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
You know, that's basically parallel construction. It's very complicated. It gets very nuanced. But I do think that civil libertarians would be a little bit aghast at sort of the trade-offs that were being made on a daily basis.
Like licensing Anom and stuff. So the deal itself is between AFGU and the US authorities and got paid something like $120,000 and then $60,000 for travel expenses, I think is how it's phrased in some of the documents. But Anom basically became an FBI tech company. From what I've been told from people with direct involvement, you know, the FBI was picking up the bill.
They were paying for infrastructure. They were paying for hardware, Android hardware for the phones, for the app to be flashed on. They were running a tech company. And I think that's just the craziest thing here. And beyond that, they were running a tech company for criminals.
So yeah, I've spoken to people who actually coded the app and basically made the phone. And these were completely ordinary developers. One I spoke to, who I call, has hit in the book. I used a different name just to protect their identity. But they found a freelancing gig online about the secure communications app.
They get involved and they're doing normal coding like they've done a million times before for an Android app. And what they're told is that... We make this app and we sell it to businesses. We sell it to corporations to protect their communications.
And as part of that, companies like to be able to audit their messages, you know, and that's very common in banking, very common in finance, all of that sort of thing for legal reasons.
Yeah, I mean, Customs and Border Protection, part of DHS, they use Wicker, the encrypted app that many people will be familiar with. But they use an enterprise or government version, which, yes, it's encrypted, but it has that extra archiving function. And the... Developers of Anom, that's what they thought they were building.
They thought they were building a communications platform for businesses to, yes, talk somewhat securely, but have the messages archived. So then, for whatever reason, the administrator can go through them at a later date. That's what they thought they were doing. What they weren't told was that the phones are being sold to criminals and the archiving feature is actually for the FBI.
AFGU left that bit out when telling the developers about that. And I mean, just very briefly on that, the compartmentalization that AFGU did, I think is very interesting, as in there were the people designing the app, and they were sort of in their own silo. There were then people making the custom fork of Graphene OS, the Android operating system, and there was those people.
And then somewhere else, there were the criminal resellers on the ground. And these groups never really communicated with one another. And I'm surprised it didn't leak. To be perfectly honest, I'm genuinely surprised, but somehow it managed to stay a secret, at least for a long time.
The phones start popping up in Europe, and that's when broadly sort of the Swedish police get involved, and then also the Dutch. They are the two main European agencies that first come forward, because that's simply where the phones are ending up. And obviously the AFP doesn't really have jurisdiction. over Sweden or the Netherlands.
And the FBI, although they are reading the messages by this point, they're not in English, for a start. And the FBI can't really go over and start arresting people in the Netherlands, nor should they. So they decide to share some of the intelligence with... their Swedish and their Dutch counterparts.
And it starts to mirror what's going on in Australia with, you know, more intelligence gathering and the rest here and the rest there. But it's still very much under wraps, even though more and more cops are being looped in.
At this point, I've read, I think, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Anon messages and messages from other providers as well. And what emerges through reading those is that a lot of people who sell these encrypted phones in a particular market or territory, they treat it like having a drug territory. Like in the same way that somebody may be the wholesale distributor for...
you know, a certain part of Sweden or maybe Antwerp or something like that, these phone dealers treat their product in the same sort of way.
Yeah, I think this is something that a lot of people reading the book are going to have an issue with, basically. I think that's the only way to put it, which is like, why is this US law enforcement agency intercepting and reading messages from all over the world? And the best answer I have is that, well, there's two.
There's sort of the legal one, which is that, you know, the Fourth Amendment only protects people on American soil, right? Where you have to get a search and seizure warrant to go through communications or a wiretap order or whatever, right? Not to get too technical. The FBI does not need that for overseas.
And that's basically sort of the loophole that they used where they were able to go through all of this data. The second one is like sort of how they see themselves and maybe how they see their ethical obligation as well. But the prosecutors I've spoken to who were involved in this case, they just simply see this as a good thing.
And they want to go out and they want to shut down all of these criminal gangs. They want to intercept them. I think that there are valid questions about national sovereignty and all of that sort of thing. But that is what the FBI... They set out to wiretap the world, essentially, and they were very, very successful at it.
I mean, it... It's partly they're doing it because they can. They can monitor these communications. Yes, they can't go arrest people themselves, but then they can provide that intelligence to foreign partners. I mean, it's sort of an overused cliche at this point, the idea of America being the world police or whatever. But there is...
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