Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 2: Our colleague Noel is on an adventure, but will be
Speaker 2: returning soon.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you argue,
Speaker 3: you are here and that makes this the stuff they
Speaker 3: don't want you to know. Longtime listeners, Matt, Dylan, you
Speaker 3: guys know this as well. We're familiar with the concept
Speaker 3: of the dark net, the way it is both misrepresented
Speaker 3: and accurately explored in the information age. Matt, what's the
Speaker 3: most basic definition of the dark net?
Speaker 2: It's the stuff that's not easy to get to if
Speaker 2: you're just using a browser the way most of us do,
Speaker 2: when we're accessing parts of the Internet that we're used to.
Speaker 2: It's the stuff that's a little more hidden.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, and that's that's a really great starting point
Speaker 3: for that definition. You know. It's it's the part of
Speaker 3: the wide Internet that is not indexed by search engines,
Speaker 3: as you said, but there's a lot more to that,
Speaker 3: because in the absence of transparency, all sorts of things
Speaker 3: can thrive. I think we're both interested to learn study
Speaker 3: show the dark net is home to an astonishing, terrifying
Speaker 3: amount of criminal activity of almost any genre one might imagine.
Speaker 3: And this evening, fellow conspiracy realist Matt We are thrilled
Speaker 3: to be joined with the award winning journalist, technology researcher,
Speaker 3: global pre eminent expert on all things involving the dark
Speaker 3: net and the future of a technological age. It's the
Speaker 3: author and host of the number one podcast kill List,
Speaker 3: Carl Miller. Carl, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 4: Hi Ben, Hi Matt. Thanks for having me on and
Speaker 4: few I was I was afraid you were going to
Speaker 4: make me do the technical definitions. That's a relief.
Speaker 2: Well we got this. I assure you. We probably didn't
Speaker 2: do as well as you could. Carl, But because you
Speaker 2: know those are the terms, let's actually start there. Because
Speaker 2: the terms the deep web, the dark net, all of
Speaker 2: these things get thrown around a lot. Is there a
Speaker 2: better way to like set us up for that, Carl?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Actually, a few days ago at a Journalism Club in London.
Speaker 4: I was doing a live event where we talk about
Speaker 4: darknet investigations and it was kicked over to me to
Speaker 4: define it at the very beginning, and it actually did
Speaker 4: make me pause for a moment because because you're right,
Speaker 4: it's a whole kind of pylon of different phrases that
Speaker 4: kind of overlap and but they also mean different things.
Speaker 4: So you've got the Onion router. You've got the tour browser,
Speaker 4: so particular browser that basically uses encryption in one way
Speaker 4: or another to basically hide the websites that you're looking
Speaker 4: at from both the website and from an ultimately you.
Speaker 4: So it kind of camouflages the request in layers and
Speaker 4: layers of encryption. But then you've got tour hidden services,
Speaker 4: which is different. These are specific websites, and these are
Speaker 4: typically what we mean by the dark web. They don't
Speaker 4: have a dot com or dot net extension domain at
Speaker 4: the end. They've got a dot onion domain and it's
Speaker 4: normally an address which is tons of numbers. And these
Speaker 4: are specifically the websites that probably people mean because they're
Speaker 4: the ones that when accessed by the tour brows and
Speaker 4: mean that you are genuinely anonymous.
Speaker 3: And this is this is an important differentiation, right, a clarification, because,
Speaker 3: as I'm sure you have seen in your work, Coral,
Speaker 3: there are so many It is a Venn diagram, isn't it.
Speaker 3: We see so many breathless headlines sometimes that perhaps frightened people.
Speaker 3: We see so many headlines that perhaps downplay some of
Speaker 3: the clear and present dangers here. You have been in
Speaker 3: this world for quite some time in your work on
Speaker 3: the promises and the potential dangers of the information age,
Speaker 3: pull in so many related subjects, disinfo, cybercrime, the rise
Speaker 3: of online conspiracy groups or hate speech, and of course
Speaker 3: kill List. Before we get to kill list, could you
Speaker 3: give us maybe a bit of your origin story and
Speaker 3: share with the audience what set you on the path
Speaker 3: to pursue this vocation.
Speaker 4: Of course, you're making me sound like a superhero, and
Speaker 4: I'm certainly not with an origin story. But I've been
Speaker 4: sometimes somewhat reluctantly, kind of immersed in this kind of
Speaker 4: world of what we would call as research as online
Speaker 4: harms for a very long time. Now, it goes all
Speaker 4: the way back to about two ninety ten. I was
Speaker 4: at a think tank at that point. I just was
Speaker 4: I was wet behind the years fresh out of university,
Speaker 4: and kind of it was just coinciding with the kind
Speaker 4: of rise of social media. You know, Facebook was just
Speaker 4: creeping out of campuses. Twitter was just a few years away,
Speaker 4: and me and some colleagues of mine back then, we
Speaker 4: were like completely convinced of two things, and I think
Speaker 4: we were right about both of them. We were wrong
Speaker 4: about lots of other things. Number One, the rise of
Speaker 4: this new world was going to be a tremendous agent
Speaker 4: a social change. It was going to change just about everything.
