PJ Vogt

Joseph's internet is one where ingenious criminals are constantly inventing apps and gadgets, sometimes giving themselves a significant edge against the cops they play cat and mouse with.

But in all his years covering this world, nothing he'd seen prepared him for the story of this one new kind of criminal smartphone.

It had transformed the underworld so quickly and so thoroughly.

And in the aftermath of that transformation,

Joseph feels sure we are living in a new world, one whose implications he thinks most of us have not yet begun to grapple with.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story begins in a country with a much more active criminal underworld than I had ever known.

Australia.

This ABC News report is from about a decade ago.

And it's about a trend that had swept through the criminal underworld.

Encrypted mobile phone companies.

The report explained how these phones worked by focusing on one company, popular at the time, called Phantom Secure.

So, like, looking at the ad, it looks like it's for fancy rich dudes who care about privacy.

Who is this phone actually for?

Why did the gangs like phantom secure?

Like, what was it about this product that they were drawn to?

Phantom Secure ran for nearly a decade, selling tens of thousands of phones, mostly to criminals.

It was shut down finally in 2018 when the FBI tricked its Canadian CEO into visiting the U.S.

where he was arrested.

But with Phantom Secure gone, a much more unusual competitor took its place.