800 arrests, 40 tons of drugs, and one backdoor. What a phone startup gave the FBI, with Joseph Cox

This week on the Lock and Code podcast, we speak with Joseph Cox about the FBI's successful backdoor into the phone startup Anom.
[00:40] Intro
[04:18] How did Anom work on the government side?
[07:21] What international government agencies are involved in this operation and why?
[09:52] What could the FBI see happening across Anom phones?
[12:09] So as to not blow their cover, what crimes did the FBI prioritize in acting on?
[14:39] How is this not entrapment? And how did this program get approved?
[18:05] Did any government agencies or leadership push back on the FBI running Anom?
[22:00] How did the FBI make Anom appear legitimate, and how did the business function?
[25:33] Did everyday employees for Anom know that they were actually working for an FBI sting operation?
[28:05] Was the FBI ever concerned that Anom was getting too big?
[31:13] Was running Anom legal, and if it wasn’t, what did the FBI do to make it legal?
[34:58] The FBI gets a crash course in content moderation at scale
[38:23] In many ways, Anom is everything that FBI has ever said it needs to stop crime. Did it, then, work?
[44:12] What was the most surprising thing you learned while reporting?
Show notes and credits:
Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons...
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)
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