Joseph Cox

Yeah, so these coders, they think they're just working for a normal Android development company, which is making an encrypted messaging app.

They know that.

That's fine.

They also know there is a message copying feature inside a NOM.

But what they're told is that, oh, this is for corporations who, yes, they want to have secure chats, but they need to keep an archive of the messages.

Maybe they work in banking, and this is very common where...

you're having crypto messaging inside a financial institution, but to stop stuff like insider trading, there will be like a secure archive of all of the messages as well.

So that's what the developers think they're making.

They're not told who it's actually sold to, which of course is criminals.

And then you have those criminal resellers like Microsoft who are siloed from the rest of the company.

But of course, they're also not told that the actual client above them is the FBI trying to build a surveillance apparatus.

One of those key people is Andrew Young.

Now, he's an assistant U.S.

attorney, but he's not a drug prosecutor.

He's from, like, the world of, like, tax and, like, white-collar crime.

So, through a series of events, when he gets involved in the Phantom Secure case, and then the enorm opportunity comes up, he doesn't have...

the institutional baggage of the doj sort of hanging over him he sees this as a really cool chance to disrupt the drug trade whereas ordinarily in san diego what prosecutors and other agencies are doing is like we'll just seize drugs at the border we'll give these poor disenfranchised people who are probably trying to make two or three thousand dollars spuggling coke across the border we'll give them a pre-written plea deal you know and we'll move on with our lives

Andrew Young and other prosecutors and the FBI around him, they wanted to do something different.

They wanted to do something that would actually disrupt, of course, not just the encrypted phone industry, but disrupt how drug crimes are investigated in the US or around the world.

When they started looking at this data, they realized, oh no, we need to triple that estimate, basically.