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
for something like 12 000 people in 150 different countries it's like i almost can't picture the task in front of them and that's why they had to turn to these pretty sophisticated systems for figuring out not just what people are saying but who the hell these people even are and they would do that and then even put you know the stereotypical graphs on the wall in the fbi with uh
the layouts of different criminal organizations. And in some cases, the FBI doesn't even know who these people are at first. They're just like, well, we have a new crime syndicate on the platform. Let's start mapping out how they're related to one another.
Yeah, so as well as the drug trafficking, the main thing that flowed across Anom were what the FBI calls threat to life. And this is where a criminal organization or just an individual criminal will want to harm, torture, or in many cases, kill somebody else. And this happened across Anom constantly to the point where one of the FBI agents who was reading the Anom messages at first
His task was just to go through every single image that was sent across the platform. And often these were weapons or locations or targets. And the way it was described to me is that it's trying to figure out a puzzle basically as quickly as possible. You have to take all these disparate pieces of information and maybe you only have a photo of... a weapon.
So that indicates there's probably going to be violence here. Or maybe you only have a photo of the location and it's like, well, something's going to happen there. And the FBI would have to very, very quickly, as best as they could, figure out this puzzle, give information to foreign authorities who could then act on it, and then maybe save people or maybe not.
I don't think it was always successful, but they did save lives in the process as well.
Yeah, there's a lot of posturing in there through the Anon messages I've read where there are people doing exactly that. Like, oh, I'm going to effing kill him or whatever. And then you'll come across messages where they are talking specifically about getting a getaway car to drive away from the restaurant after they've killed somebody. Then they need to rent an Airbnb to hide the assassin.
When it starts to get specific and granular, at least to me, that's when it's like, oh, okay, we need to actually take this seriously. And that's what the Swedish authorities did, the Dutch as well, and especially the FBI.
Yeah, it puts the FBI in a complicated ethical spot, and it puts the foreign agencies in the same spot as well. What started to happen was that the FBI or its partners would intercept communications about a threat to life. The authorities would then act on it. They would somehow stop the killing, and that could be in various ways.
But then what would happen would be that the criminals would continue talking, and they would go, huh. how did the authorities know we were going to kill this guy? And they wouldn't assume it was a nom. They would assume there was a mole or a rat in their organization. And then they would try to kill that person. So then the FBI has another threat to life.
And it almost became like this endless cycle or spiral where it just started to become exceptionally difficult for the FBI to maintain tempo, is the way they described it.
Anom phones, as I found through reporting this book, they absolutely landed on American soil. There were Anom phones being used inside the United States. there was a plan for the FBI to start reading those messages. But it was very difficult for them to figure out what to do with all this information they collected. They are basically stonewalled in being able to look at U.S. communications.
There just didn't seem to be the appetite to go after people inside the states, even though the prosecutors and the agents on the case very, very much wanted to. They were ready to do it. They were collaborating with a field office in Los Angeles as well. It was just a matter of basically pulling the switch, but higher-ups in the DOJ shut that down, essentially.
Yeah, so what happened when it was first approved for the FBI to gain access to the messages in general was that most drug prosecutors in San Diego in a specific meeting I describe, they were like, no, this is a ridiculous idea. You can't do this.
Yes, exactly. They were like, please don't look at the US messages. We will figure that out later. And what happened was that the prosecutors on that, they send their requests to a specific part of the DOJ called the Office of Enforcement Operations. And they're the ones who basically approve every wiretap. If you want a wiretap in the US, they have to approve it.
And the prosecutors on the Anom case sent that, and... OEO just sat on it for months and months and months. There was clearly this divide between the cowboys on the Anom case and then the more senior people in DOJ who were just like, we're absolutely not approving this.
And Anom obviously grew to a massive size even without that, but it could have grown even bigger with potentially even more disastrous consequences.
Yeah, I absolutely think there should be a debate around whether secretly running a tech company should be allowed. There should be a debate on whether we want to be able to hack into entire telecommunications providers. Maybe the end result of that conversation is that we as a society are okay with the trade-offs.
But I don't think ordinary members of the public, one, first, even though this is basically happening, and second of all, aren't aware of what those trade-offs even are. Like, how can we even have that conversation when this is basically done in the shadows and then everybody moves on?
I mean, there's no two ways about it. The FBI facilitated crime with the development and the ongoing maintenance and the secret running of Anom. The FBI was a tech backbone of organized crime. Now, yes, of course, they also had the surveillance capability as well, but they were selling a product to criminals, and the criminals were making great use of it.
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