Speaker 4: Who we thought we were, the problems that we saw
Speaker 4: in the world, the identities that we held most preciously,
Speaker 4: the relationships we were all going to have, the politics
Speaker 4: that we were going to pursue. All of that was
Speaker 4: going to get radically reformed, we thought, in the years ahead.
Speaker 4: But on the other hand, there was this unbelievable opportunity
Speaker 4: to research ourselves in new ways because when you were
Speaker 4: looking at social media data, you look at all these
Speaker 4: forums or even.
Speaker 2: The dark net.
Speaker 4: Suddenly you had tremendous amounts of data and information and
Speaker 4: evidence that you could access, which completely totally eclipsed the
Speaker 4: kind of normal ways in which we try to understand people,
Speaker 4: and so began then this kind of more than a
Speaker 4: decade now than me basically trying to get my head
Speaker 4: around how to research these different spaces. Sometimes that's been
Speaker 4: in the form of data and building technologies, using AI
Speaker 4: and crunching lots of numbers. Sometimes it's been much more journalistic,
Speaker 4: trying to reach the people and go to the places,
Speaker 4: whether they're online or offline, where I really thought I
Speaker 4: needed to be in order to learn what's going on.
Speaker 4: And as suppose, from about twenty seventeen onwards, the main
Speaker 4: question has been around power, like how power was changing,
Speaker 4: like who was being newly empowered by the kind of
Speaker 4: revolutionary emergence of these technologies, and who in fact was
Speaker 4: being being kind of undermined and really cutting through as
Speaker 4: much of the hype and waffle and as I possibly could.
Speaker 4: I think one of the things, I'm sure that you
Speaker 4: share it. One of my big frustrations is that this
Speaker 4: kind of whole conversation we've had around the rise of
Speaker 4: the Internet has been actually quite a bad one, and
Speaker 4: it's been full of you know, really poor kind of
Speaker 4: assumptions and as much myth and exaggeration as reality.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, at least we won't have to use it
Speaker 2: very much, at least for much longer, because it'll all
Speaker 2: just be language learning models right doing everything, and we'll
Speaker 2: just kind of get to get a little window into
Speaker 2: the Internet every once in a while. I'm curious about
Speaker 2: how Chris Montero enters into your life and into that
Speaker 2: world that you're already exploring. He seems like a very
Speaker 2: interesting human being. He's just he describes himself on medium
Speaker 2: as a pirate, cis admin, transhumanist, and Internet hipster. Who
Speaker 2: is Chris Montero? And how does he work into the
Speaker 2: story and get you to kill.
Speaker 3: List and vigilante style too?
Speaker 4: I mean Chris is a hacker.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it professional.
Speaker 4: Chris is the hacker. And I first got to know
Speaker 4: Chris when I was actually really trying to meet as
Speaker 4: many people I could in both law enforcement and the
Speaker 4: world of cyber crime and everyone in the middle. I
Speaker 4: was writing a book and I thought that this about power,
Speaker 4: and I thought this area of how kind of crime
Speaker 4: was changing, and how law enforcement's changing, and how maybe
Speaker 4: the balances and equilibria of power between those two different
Speaker 4: kind of forces were also changing. I thought that was
Speaker 4: probably one of the most important stories to tell about
Speaker 4: the last twenty years, and so I was. But that
Speaker 4: story couldn't be told just sitting behind the screen. You
Speaker 4: can't just like google together some stories from the New
Speaker 4: York Times or The Guardian to get you to that answer.
Speaker 4: So I basically resolved to go out and meet and
Speaker 4: get to know and in fact live in the different
Speaker 4: place where I needed to in order to try and
Speaker 4: get a better sense of that question. So I became
Speaker 4: embedded with a police cybercrime team for a bit, and
Speaker 4: I was learning more about all of that. I was
Speaker 4: actually living in a political technology commune at that point
Speaker 4: as well. But then I also decided that I need
Speaker 4: to understand more about what cybercrime looked like. And I
Speaker 4: was kind of being passed from person to person in
Speaker 4: the way that this kind often happens in this world,
Speaker 4: especially when there's not a lot of trust and you've
Speaker 4: got a lot of people that are not entirely open
Speaker 4: to meeting new new friends. And then I first got
Speaker 4: to meet Chris that way, a kind of mutual friend
Speaker 4: of ours puts in touch. And it was probably twenty seventeen,
Speaker 4: I think, and it was just before Christmas. It was
Speaker 4: a kind of I remember it was a kind of
Speaker 4: really rainy day and I was quite ill, and I
Speaker 4: definitely wasn't looking forward to going to one of the
Speaker 4: overstuffed pubs of central London to have an elbow in
Speaker 4: my back for hours. And then as soon as I
Speaker 4: kind of met Chris there, he kind of turned around
Speaker 4: his phone. He said, I'm looking at these assassinations sites
Speaker 4: that exist on the darkneck.
Speaker 2: That was just how.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: That was within minutes of us beginning to talk, and
Speaker 4: he was kind of beginning to dig into them. He
Speaker 4: had actually kind of blogged about it, and he'd began
Speaker 4: to say publicly he thought they were scams. The big
Speaker 4: question was like are these real? Are they are these scams?
