Dark wire The incredible true story of the largest sting operation ever

Journalist Cox blazes the trail for the investigative reporting on how drug traffickers and organized crime deploy fully encrypted cellular devices. This is a truly epic story, and Cox tells it via the criminals' texts and interviews with international law enforcement agencies as he recounts a remarkable sting operation. Like a judo master, the FBI used criminals' encrypted phones against them by starting their own cellular company, thus inducing the bad guys to distribute the devices themselves. These "Anom" phones did indeed send communications encrypted from end to end, but they also sent a copy of all the data to the FBI's field office in San Diego. Cox then takes readers inside the world of today's organized crime in Australia, Canada, South America, and all across Europe as the trap is sprung and thousands of criminals get scooped up on a global scale. Cox covers the juggling of myriad privacy concerns with the efficacy of catching bad guys as he describes the Anom operation's success in sowing doubt and confusion among criminals regarding their use of cell phones.

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.