Dark Wire
This cat-and-mouse story of a vast FBI sting operation reveals how the criminal underworld has become a globalized economy in its own right--one that can't be policed without crossing complicated ethical boundaries. Beginning in 2018, a powerful app for secure communications, called Anom, began to take root among drug dealers and other criminals. It had extraordinary safeguards to keep out prying eyes--the power to quickly wipe data, voice-masking technology, and more. It was better than other apps popular among organized crime syndicates, except for one thing: it was secretly run by law enforcement. Over the next few years, the FBI, along with law enforcement partners in Australia and parts of Europe, got a front row seat to the global criminal underworld. They watched drug deals and hits being planned in real time, making arrests where they could without blowing their cover. For a period of years, some one hundred thousand criminals worldwide, including members of South American drug cartels, the Calabrian mafia, and the Chinese Triad, did their business in full view of the officers they were trying to evade. It was a sprawling global economy as efficient and interconnected as the legal one. But a surveillance operation like this couldn't last. It was too dangerous, too ethically fraught, too large. And it all ended in spectacular fashion.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
9mentions
9people
2024–2026years
56% recommend44% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Early in the year I picked up "Dark Wire" by Joseph Cox. It was a fascinating dive into the world of "secure phones", particularly a company called Anom.
I also read:
"Digital Fortress" - Dan Brown (not strictly technically plausible but the suspense kept me hooked) "Never Enough" - Andrew Wilkinson (meh)
Currently working on: "The Technological Republic" - Andrew Karp "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" - Martin Kleppmann
I had a tendency of a lot of false starts on books this year. I picked up several recent LLM/AI books and would make it like a chapter before realizing it was mostly just AI generated slop and gave up.
- For more on this subject, here's a book that documents it: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Wire-Incredible-Largest-Operatio....
- I highly recommend two...
Dark Wire - An insane story about the FBI setting up their own encrypted phone network and selling it to global crime syndicates.
Mastermind - The story of a 10-year-long quest to bring down Paul Le Roux, who went from crypto coder to drug lord to an insane global crime group. It is one of the craziest stories I've ever read. If you want to see how Bond villains form in real life this is it :)
Also, a lot of people have recommended "This is how they tell me the world ends" as well: https://shepherd.com/book/this-is-how-they-tell-me-the-world...
And I've been meaning to read Countdown to Zero Day about Stuxnet.
- If you enjoy this story, read the book Dark Wire which focuses on the FBI’s infiltration of Anom, another encrypted message service. It also covers sky briefly. Fascinating story
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-cox/dark-wir...
- Dark Wire by Joseph Cox covers the whole story
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Wire-Incredible-Largest-Operatio...
It was a real conundrum for law enforcement agencies because at some point they had to stop facilitating crime and start exposing it.
- Pair it with your Dark Wire phone for perfect anonymity! /s
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-cox/dark-wir...