Speaker 4: We knew that drug markets were real, we knew there
Speaker 4: are a lot of other markets that were not, and
Speaker 4: we were like trying to work out whether these things
Speaker 4: were or not. And he'd actually the other thing that
Speaker 4: he sent me, which made me very nervous and not
Speaker 4: quite sure how to proceed, was he turned his phone
Speaker 4: around again and there was a video of a man
Speaker 4: in a kind of mask with his username Chris is
Speaker 4: username on a piece of paper and a torch shines
Speaker 4: at the paper and then it goes dark, and then
Speaker 4: you could hear a rustling and then a there's a
Speaker 4: car in the kind of middle distance, and then suddenly
Speaker 4: it burst into flames. It was a warning, and scammers
Speaker 4: don't really do that. Scammers don't really torch carves very often,
Speaker 4: Matthia do. Organized criminals do, but not scammers. And so
Speaker 4: that was my first meeting with Chris.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And when we fast forward a little bit, we go
Speaker 3: to twenty twenty, you and you and Chris know each other.
Speaker 3: I'm still still a bit amazed by that classic Chris
Speaker 3: small talk of and nice to meet you. Yeah, here's
Speaker 3: the list of hitman's sites. So he reaches out to
Speaker 3: you and he says, look, I haven't just found one
Speaker 3: site in specific, I have managed to compromise this site.
Speaker 3: I have hacked it. I have gained what we would
Speaker 3: call back end access. Could you tell us a little
Speaker 3: bit about the moment when you and Chris discover this
Speaker 3: and maybe your initial reaction actions. I'm especially interested in
Speaker 3: the point you already made their Carl, that it's sort
Speaker 3: of known a lot of these sites might be scared.
Speaker 4: Well, so we were actually already embarking Chris and I
Speaker 4: and some producers on a podcast slightly before that keystone
Speaker 4: kind of life changing revelational discovery.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 4: It was on assassination markets, but it was supposed to
Speaker 4: be a quick, little six week retrospective looking at them
Speaker 4: over the last couple of years and maybe talking to
Speaker 4: some people that had been digging into them as well,
Speaker 4: and people that had been kind of either implicated and
Speaker 4: using them or had been targeted, you know, and there
Speaker 4: were some stories knocking around about them, and so, you know,
Speaker 4: it was COVID. It was twenty twenty. It was probably
Speaker 4: like April ish, twenty twenty, and and like kind of
Speaker 4: most of my attention was on the world shutting down,
Speaker 4: and on where was I going to get my alcohol
Speaker 4: wipes from to wipe down my apple, you know, and
Speaker 4: kind of when's my oga mat going to arrive, you know,
Speaker 4: and all these sorts of things. And then during one
Speaker 4: of these calls, like me and Chris and the others
Speaker 4: were just beginning to spin up, like our thinking around
Speaker 4: how are you going to do this? Then Chris kind
Speaker 4: of tells us that he'd made this faithful discovery, you know,
Speaker 4: he'd found this vulnerability in the way the site worked,
Speaker 4: and he'd wiggled through it, and that allowed him to
Speaker 4: essentially get, as you said, into the back end, so
Speaker 4: for the site to believe that he was basically an administrator.
Speaker 4: And in that first meeting, you know, he laid out
Speaker 4: for us like what that really meant, like the implications
Speaker 4: of what that meant. It wasn't immediately clear to me
Speaker 4: what gaining back end access to an assassination market would
Speaker 4: really mean to me, to our team or to the podcast.
Speaker 4: But the implication really was that he could then see
Speaker 4: the orders that were being placed. That was the big thing.
Speaker 4: So you log into this site and you've got to
Speaker 4: user name and password, and you're kind of messaging you
Speaker 4: believe you're messaging the kind of mafia's e commerce portal. Basically,
Speaker 4: that's what this that's what these sites claim to be.
Speaker 4: They're like, hey, with the Albanian Mafia or with the
Speaker 4: Comoral Mafia or whatever, you know, log in and talk
Speaker 4: to us and we'll we'll we'll sort out your hip
Speaker 4: man for you. We'll be the honest middleman, will be
Speaker 4: the broker. That's they're like the eBay, you know, we'll
Speaker 4: hold the money safely for you until the hit man's
Speaker 4: done the job. That's what they're saying they'll they'll do.
Speaker 4: And we thought there were dozens of people, like dozens
Speaker 4: of like serious sustained conversation chains, some of them going
Speaker 4: on for weeks or months between the users of this
Speaker 4: site and the administrators, and that was all now coming
Speaker 4: into our inboxes in real time.
Speaker 3: Wow. And the administrators did not know this was occurring at.
Speaker 4: The time, The admins did not know that we had access. No,
Speaker 4: and we we were very careful to not leave any
Speaker 4: traces or tracks, so we weren't don't change anything. We
Speaker 4: certainly weren't replying or adding any messages. We were just
Speaker 4: very very quietly lurking in that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and being able to see that stuff in near
Speaker 2: real time, to see new names pop up, new you know,
Speaker 2: photographs of a human being pop up on there that
Speaker 2: is at least within the showkill list listening to it.
