What's the best phone to do crimes on?
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That's ShipStation.com, code SEARCH. Whatever you do for work, if you do it long enough, you'll probably experience a moment where a new piece of technology shows up and overnight just changes your job, even in my field. When I started out in radio before the podcast boom, the big semi-recent invention everyone was still talking about was just editing audio on computers. The veterans who I learned from loved to talk about how just a few years before, interviews were still being recorded onto actual physical tape. And they'd tell me how they used to edit that tape by cutting it with a razor blade and sticky taping it back together. It had all been so different, so much less efficient, so recently. They were still marveling at it.
For me, a few years later, the equivalent change was auto-transcriptions. The weeks of my life spent typing up transcripts of other people's interviews, or my own, just gone. And now I was the one telling the young producers about how it used to be. Every industry has these moments. Although technological change, as we know, is not always that good. Somebody recently told me one of these stories where a small tech breakthrough opened the door to innovations in the fields of professional violence and corruption.
Hey, Joseph, how are you doing over there? All good, all good. A little bit of a sore throat from talking constantly. I'm going to get so sick of my voice.
You're going to get book tour fever. This is Joseph Cox. He just published a book called Dark Wire. Joseph's a tech reporter, but he's not one of the normal ones. His work won't tell you how many more camera lenses to expect on the next iPhone. He does not dissect the latest outrageous tweet from Elon Musk. His interests lie elsewhere. And what's your relationship with the criminal underworld?
Kind of close, actually, weirdly. I've carved a niche in my journalism career by speaking to criminals, essentially. And that could be drug traffickers. It could be cyber criminals, hackers especially. And I was always interested where we would read press releases about hacking operations or law enforcement campaigns. And you would never hear from the other side. So I made a habit of, I want to go talk to the people with hands on keyboards, is what I say. I want to talk to the hackers. I want to talk to the people using strange technology. So I've, for years, approached it from the crime side of things. And they'll talk to you some of the time, at least. Yeah, I think when you meet people sort of where they are, of course, for war reporting, that would be actually going to the scene of the conflict. For me, that's like downloading the very particular weird apps that these criminals use. They respect you jumping through those hoops.
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.
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