For years, the must-have phone for the discerning drug trafficker or hitman was a brand you may not have heard of: AN0M. Reporter Joseph Cox tells us the story of the AN0M phone, its sudden rise and shocking fall, and the shadowy group behind its invention. Joseph's new book: Dark Wire. Incognito Mode, our ad-free, no-rerun, bonus episode feed. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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That's ShipStation.com, code SEARCH. Whatever you do for work, if you do it long enough, you'll probably experience a moment where a new piece of technology shows up and overnight just changes your job, even in my field. When I started out in radio before the podcast boom, the big semi-recent invention everyone was still talking about was just editing audio on computers.
The veterans who I learned from loved to talk about how just a few years before, interviews were still being recorded onto actual physical tape. And they'd tell me how they used to edit that tape by cutting it with a razor blade and sticky taping it back together. It had all been so different, so much less efficient, so recently. They were still marveling at it.
For me, a few years later, the equivalent change was auto-transcriptions. The weeks of my life spent typing up transcripts of other people's interviews, or my own, just gone. And now I was the one telling the young producers about how it used to be. Every industry has these moments. Although technological change, as we know, is not always that good.
Somebody recently told me one of these stories where a small tech breakthrough opened the door to innovations in the fields of professional violence and corruption.
Hey, Joseph, how are you doing over there? All good, all good. A little bit of a sore throat from talking constantly. I'm going to get so sick of my voice.
You're going to get book tour fever. This is Joseph Cox. He just published a book called Dark Wire. Joseph's a tech reporter, but he's not one of the normal ones. His work won't tell you how many more camera lenses to expect on the next iPhone. He does not dissect the latest outrageous tweet from Elon Musk. His interests lie elsewhere. And what's your relationship with the criminal underworld?
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