Speaker 2: That's an intense concept to then process and imagine you guys,
Speaker 2: you know, on the cutting edge there and then trying
Speaker 2: to decide what to do. So, once you have this information,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of responsibility perhaps or maybe you felt
Speaker 2: the weight of that responsibility. What did you guys choose
Speaker 2: to do immediately following that or how long did it
Speaker 2: take to figure out what to do?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I mean it's as you said, real time
Speaker 4: threw us from any kind of idea of as being
Speaker 4: a retrospective into a kind of a real time, kind
Speaker 4: of contemporary scramble. Actually realized two things going through these messages.
Speaker 4: I think probably the day we first saw them, or
Speaker 4: at least the week. Number one, there were lots of
Speaker 4: people not truly trying to acquire a hit man. Number two,
Speaker 4: there didn't seem to be any actual hitmen. So if
Speaker 4: these were hit men, they were the most incompetent hit
Speaker 4: men that you would ever imagine. They kept getting lost,
Speaker 4: they kept losing their weapons. They would like, you know,
Speaker 4: the target would be too well protected, so that you
Speaker 4: know you needed to I'll not have this hit man,
Speaker 4: but instead a more expensive, military trained team. You know,
Speaker 4: every time these conversations seemed to lead to a kind
Speaker 4: of a dead end and then a request for more money.
Speaker 3: So there was always something.
Speaker 4: There's always something. But of course we saw in lots
Speaker 4: of cases people paying more money again and again they
Speaker 4: were just lumping more money in, and so.
Speaker 2: How much money are we tarking?
Speaker 3: Coral?
Speaker 4: So it ranged drastically In fact, I think like the
Speaker 4: cheapest I think was maybe one hundred pounds what and
Speaker 4: then yeah, yeah, very cheap. And then it went all
Speaker 4: the way up to the kind of eighteen ninety thousand
Speaker 4: all in bitcoin. So it does depend exactly when you
Speaker 4: would have decided to take out your bitcoin, it would
Speaker 4: be a lot more.
Speaker 3: Now, oh no, kidding, And we want to go back
Speaker 3: to the crypto aspect in a moment for now, perhaps
Speaker 3: it's it's mission critical for our fellow conspiracy realist to
Speaker 3: know that along with these payments or attempted payments through crypto,
Speaker 3: people were also you could almost say, paying personal information.
Speaker 3: They were giving as you note they were they were
Speaker 3: giving photographs of these intended targets. They were giving different
Speaker 3: details even onto you know, daily routines, where is this
Speaker 3: person going to be, what's their point A to point z?
Speaker 3: And with this I was also fascinated to learn there
Speaker 3: were specific requests for the method of homicide. Could you
Speaker 3: tell us a little bit about what these people who
Speaker 3: think they're putting out a hit, like, what kind of
Speaker 3: information are they providing about the target and what's the
Speaker 3: level of sophistication in that information?
Speaker 4: Well, this this document, this kind of collection of these
Speaker 4: orders that became known as the kill list. This is
Speaker 4: the single most grotesque thing I have ever had to
Speaker 4: deal with or read, I mean every single one with
Speaker 4: that exception of the of these like conversational chains, these
Speaker 4: order messages, they are really really difficult to deal with
Speaker 4: even now retrospectively, let alone at the time. They're almost
Speaker 4: always a mixture I think of two different things. On
Speaker 4: the one hand, as you said, Ben Logistics, Facebook profile
Speaker 4: photo more often than not, like the time, is looking
Speaker 4: often very happy, relaxed, surrounded by their family, usually on
Speaker 4: a holiday, tanned by boat in a casino. That's what
Speaker 4: first gets you because they're always smiling. The targets looking
Speaker 4: at you through the screen. Practical information that a hit
Speaker 4: man would need, location of the target, their address, phone number,
Speaker 4: often car registration number, very often, pattern of life information,
Speaker 4: and some of that would be coming in real time.
Speaker 4: And that was one of the scariest aspects of this
Speaker 4: is that we would be receiving a message from the
Speaker 4: person saying she's just left the house. I have reason
Speaker 4: to believe that she's visiting her folks in in sert
Speaker 4: Us State next week. You know, really sometimes quite specific,
Speaker 4: intricate descriptions of where the person would be. But mixed
Speaker 4: in with all of that, you would also have and
Speaker 4: this was weird, weirder to me, and I wasn't expecting
Speaker 4: less of this, like justifications, so like it seemed important
Speaker 4: to many people that they make the moral case in
Speaker 4: a weird way to the hit man or who they
Speaker 4: believed to be the hit man, for why this person
Speaker 4: needs to get killed. So it would there would often
Speaker 4: be descriptions about why there's such a problem in their
Speaker 4: life or that they're really you know, that they're a cheat,
Speaker 4: or that they're violent, or that they're unfair and those
Speaker 4: two things. Sometimes it would be a cut, single clipped
Speaker 4: message or so as the messages sometimes twenty thirty pages
Speaker 4: if I were to print them out for you, you know,
Speaker 4: going on for months and months.
Speaker 2: Wow. And with that, let's take a quick break. You're
Speaker 2: a word from our sponsor and we'll be read back.
Speaker 2: And we've returned with Carl Miller talk and kill List.
Speaker 2: Hey Carl, Sorry bother man, I cut you off earlier.
