How the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld
How the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld
Cybersecurity journalist Joseph Cox joins Decoder to discuss his new book Dark Wire all about the FBI’s secretive secure phone startup.
This was years ago...
Yes. It’s not a news article. The article is promoting a podcast of an interview with someone who wrote a book about that story. You know sometimes books are about things that happened in the past.
You know sometimes books are about things that happened in the past.
Big if true
It's by Joseph Cox who did a lot of reporting on the phone while they were at Motherboard. Quite good tech journalist.
You know sometimes books are about things that happened in the past.
Only if the book has pictures in it. Otherwise those things didn't happen.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Somehow, on top of all that, Joseph also found time to write a new book coming out in June called Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, and I can’t recommend it enough.
Criminals like drug traffickers represent a market for encrypted, secure communications away from the eyes of law enforcement.
In the early mobile era, that gave rise to a niche industry of specialized, secured phones criminals used to conduct their business.
Joseph’s done a ton of reporting on this over the years, and the book ends up telling a truly extraordinary story: After breaking into a few of these encrypted smartphone companies, the FBI ended up running one of these secure phone services itself so it could spy on criminals around the world.
The company was called Anom, and for about three years, it gave law enforcement agencies around the world a crystal-clear window into the criminal underworld.
Now, with the rise of apps like Signal, most criminals no longer need specialized hardware, but that, of course, raises a whole new set of issues.
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