Joseph Cox

It was like they already knew, of course, the contours of organized crime.

But an entire iceberg emerged underneath the water's surface, where I was like, oh no, this is way bigger than we anticipated.

And something that doesn't normally come up in ordinary criminal investigations, but it did with Anom, is the sheer amount of public corruption involved in the drug trade.

You're going to have corrupt law enforcement officials giving tips to their criminal cohorts,

You can have people in ports, in airports as well.

And there's sort of this interface between the criminal world and the legitimate economy.

And it turns out these actually overlap way more than many of the officials reading the messages actually previously understood.

Yeah.

It's bigger than we all thought, and it intersects with the surface world or the legitimate economy in way more ways than I think anybody sort of anticipated.

You've seen some of the material that they saw.

Like, what have you seen?

So, when the FBI started digging through the unknown messages, what they found was that the content was overwhelmingly criminal.

Usually, if a wiretap is like, oh, there's a little bit of crime, but maybe they're talking to their wife or husband or whatever.

Here, it's like, no, they're just straight up talking about cocaine all the time.

No code words, nothing like that.

And I later obtained...

hundreds of thousands of Anom messages and spent months reading them, waking up, reading them, going to my day job, reading more in the evening to build up a picture of Microsoft and his associates and other criminals as well.

And I think I felt the same sort of sensation that the FBI must have felt because it was insane.

Just every single chat in there is about some sort of really serious crime.

We're going to kill this person.