Speaker 2: We were talking about the responsibility you felt when you
Speaker 2: know you have this list and you're going through all
Speaker 2: these things, you're looking at what we just discot Could
Speaker 2: you just please continue there for a moment.
Speaker 4: Sure, So, you know, it was obvious to us at
Speaker 4: the beginning that the people placing these orders, some of them,
Speaker 4: had like a serious, sustained determination to have these people killed,
Speaker 4: and we thought that was going to be the real danger.
Speaker 4: These people might be doing it themselves, they might be
Speaker 4: planning or doing it themselves, or they might be seeking
Speaker 4: other means to have this person killed as well as
Speaker 4: this site. So we were looking I mean, I remember
Speaker 4: quite clearly, like sat in my COVID surrounded flat in
Speaker 4: my room, kind of looking at this document, scrolling through
Speaker 4: these people and thinking we might be the only people
Speaker 4: in the world now that know that these people are
Speaker 4: in danger, Like we have to try and do something
Speaker 4: about this. This isn't something that we can sit on.
Speaker 4: It's not something that we can drop or walk away from.
Speaker 4: And that's you know, I mean, by the way everyone
Speaker 4: listened to this doesn't know me. I'm not a particularly
Speaker 4: risk attracted guy. Like, like I don't really like risk,
Speaker 4: you know, I don't like fast cars or like extreme
Speaker 4: sports or anything like that. This is not the kind
Speaker 4: of story that I normally do. So kind of against
Speaker 4: I think some of my kind of instincts shouting at me.
Speaker 4: I decided with the team that we were going to
Speaker 4: have to try and act on this as serious threat
Speaker 4: to lives. So the first thing I did was whatever
Speaker 4: one would do, I imagine listening to this, I phone
Speaker 4: the police. I've phoned the police in London, and before
Speaker 4: long there are two quite bemused young police constables at
Speaker 4: my door and they're there basically because they think I'm mad, right,
Speaker 4: They're conducting and they literally are conducting a mental health check,
Speaker 4: so they're concerned for my welfare and they're trying to
Speaker 4: work out whether the story is in fact real as well,
Speaker 4: and they candidly said, you know, we ninety nine times
Speaker 4: out of one hundred, nine hundred and ninety nine times
Speaker 4: out of one thousand, like this kind of thing is
Speaker 4: a mental health problem. And so I had to go
Speaker 4: through that, and after kind of some diligence, I guess
Speaker 4: with the police they did in fact believe that it
Speaker 4: was real. The problem was that there were no UK
Speaker 4: cases at that point.
Speaker 2: I see, uh huh, jurisdiction.
Speaker 4: Man, jurisdiction, And this is this is by the way,
Speaker 4: like one of the one of the general kind of
Speaker 4: ideas or thoughts that I'd already had around cyber crime
Speaker 4: and why it's so unbelievably difficult for police to deal with.
Speaker 4: Is crime on the Internet passes between borders, out even noticing,
Speaker 4: and police forces are nothing if not massively geographically bounded.
Speaker 4: Like police forces, they live in their area, they know
Speaker 4: the streets, they're drawn out of their area. You know
Speaker 4: that the whole point of police force is to police
Speaker 4: are given geographic space. And you try and ask that
Speaker 4: police force often to like reach across boundaries and bring
Speaker 4: evidence and victims and perpetrators into a courtroom, and they
Speaker 4: simply can't. And and here the met was basically like,
Speaker 4: this isn't our problem, that this is a no UK
Speaker 4: target site. So they packaged it up. They sent it
Speaker 4: to INTERPOL, which is the international policing organization. It's not
Speaker 4: really an investigatory body. It's more like the glue that
Speaker 4: sticks different police forces together. And for one reason another
Speaker 4: which I can go into if you want, gets a
Speaker 4: bit technical, we became convinced that this was not going
Speaker 4: to work. That we couldn't talk to the investigating police forces,
Speaker 4: They couldn't make sure that I wasn't mad. We couldn't
Speaker 4: send any new messages, We couldn't send any of the
Speaker 4: payment information that we were increasingly uncovering. And so we
Speaker 4: took another faithful decision, really, and that was to approach
Speaker 4: the targets on the kill lift ourselves.
Speaker 3: And I want to go with this with these threads.
Speaker 3: We've got some concurrent threads here, Carl, I want to
Speaker 3: go to a specific moment a little bit before this,
Speaker 3: maybe what began to laudnge these thousand ships of racing
Speaker 3: against time. There was a moment wherein you when your
Speaker 3: team discovered that one of the targets listed did in
Speaker 3: fact die in twenty sixteen, I believe the person Amy
Speaker 3: or Wine expired. Could you tell us about how this
Speaker 3: transformed the investigation that you and the team were already
Speaker 3: beginning to conduct.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And we begin with the story of Amy in
Speaker 4: the podcast as well, not because it was attached to
Speaker 4: our investigation, but because it was the most important memory
Speaker 4: precedent thing that was in our minds. Really, Amy was
Speaker 4: in our minds when we were to stop making all
Speaker 4: these decisions. So it happened in twenty sixteen there had
Speaker 4: been a hack of the site the person running the site.
