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 really positioned itself as sort of the Royals Royce of the encrypted phone industry. If you wanted a super secure device from a company that didn't care if you were a criminal, if anything, it likes the fact you're a criminal, you could turn to Anom.
That is basically what Anom was pitching itself as to its customers and even to its sellers. It was saying, your messages will be end-to-end encrypted. We can't see what's going on. We won't turn over data to law enforcement. Our servers are outside the reach of the Five Eyes. All of the normal sort of marketing and privacy benefits you would expect. Except, of course, that wasn't true.
Anom was doing something else in the background.
So it's very, very interesting on a technical level. And what it is, is that Anom basically created a ghost contact that was added to every conversation. And it received a blind carbon copy, a BCC, of every message sent across the platforms. So when Criminal A was talking to Criminal B about a cocaine shipment, that was secretly being sent off to Anom, and the users were none the wiser.
It was like having a spy in everybody's pocket, in their back pocket, looking over their shoulder. They could just see into everything.
Yes, it's almost end-to-end encrypted. There's another end in there.
So why not, Afgu's lawyer tells the authorities, would you want to use Anom in your investigations in exchange for, you know, leniency if Afgu ever faces charges, right? It became the ultimate bargaining chip, essentially.
Yeah, and this is very quickly done in the book. And that's not because I'm sort of glazing over it. It's because it just happened really, really quickly. And that's just a series of events that happened. Now, I don't know whether that was always the plan or something like that, or was it maybe always in the back of Afgu's mind? I don't know that. But very, very quickly...
Anom was put on the table to the FBI back in around 2018, I think is when these conversations were happening.
Yes, and the Australian Federal Police, who for years, they've been really stymied by encrypted phones, like probably even more than the FBI. In Australia, these sorts of phones are incredibly common among organized crime groups. You know, you'll have the Italian Mafia over there in Australia, them using it. You'll also have the biker gangs like the Comicheros and the Hells Angels. They all use...
these sorts of phones. And for years, if not more than a decade at this point, the AFP in particular has been running into these phones again and again and again. So the idea of a backdoor in an encrypted phone is incredibly attractive to them.
I mean, what I've been told is that when the AFP agents were told about this possibility and the plan to go ahead, they looked like they were kids on Christmas morning.
So it starts when Afgoo, the creator of Anom, offers the phones to a particular phone seller slash drug trafficker in Australia. His name is Domenico Catanzarati. And he used to sell Phantom Secure phones, one of those earlier companies. And when that company was shut down, He obviously doesn't really have any phones to sell.
Well, lo and behold, here comes AFKU with what looks like it's going to be the hottest new phone on the market. So he provides some of those phones to Catanzarati and just starts using them and just starts talking about them and spreading them around. I think initially the phones were actually just given... for free to Catanzarate.
It's almost like a sort of Uber technique, Silicon Valley growth technique. I don't know, just get it out there for free. And we'll figure out the laws, we'll figure out the market later. But we just want to get devices into people's hands, basically.
At least for the Australians, the AFP, it was relatively real-time, instantaneous. You know, they could see that, oh, the Comacheros are talking about beating up this guy. Oh, this biker gang is talking about... doing a weapons drop off of like high caliber assault rifles at this time in this location. It was really like peeling back the curtain on these conversations.
At the start, the AFP, as far as I know, was simply collecting the intelligence. There is this massive trade-off constantly throughout this entire story, which is that, okay, you have a backdoor into a phone, but how do you act on that? Do you act on it? And when do you act on that information?
Because if you go too loud too quickly, it's going to become obvious to the criminals that something bad is going on, at least for them.
Yeah. It got to the point where the people I've spoken to, the law enforcement officials around the world, they had to do stuff like basically lie. They had to make up a story where it's like, okay, we are finally going to strike on this drug lab or this drug warehouse or whatever, because it's so large and we have to act, but we're going to write the intelligence in such a way that
It looks like it's coming from an informant or a source. There's going to be no mention of a NOM, no mention of a backdoor. And from a law enforcement perspective, that's great. Okay, we managed to get the drugs and arrest the people or whatever while without revealing... you know, the secret about a norm. On the flip side, there is a justice issue there.
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