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.

Dark Wire is more than the story of this enormous sting operation--it shows the fundamental problems of policing in such a vast and high-speed economy. This is a caper for our modern world, where everyone is connected and no one is completely free.

"[Cox] swings back and forth between the activities of the white hats and the black hats in the manner of a good crime thriller."--The Wall Street Journal
"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
"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
"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

Joseph Cox has been the world's leading reporter on the Anom story, publishing a series of exclusive stories about it for VICE's Motherboard. He appears with frequency on NPR, NBC, and the BBC, has built a growing audience of 70,000 Twitter followers, and has done extensive speaking at dozens of conferences related to the tech, security, business, and communications subjects intersecting with the book.

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