This wasn't just an operation to gather evidence and the rest people.

It was like, we want to fundamentally shift how criminals think about encryption. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Joseph Cox.

Joseph is the author of Dark Wire, the incredible true story of the largest sting operation ever, and the host of the 404 Media podcast.

This is an absolutely fascinating conversation that gets into the story of how the FBI created its own encrypted phone platform to target criminals around the world and ultimately work with other law enforcement agencies

to share those messages and that information to target criminal networks that were operating

in Europe, in Australia, and many other parts of the world, of course. This was honestly a story

that I had never even encountered before, I guess because I'm not so much in these circles

where these sorts of things are discussed. So when I picked up Joseph's book, I could hardly

put it down because this story was so compelling. And of course, the way that Joseph has written it

is so deeply reported and has so much perspective on both the sides of the criminals who were doing

these drug operations and these kidnappings and assassinations, but also on the side of

the law enforcement who are watching these things, who are trying to set up these networks,

who were trying to break the encryption on other encrypted phones, and were ultimately seeking

to disrupt these criminal

networks and the criminal activity that was happening within their jurisdictions.

The story is not only a fascinating one, but it also brings up really big questions as to

whether authorities should be doing things like this, should be carrying out these sorts of

major projects,

what it means for broader privacy, if it starts to move away from networks that are just used

by criminals into ones that are used by much more of the general public. And the broader question

of how law enforcement, but also how criminal networks work in the 21st century and how both of them

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