@kaibiermann you couldn't make it up.

The messages themselves were transmitted through encrypted applications that the men believed to be secure. But Google operates through servers in the United States, which fall squarely within the reach of an FBI surveillance warrant. Armed with a court order, investigators were able to access the logs of these translations directly from the service provider, reading the clear-text content of the entire operational communications thread in real time, even as Alimov and Durovic believed themselves protected by end-to-end encryption.

The surveillance logs, portions of which have been quoted in a newly unsealed U.S. grand jury indictment, read at times like an absurdist document: two operatives of Russia's most secretive assassination unit conducting a murder-for-hire plot through a consumer translation tool, their every instruction and status report preserved in legible, timestamped entries on an American company's servers. It was, as a source close to the investigation later noted, even better than a wiretap because it arrived transcribed.