Episode
How the FBI got everything it wanted (re-air, feat. Joseph Cox)
- Podcast
- Lock and Code
- Published
- Jul 27, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 3122
- Processing state
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Summary
For decades, digital rights activists, technologists, and cybersecurity experts have worried about what would happen if the US government secretly broke into people’s encrypted communications. The weird thing, though, is that it's already happened—sort of. US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and NSA, have long sought what is called a “backdoor” into the secure and private messages that are traded through platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple’s Messages. These applications all provide what is called “end-to-end encryption,” and while the technology guarantees confidentiality for journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, and everyday people across the world, it also, according to the US government, provides cover for criminals. But to access any single criminal or criminal suspect’s encrypted messages would require an entire reworking of the technology itself, opening up not just one person’s communications to surveillance, but everyone’s. This longstanding struggle is commonly referred to as The Crypto Wars, and it dates back to the 1950s during the Cold War, when the US government created export control regulations to protect encryption technology from reaching outside countries. But several years ago, the high stakes in these Crypto Wars became somewhat theoretical, as the FBI gained access to the communications and whereabouts of hundreds of suspected criminals, and they did it without “breaking” any encryption whatsover. It all happened with the help of Anom, a budding company behind an allegedly “secure” phone that promised users a bevy of secretive technological features, like end-to-end encrypted messaging, remote data wiping, secure storage vaults, and even voice scrambling. But, unbeknownst to Anom’s users, the entire company was a…