight outside

some of these is the department of justice and our elected officials, the oversight committees who are empowered to take all sorts of steps to make sure that people like me don't break the law. it really is a rare occurrence. >> we are running out of time. >> if an american name or person was heard on the intercept of the conversation and we do not have a warrant, we literally had to stop the listening. we cannot do it. so even if we gave up information, we just cannot do it. >> is a really fascinating discussion and i'm sure we could go on for another hour, but we are out of time. less think our guests, i'm sure you will be back to talk about this in the not-too-distant

future. let's think len, michael, and arthur. -- glenn, michael and arthur. and thank you for watching, you can see the show again or all previous programs by visiting our website aljazeera.com. join the conversation on twitter, our handle is @ajinside story. from me and the whole team, for now it is goodbye. ♪ ■x?x■x■x■ñ■oxxxúúúúúóóóóóóóó??■

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