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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it's something like $5 million for a full iOS end-to-end chain, which is break into the phone and get the data and extract it. That's a lot of money, but I don't know, FBI, just get more money or something. I don't know, just figure it out. And of course, that's kind of easy for me to say, but I would take that over.
Well, now we have a turnkey solution where we could just read all messages all the time. And again, I'm not saying they've done that. I'm not even saying they would do that, but I know... the FBI is looking for the next iteration of this operation because they've said so as much.
Like, I've heard from the agents and they say they're looking forward to whatever the next version of the Anom operation is. And for...
I mean, I would probably use a Graphene OS phone, which is a custom security-focused fork of Android, but is not one of these like shady companies you go buy it from. It's like an open source project that's made by security researchers and that sort of thing. And you download it and you install it for your web browser. I've done it. It's really cool. It takes 30 seconds or a couple of minutes.
I would do that. I would then use an app like Signal. And of course, I'm not actually giving advice to criminals. I'm doing this because if I was just an ordinary user looking for the most secure phone solution, it would also probably be something like that.
My name is Joseph Cox. I'm the author of Dark Wire, and I'm also a co-founder and journalist at 404 Media. Yeah, what's 404 doing? So 404 is a group of four of us, myself, Jason Kepler, Emmanuel Mayberg, and Samantha Cole. And we are all former staff members at Vice's motherboard, the technology site.
Unfortunately, Vice made some very poor managerial decisions from the executives, and that company is now bankrupt. But we left to...
make our own company where well we we want to continue doing tech investigations we want to continue telling stories and how about we do it in a way where we own the company you know so we can not only make journalistic decisions and editorial ones but we can make business ones as well in the hope that we can just keep on doing what we love doing which is unearthing stories verifying information and publishing stuff that's in the public interest
Yeah, of course. I mean, I have been working on this book for three, maybe four years at this point, speaking to essentially every sort of person involved. That's law enforcement. That's also a lot of very dangerous people. But I don't think I've ever been more obsessed with a story. I mean, I'm sure of that. I've never been more obsessed with a story than this one.
That's been my life for years at this point.
Yes. For years, I used an iPod Touch as a secure device, and now I've moved on to an iPad Mini because the iPod's no longer supported, unfortunately.
So I call it an encrypted phone, which is simultaneously a helpful term, but then also not very helpful at all. We don't really have the terminology for it. But yes, it's a combination of things. It had a secure communications app that allows you to send end-to-end encrypted messages to one another with photos and...
voice memos and all of that, very much like a Signal or a modern WhatsApp or a Freema or whatever, right? And it also was a custom phone operating system. It is based on Android somewhat. It's actually a fork of Graphene OS, the privacy-focused operating system. Apparently, Anom had also removed all GPS functionality so that there would be no way
for law enforcement or Google or sort of third-party apps to track the location of those devices.
Which, hey, that's pretty good if you're having a private conversation and, I don't know, an abusive partner snatches your phone trying to rummage through your messages. Or if you're a criminal, a police officer does it or a border official or something like that. So there's that. There's also voice scrambling. So...
You know how on Signal you can send a voice note for one another, and that's very popular on other messaging apps. On Anom, you could do one where it would add either a high-pitched distortion or a low, deep distortion to it as well, and that would mask what your real voice sounded like.
So Anon was created by someone called Afgu. I have to be a little bit careful about what I say about them for reasons that we'll get into. But they are, from what I've learned, a pretty sort of nerdy tech expert for the criminal underground. They were connected to a very well-known criminal called Hakan Ayik, who at one point was Australia's most wanted man.
And this AFCO character sells or did sell phones in this space before eventually deciding, well, I'm going to go make my own. Like rather than working underneath other sellers and sort of other encrypted phone companies, I'm going to create my own tech startup for the criminal underground.
Yes. Legally, it's very, very messy because it's not illegal, generally speaking, to sell or use an encrypted messaging app, which is a good thing, to be clear. Like, that should not be illegal. But a lot of these companies in the, I would say, shadier part of the encryption industry... The thing that differentiates them is that they deliberately facilitate crime.
As in, it's not like Signal, whose users will of course include criminals, or even Apple iMessage or something, just because they're very popular. One of the taglines was, I think it was... designed for criminals by criminals, which is just asking for trouble, really. But Anom had all of those sorts of bells and whistles you would expect, you know, wiping the phone, all of that sort of thing.
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