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
There's an element of that stereotype here in that the FBI went out and they collect all these messages all around the world, even though they couldn't monitor what was going on in America. This is sort of the future of policing that we're in now. And there wasn't really a debate about it.
It was just like one day or several days over the past few years, police have just decided that they're going to hack or otherwise intercept communications all around the world, basically. And we didn't really get a chance to talk about that as a society, about whether that's something we want. Maybe it turns out we do. Like, I don't know.
But we can't have that conversation unless we know what's going on. And that's kind of what I was hoping to do with this book. pause and consider this.
I think that is something that cryptographers and privacy experts I spoke to in the book were worried about, which is that some of them are less worried about the specific case of a norm, while some are, to be clear, but they're more worried about, well, what happens now? If we have a network that's 90% criminal and 10% normal users, is that a fair target? I don't know.
What happens when it moves to 50-50? You know, and there's a really good quote in there from Matthew Green, the cryptologist, and he says that, well, maybe 50% of the criminals on this network are doing really, really bad stuff like trafficking or whatever. And then 50% are doing like, I don't know, copyright infringement of song lyrics, something that I don't think many people really care about.
In the eyes of law enforcement, is that a fair target? And that's the discussion we're not having. And we need to have that as quickly as possible, because otherwise law enforcement are just going to go ahead and do it.
Yeah, yeah. It's a worry, and that was a big worry in the Snowden ones. And in this case, it was like, even though the FBI couldn't look at phones in America, the AFP agreed to keep an eye on the ones on American soil for threats to life. And, you know, on one hand, you could say that, well, it's good the AFP were monitoring that so nobody got hurt, hopefully.
On the other end, well, why didn't the FBI just get a warrant and do it themselves? Yeah.
Some of the phones landed in Dubai and, you know, part of the UAE. And the UAE is very interesting because it's one of the very few places that you're not allowed to just go around and start selling an encrypted phone or an encrypted app. If it is not approved by the government, you can get into a lot of trouble. You know, I guess sort of in the same way as like the Russian Federation, right?
It has to be approved by the government. It is basically a combination of a censorship and a surveillance sort of posture. Whereas if you are selling an encrypted app that the local authorities and national authorities do not approve of, you're not allowed to do that. And the reason being is that, well, they want to be able to access that.
And somebody running around selling Anom phones is not going to get on their good side.
I mean, I walked through the same rooms that the FBI was reading the Anom messages in. I've obtained screenshots of what the FBI interface looked like. So I feel like I can put myself in the head of some of these FBI agents because I've also read a ton of these messages as well, right? And the system itself is called Holler iBot. You log in.
Initially, it was just from the San Diego FBI field office, but then they made it remote as well for the European partners. And also because of COVID, people couldn't go to the office as much. You log in, and there's sort of a green and black interface. And you can click on an individual Anom user. And it will show sort of a constellation of all of their contacts.
There'll be a circle in the middle, and there'll be another circle of the person they spoke to, and then another circle which shows sort of the group chat. You can then zero in on those. It's almost like a Maltigo sort of interface. And then once you go to a specific user, you can see all of their messages. You can see all of their photos.
And rather handily, there was also AI-powered summaries of what was being spoken about, powered at least in some way by... Amazon, the FBI used some Amazon capability there. So you can look on the right side of the screen and it's like, Jerry is talking about a cocaine deal or whatever it is. And sometimes it's that blunt, which was just always hilarious to me.
But when it gets to the point where there are millions and then tens of millions of messages, the FBI had to turn to some of these AI capabilities because otherwise they're going to be swimming in data. And by the end, they were absolutely swimming in data.
There was a real danger that if they did not analyze every single message, well, what would happen if the one message about a death threat got through and then somebody died? That was a constant threat, and it really, really ramped up as Anom became especially more popular.
HoloEyebot was developed by FBI computer scientists. It was made in-house as basically like the surveillance interface of a knob.
Yeah, and I mean, if you think about it, imagine a normal wiretap in LA or something, and it's one guy talking to another guy on a normal phone, and they're talking about a drug deal. And if you're the FBI or whoever, you have to figure out who these people are. And that might be tricky. As you say, maybe they're using code names, maybe they're using pseudonyms.
And then you go about, and you maybe get phone location data, you figure out who they are, whatever. Now imagine doing that
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