Joseph Cox
speaker
591 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard 28 Jan
Joseph Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I see a Google account in Hakan Ayik's name, and I'm pretty sure it's him, starts leaving more Google reviews at restaurants across Turkey, and this is about six months after the operation.
Yeah, he's like, this restaurant is great, five stars, amazing service. Oh, I really like the food in this place. And I put them on a map and I'm following them. He's like, oh, he's having a great time, like going around Turkey, going to these tourist spots.
So I'm following that, and to me that shows, damn, this guy is so bold, and he's flexing to the authorities. Like, you just ran the biggest sting operation ever, and I'm out here having a really good meal and pulling it basically on Yelp or Google reviews or whatever. Yeah. That audacity...
does come to a halt when, very surprisingly, Turkish authorities launch a large series of coordinated raids against organized criminals inside the country. That sweeps up Hakan. It also gets Microsoft and a ton of other people connected to their network.
Microsoft looks completely dumbfounded and surprised in that footage. And all we know now is that they're probably sat in a cell somewhere in Istanbul or otherwise in Turkey, but their fate remains unclear. And one... associate of Hakan's I spoke to immediately after that. He said that, of course, it's a speed bump, but I don't think it's the end of this story.
This is one of the most successful criminals ever, and especially successful at getting away from the cops whenever it feels like they finally have him in their grasp.
They haven't stopped. They haven't stopped. And of course, it would be a bit unfair to lump the entire drug trade on one operation, but even when the largest sting operation ever can't really put a sizeable dent in the drug trade, like, maybe there should be a different approach.
And even some of the Swedish officials I spoke to, they brought this up, like, we're seizing these shipments of cocaine, we're arresting these people, more criminals take their place and then more cocaine comes. Like, maybe this is the wrong approach, right? So you have that. What you also have is that I think the FBI was really successful in sowing that mistrust in the encrypted phone industry.
And drug traffickers I've spoken to and people who sell these phones since the operation, they say it's basically impossible to build a customer base at this point because everybody suspects, well, what if the FBI is behind that phone as well?
do we want law enforcement to touch these consumer platforms at all? It's an incredibly complicated and fraught issue, but we're even seeing it. In Europe, they're proposing legislation to scan the content of encrypted messages for child sexual abuse imagery and then potentially other crimes as well. It's not even in the shadows.
The European legislators are just coming out and saying, we want to do this, so maybe it's time we pay attention to what these people are asking. I mean, it's funny.
I think that's why it's so fascinating because you'll have privacy-focused people read the book and they've told me, oh my God, this is terrifying and horrifying. They did this. And then you'll have people who are more on the law enforcement side and they'll read it and they'll go, this is fucking awesome. This is really cool. And then I think a ton of people will be in the middle
and genuinely won't know what to think about it because you absolutely can see it on both sides. And again, I've heard from people who also lean more on the privacy side. They've actually shifted somewhat. They're like, to be fair, as you say, this was a network primarily for criminals. And I think that is the key thing, right? This is not Signal.
It's not WhatsApp or it's not one of these consumer apps, but it is a warning shot of the incredible amount of resources that law enforcement may put towards fighting this problem. And it's what happens now that I think people may want to worry about or may want to think about.
But for years, we've had to speculate or just basically make up, what would it be like if the FBI got a backdoor into a tech product? Well, now we know. This is literally the case. It actually happened. So if we can digest this and we can figure out, okay, now do we want authorities to read all encrypted messages or not? And personally, there are like three options I see in front of me.
The first is that secure apps give more data to the authorities. You know, oh, you send a subpoena to Signal, they give information about the user. That's pretty problematic because that could be very easily abused for various reasons and it would undermine the security of the apps. Okay, sure.
You have the second one, which is like, well, let's just run the apps and get all of the messages on it like they did with Anom, which obviously to me is insane, compromising the entire communication platform. You then have something else, which I believe, and I know people will disagree with me, there is another option of targeted hacking.
You have malware that can be delivered to a specific device, to a specific user, and harvest only a small particular amount of information which is allowed under that country's or agency's laws or whatever. If those are the three options, I would take the hacking one just because it's the less bad out of all of those. And some people will come forward and say, why do you have to pick one?
And I think it's because the status quo is just not sustainable. We had the status quo for ages, and then the FBI decided to run its own tech company. That's what happens when there's a status quo. They'll keep doing these crazy brazen operations. Do you want them to do that, or do you want them to do something less invasive? Right, because the thing that you're pointing to is
Yeah, and there's a lot of nuance to it in that, you know, the FBI will have an exploit to get into an iPhone, and that will allow them into it. And then Apple will learn about that and get very, very mad, and then they'll fix it. And then the FBI will have to buy another exploit. And yes, there's a lot of money involved. I've reported a lot on the people who sell exploits for iPhones.
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