Speaker 4: This is a theme is not very good at cybersecurity,
Speaker 4: and some information had leaked out of it, including the
Speaker 4: fact that there was a use of a site called
Speaker 4: dog Day Gods and he was targeting Amy or Wine.
Speaker 4: A police had gone to Amy or Wind's house to
Speaker 4: warn her in Cottage Grove in Minnesota. I believe in
Speaker 4: the United States. What they had said to her was basically,
Speaker 4: there are some internet threats about you. And it seems,
Speaker 4: or it sounds at least like the basic kind of
Speaker 4: problem that they thought they were dealing with and that
Speaker 4: they were warning Amy about, was that there was like
Speaker 4: nasty messages about her online, not of course that there
Speaker 4: was a person who in secret was trying to plot
Speaker 4: her murder, but that there were kind of nasty messages,
Speaker 4: maybe abusive messages. And one of the police officers had
Speaker 4: advised the all Winds to buy a firearm for her safety,
Speaker 4: and then a few weeks later she was killed by
Speaker 4: that firearm. So the nine to one one called Sorry America,
Speaker 4: was that Amy had committed suicide with that firearm. We
Speaker 4: spoke to and this is the kind of voice he
Speaker 4: first here in the kills. We spoke to the investigating
Speaker 4: officer Randy McCallister, who by the way, is a hero.
Speaker 4: Like they were inches seconds away from closing up the
Speaker 4: scene as a suicide, and Randy McAllister thought that they
Speaker 4: should just that. So something didn't feel right about where
Speaker 4: the body was, where the gun was, and so he
Speaker 4: didn't close it up. In fact, he kept it open
Speaker 4: as a crime scene. They luminold, so they spread the
Speaker 4: house with this with this substance that basically glows in
Speaker 4: the presence of blood, and then they found that there
Speaker 4: was blood all over the house that being cleaned up.
Speaker 4: In fact, it wasn't a suicide. It was a murder.
Speaker 4: And that amy you'd be moved in the house in
Speaker 4: order to stage a suicide. And the person that had
Speaker 4: killed her was her husband, Stephen R. Wine who's now
Speaker 4: serving life in prison without parole in the United States.
Speaker 4: The first agree and he was to do day.
Speaker 2: God's Wow. They also found scopolamine or scopelamine in her blood.
Speaker 2: I believe it was just the tale that you tell
Speaker 2: within the story is chilling, well well worth your time.
Speaker 2: Please do listen if you get a chance. Man. Okay,
Speaker 2: so there's this one person that you have in mind
Speaker 2: as you're going through all of this stuff, you are
Speaker 2: trying to contact these individuals. How does an individual react
Speaker 2: to you when you call them up or get get
Speaker 2: their attention somehow and then say, hey, you're on a
Speaker 2: kill list?
Speaker 4: Quite poorly?
Speaker 3: Yeah. I also before you answer this with Carl, I
Speaker 3: want to take a personal moment and just just to
Speaker 3: share a connection with you. I think it's in episode two.
Speaker 3: This is not a spoiler, but you're you're fairly uh,
Speaker 3: you're fairly transparent about how not everyone loves calling people
Speaker 3: even if you know them, and calling people out of
Speaker 3: the blue, especially strangers, to tell them this stuff is
Speaker 3: is itself a pretty heroin thing, and that I think
Speaker 3: you've you've set this up beautifully. You know, we have
Speaker 3: to put ourselves in the place of the folks you
Speaker 3: were contacting, right, most of many people don't want to
Speaker 3: answer an unfamiliar number at all. Right, So with these
Speaker 3: initial reactions, how many people thought you might be doing
Speaker 3: a scale?
Speaker 4: All of them, every every single one of them? Initially?
Speaker 4: I mean it was loads of things came together there,
Speaker 4: I think to mean that our first try didn't work.
Speaker 4: It really didn't work. Number one, As you said, like
Speaker 4: this is COVID time. I mean, there are scams everywhere.
