The FBI’s Chat App and the Biggest Sting Operation In History
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2024
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
International criminal organizations are more concerned about message security than the average citizen. The end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp or Signal is great, but drug traffickers are looking for a little extra. Enter services like Anom, EncroChat, Sky, and Phantom Secure— discrete messaging services that charged big bucks and promised criminals a chat experience free from the prying eyes of law enforcement. But the cops always find a way. And one of those services was actually purpose built by the FBI to act as a spying tool on the world’s criminals.
In Dark Wire, investigative journalist Joseph Cox tells the story of how the FBI built and maintained a phone service just for criminals. He’s on Angry Plant today to tell us all about it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature |
| 0:05.1 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Welcome back, |
| 0:15.0 | listeners to Angry Planet. |
| 0:19.0 | We're on today with Joseph Cox, |
| 0:21.0 | a 404 media who's got a new book out called Dark Wire |
| 0:24.3 | that I just finished last night and is absolutely incredible. How are you doing |
| 0:28.8 | Mr Cox? All good. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about it. So this is one of these books that I'm reading and every page is more ludicrous and crazy as the story unfolds. There's a lot of amazing characters, but I want to start at the end, if we can, which is kind of in the subhead of the book. This is the story of the largest staying operation in world history. |
| 0:57.6 | Can you define largest? |
| 1:00.1 | How many countries say are involved? |
| 1:02.4 | Yeah, I'm actually really glad you asked that. how many countries say are involved? |
| 1:03.4 | Yeah, I'm actually really glad you asked that because there's a few different ways to go about it. |
| 1:08.6 | So on this day, 7th of June 2021, when the FBI executed the sort of final stage of this largest thing operation, |
| 1:19.0 | there was something like 10,000 law enforcement officers acting in some capacity on that day, which is obviously huge. |
| 1:27.6 | You then have the data that they're acting on was collected from phones based in more than 100 countries. |
| 1:35.7 | You then have this Europol-based task force of around 16 countries all collaborating as well all as one. |
| 1:46.0 | So that all happens on June 7th, 2021. |
| 1:50.1 | But there's also another way to look at it, and I'm sure we'll drill down into this. But if you zoom out, this actual operation was sort of part of a master plan impacting two other |
| 2:00.9 | investigations, one involving a company called Encrochat, one involving a company called |
| 2:02.8 | Encro chat, one involving a company called Sky, don't need to worry about those |
| 2:06.4 | right now, I'm sure we'll get into it, but then once you zoom out and look at that, |
| 2:10.6 | something like 10,000 people were arrested as part of that Grand Master Plan. |
| 2:17.0 | I don't know a bigger operation than that. |
... |
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