"Joseph Cox has written an instant true-crime classic, the inside—very inside it turns out—story of the largest global crime sting in history, a fascinating portrait not just of the frontiers of technology but also how organized crime operates in the 21st century. Filled with stranger-than-fiction gangsters and smugglers, this book is part-Miami Vice, part-Sneakers, and part-Ocean's Eleven. Your eyebrows will be raised in amazement page after page."—Garrett Graff, director of the Cybersecurity Program at The Aspen Institute, bestselling author of Watergate: A New History

"A jaw-dropping page turner that truly terrified me. The story of how the FBI subverted an encrypted messaging program should send chills down the spine of anyone who cares about privacy and a free society."—Julia Angwin, contributing writer at the New York Times and author of the bestselling book Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance

"A tense, deep, beautifully told tale that could be a top-notch technothriller... except it's all true."—Cory Doctorow, author of The Bezzle and The Internet Con

“Cox has pulled off a breathtaking feat of reporting. He brings readers into the very rooms where the criminal underworld’s most audacious conspiracies are planned and executed—and into the rooms where the cops are watching it all. His book is true to its namesake, The Wire, but more real, more raw, and played out at a staggeringly global scale.”—Andy Greenberg, WIRED senior writer and author of Tracers in the Dark and Sandworm

“One of the best true crime thrillers I’ve read in years. With its tremendously flawed and persistent characters and crazy plot, it felt instantly like a television show while also illuminating the way the shadowy underworld uses encrypted and special phones.”—Bradley Hope, co-author of BILLION DOLLAR WHALE and BLOOD AND OIL

2024-04-20
The FBI proves that if you can’t beat them, then joining them can work out just fine.

Investigative journalist Cox, co-founder of 404 Media, opens with a former football player named Owen Hanson, who graduated from real estate to sports betting to international drug trafficking. Though he made lots of money, he wasn’t smart enough to change the default passcode on his encrypted phone, which enabled the feds—aided by Australian police, since Hanson did much of his trade there—to track him. The author then moves to the crux of the story: the land-rush business in supposedly secure phones, which allowed criminals (and some legitimate businesspeople) to conduct their business without danger of being monitored. Through brilliant technosleuthing, investigators managed to break down the electronic security doors of a phone company called Phantom Secure, which sent its customers scurrying for a new provider. In a stroke of fraught genius, the FBI cooked up its own company, called Anom, which carried with it all sorts of problems—not least what might have happened if, too successful, “law enforcement knocked out Anom’s competition in the secure phone industry.” As Cox relates, that came close to happening; more problematic was that the FBI, after building up a customer base thousands strong, had a firehose of data to analyze. Still, it worked, so much so that one day a few yeas ago, police officials around the world, in a coordinated international operation—a “nonstop, intercontinental line of dominoes”—arrested hundreds of criminals and seized a dozen tons of cocaine, 1.5 tons of meth, and scores of illegal weapons, all courtesy of that fake phone company. Cox’s story is full of geekery, but it’s also a vivid, captivating tale of true crime and true punishment.

A fast-moving, exciting blend of white-hat technology and old-school gumshoe drudgery.