Speaker 4: People are getting phoned up all the time, and you know,
Speaker 4: I think in many cases, you know, and it's on
Speaker 4: the it's on the press all the times, in the news,
Speaker 4: you know all these You know how crime is not
Speaker 4: having to reach in your own home. I was a
Speaker 4: bag of nerves, Like there is nothing scarier that I
Speaker 4: ever had to do than phone up a complete stranger
Speaker 4: and tell them someone's trying to kill them. I was
Speaker 4: also I was bagging nerves for a reason that I
Speaker 4: don't think we actually spoke about much actually in the narrative,
Speaker 4: but it's worth also dwelling on that moment of warning
Speaker 4: them I actually we actually assessed was actually quite a
Speaker 4: dangerous one because either the person might react in a
Speaker 4: way which was dangerous, like believe that they know who
Speaker 4: it was and go out and kill someone else or
Speaker 4: hurt someone else, which almost happened. Not they didn't kill
Speaker 4: someone else, They just like were going to go over
Speaker 4: and give someone a stern talking to, But it was
Speaker 4: it was it was nerve wracking. They didn't or and
Speaker 4: this was what I was really worried about. The person
Speaker 4: that put them on the list would be next to
Speaker 4: them when I phoned them and hear the warning and
Speaker 4: in that moment maybe believe that their window of opportunity
Speaker 4: was closing, and maybe believing that taking things that matters
Speaker 4: into their own hands in that moment. And I know
Speaker 4: that sounds like maybe like a bit of a stretch,
Speaker 4: but honestly, when you don't know how it's going to go,
Speaker 4: you don't know what the future holds, like, that's the
Speaker 4: kind of stuff that's running through your mind. And so
Speaker 4: when I'm phoning these people, I'm both sound extremely nervous
Speaker 4: because of all of this, and it's what It washes
Speaker 4: around in your mind, and you prepare for it, and
Speaker 4: actually nine times out of ten you don't get through
Speaker 4: or they just hang up, and the one time they
Speaker 4: are actually talking to you, you're like, oh my god,
Speaker 4: someone's actually But then you're and we wrote it's really
Speaker 4: careful script that I wasn't to tell them straight up
Speaker 4: that someone's trying to kill them. In fact, I was
Speaker 4: trying to book another meeting with them where they could
Speaker 4: talk to me in a place where they felt safe
Speaker 4: and were importantly alone. And how how suspicious does that
Speaker 4: sound when they're alone? Yeah, So I'm like, Hey, I'm
Speaker 4: a journalist. I'm doing this investigation into scam sites on
Speaker 4: the darknet. You know, I think that that kind of
Speaker 4: roughly the way the script went. It turns out in
Speaker 4: retrospect now, like looking back at it and listening back
Speaker 4: to those just terrible calls. We were trying to solve
Speaker 4: the wrong problem. Like we thought the problem was going
Speaker 4: to be around the kind of psychological cratering impact of
Speaker 4: being told something like you're someone's trying to kill you,
Speaker 4: and in fact the main problem was going to be scams.
Speaker 4: It was going to be that we weren't believed, and
Speaker 4: so we kind of pivoted pretty quickly. I think we
Speaker 4: spent probably about a week trying to do that, maybe
Speaker 4: even less, and then we started rolling out a new
Speaker 4: strategy because it simply wasn't working.
Speaker 2: Man. There was another moment, as I was listening through
Speaker 2: that section of the show, just thinking about even if
Speaker 2: the person wasn't immediately next to them and could hear
Speaker 2: the conversation more than once within the instances of their
Speaker 2: kill list, the person was someone very close, if not
Speaker 2: a partner, you know, if not someone who would be
Speaker 2: a confidant for the person you're trying to warn, so
Speaker 2: like even if it's a week and they're just having
Speaker 2: a little conversation, Oh but that got this weird call
Speaker 2: the other day. In that moment, that same moment you're
Speaker 2: describing happens, and uh, you feel such on edge listening
Speaker 2: to it, like listening to you go through it. Just
Speaker 2: knowing that you went through it as is mind bargling.
Speaker 2: I do want to know. So you're you're attempting to
Speaker 2: call all of these people, what is the first moment
Speaker 2: when you get through to somebody it actually starts working.
Speaker 4: The first moment was when we started to send out
Speaker 4: local reporters. So we change it up and instead we
Speaker 4: start reaching out to people on the grounds that can
Speaker 4: go to the area where each of these targets lives,
Speaker 4: can scoping out for us, and we thought can make
Speaker 4: on you know, game time decisions. And what's so weird,
Speaker 4: by the way, is we begin to act a little
Speaker 4: bit like a hit man. Yeah, we are taking outside
Speaker 4: of people's facts.
Speaker 3: Figure out either figure the routine out.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean in one desire moment, we
Speaker 4: had a man outside of a flat on Halloween night
Speaker 4: in Amsterdam, you know, waiting for trick and treaters to
Speaker 4: call on the flat so that we could see who
Speaker 4: was answering the door, so that we would know whether
Speaker 4: a spouse was in there who we were afraid might
Speaker 4: be the person that put them on the list. So
Speaker 4: when we start sending these these local journalists out, the
Speaker 4: first one we actually do that with and managed to
Speaker 4: reach in is in the outskirts of Zurich, and there
Speaker 4: this kind of driving around and outside the flat and
Speaker 4: we're like, you know, we're all on a signal group.
Speaker 4: That kind of reduces and me and that I'm talking
Speaker 4: to them. We have a few calls with the local
Speaker 4: journalists and we record her thoughts and feelings as she's
Speaker 4: going in, and I mean, I can't imagine, by the way,
Speaker 4: I mean, however nervous I was what she was going through,
Speaker 4: like physically going in. That is unbelievable heroism. They all
Speaker 4: said yes, by the way, all these local journalists, and
Speaker 4: most of them were in there, are in their twenties,
Speaker 4: most of them are kind of just starting out in journalism,
Speaker 4: and they, you know, to a person, when you told
Speaker 4: them what was going on, agreed to participate, agree to
Speaker 4: step into the unknown in that way, and I think
Speaker 4: that as I mean, the kill is a story obviously
Speaker 4: of very very grim human evil to one another, but
Speaker 4: it's also a story of that, and there's also a
Speaker 4: story of people like that that put themselves on the
Speaker 4: line in ways that I'm not sure I would in
Speaker 4: order to in order to help someone. And she finally
Speaker 4: goes into the fact and there's this kind of fifteen
Speaker 4: minute long silence, maybe the longest fifteen minutes of my life,
Speaker 4: actually really really really gut wrenchingly, nerve rackingly and anxiety provoking.
