About:
Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever by Joseph Cox is the story of the largest sting operation in law enforcement history, the FBI’s tech start-up to wiretap cell-phones. Mr. Cox is an award-winning investigative journalist focusing on cybersecurity.
- 352 pages
- Publisher : PublicAffairs
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 1541702697
My rating for Dark Wire — 5
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More Books by Joseph Cox*
Thoughts:
This book has been on my virtual book shelf for a while, but I recently listened to the podcast Darknet Diaries featuring Mr. Cox talking about the book. The story told was wild, and the fact that it was true, convinced me to put Dark Wire by Joseph Cox on the top of the list.
Everyone who likes privacy wants an encrypted, secured phone that keeps whatever we want out of prying eyes. Criminals, of course, want it to keep law enforcement away. Like every technology ever invented since fire, new inventions will be used for the worst thing we could imagine, and often things we can’t imagine.
The FBI decided to run a world-wide secured and encrypted cellphone company called Anom. Of course, law enforcement will get a copy of each and every message.
For about three years Anom was active and a window into the criminal world of major drug dealers and even assassinations. It was finally shut down because the police couldn’t keep up with all the intelligence they were gathering and decided to start arrests around the world.
There were several side effects, however. Criminals stopped trusting technology, or started creating their secured phones using available technology (and new phones often). Users who had legitimate need for secured communication (e.g. lawyers to clients) were also revealed (even though law enforcement did make an effort to ignore those messages). And, of course, the regular people who just want privacy are now in a bind. Frankly, the whole thing seems to me to be in a very gray area, legally. That being said, I know very little about the intricacies of the legalities of it, certainly not enough to form an opinion (I know that I can get kicked off the Internet for such a statement).
The book is fantastic, interesting, fascinating, well written and tells a great story which is going to be of interest to techies and non-techies alike.
Zohar — Man of la Book
Disclaimer: I bought this book.
*Amazon links point to an affiliate account, the money is usually spent on books