Speaker 4: And then finally we get a message saying I've reached her,
Speaker 4: she's ready to speak, and umkoo comes up and there
Speaker 4: she is.
Speaker 3: And I remember that because listening to that, Carl, I
Speaker 3: was I had one of those moments where you pause,
Speaker 3: you know, and you're in that other place waiting to
Speaker 3: see the the end result, and felt physically lighter after that.
Speaker 3: I'm not mad at you guys for that long pause,
Speaker 3: but felt physically lighter learning that there had been success.
Speaker 3: And I think it's important, as we're going through this
Speaker 3: thread here to share with our fellow listeners how you
Speaker 3: began collaborating with this team of local reporters. We talked
Speaker 3: a little bit about interactions with law enforcement, you know,
Speaker 3: the big the big barrier of persuading them, Hey, I'm
Speaker 3: not you know, for lack of a better term, some
Speaker 3: nutter with too much time on their hands. These are
Speaker 3: real things. There is a ticking clock. How how would
Speaker 3: you overall characterize your interactions with law enforcement? And then
Speaker 3: you know, given this spans multiple countries, right, it spans
Speaker 3: multiple cases, jurisdictions, turf wars are always touchy with a
Speaker 3: lot of these organizations. Was it the interactions with law
Speaker 3: enforcement that inspired you to make direct contact.
Speaker 4: Because of Amy? Yeah, because Amy didn't need to die,
Speaker 4: and the way that law enforcement approached that I think
Speaker 4: was ill conceived. And so that was one of the
Speaker 4: reasons why we felt like being present in the conversation
Speaker 4: and talking directly to the people targets on the keyllers
Speaker 4: could mean that we could also have a good relationship
Speaker 4: with law enforcement, that we could be supplying them with
Speaker 4: the information they needed. And the difficult kind of story
Speaker 4: to tell about law enforcement in this is that they're
Speaker 4: not a single character. As you pointed out, you know,
Speaker 4: there's dozens of these law enforcement agencies all over the
Speaker 4: world that we interacted with in in one way or another. Initially,
Speaker 4: the relationship with law enforcement was really quite tough, and
Speaker 4: I didn't anticipate that I had had pretty good interactions
Speaker 4: with law enforcement in the UK. I felt like I
Speaker 4: had a good working relationship with them, and ultimately here
Speaker 4: like incentives were very, very aligned. The threat was so serious,
Speaker 4: and because this has to do with lives and them
Speaker 4: either continuing or not, we were, you know, we were
Speaker 4: not drawing like any kind of like journalistic boundaries really
Speaker 4: around any of the information we were trying to pass
Speaker 4: over to them. We were just like, here's a threat,
Speaker 4: here are the messages, here's the bitcoin payments. Buddy, step
Speaker 4: in and make this person say but that's what you
Speaker 4: need to do. And what I didn't anticipate was that
Speaker 4: doing that in Spain, doing that in Switzerland, We were
Speaker 4: doing that in Holland, like quite often, the police were
Speaker 4: reasonably hostile. Like in the Swiss case, the one I've
Speaker 4: just been talking about, the Swiss police told the target, Elena,
Speaker 4: that they suspected that we were running the site, that
Speaker 4: we were doing it for a story. Now, this is
Speaker 4: like baseless speculation and maybe if you're in the police team,
Speaker 4: maybe that's a kind of a hypothesis that you want
Speaker 4: to chase down. Like, yeah, I'm not saying they needed
Speaker 4: to trust us, like police don't trust journalists, and I'm
Speaker 4: sure journalists don't really trust police most of the time.
Speaker 4: But to share that with the target in the going
Speaker 4: through this moment in her life that was probably hopefully
Speaker 4: one of the most difficult moments she has to live through,
Speaker 4: as you know, to say that about the one little
Speaker 4: group of people that's reached her and that understands what
Speaker 4: she's going through, that I just found that like so
Speaker 4: so unacceptable and inappropriate way for the police to be acting.
Speaker 4: And it was happening in other places as well. And
Speaker 4: then slightly later there was a kind of new pressure
Speaker 4: where the police were in each of these cases, after
Speaker 4: actually believing it was real, they would then try and
Speaker 4: drag us into a courtroom. So they began to make
Speaker 4: arrests and they began to do investigations. But their problem was,
Speaker 4: how do you tie the messages that we've intercepted with
Speaker 4: the person and how do you say the messages are
Speaker 4: really from that site? So the defense teams began to
Speaker 4: say these aren't you can't prove they're from this site.
Speaker 4: This is just a word document that some random British
Speaker 4: guy sent you. You know, this isn't This doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 4: You can't use this in it. You know, this isn't evidence.
Speaker 4: And so what they wanted to do basically was to
Speaker 4: bring either me or the producer or Chris into a
Speaker 4: courtroom to testify under oath as to how we got
Speaker 4: the messages. Oh, Chris broke in like this and I
Speaker 4: know this because of this, and then he sent the
Speaker 4: messages and here they are, right, And I couldn't do
Speaker 4: that because as soon as we stepped into a courtroom,
Speaker 4: we expose the fact that we're broken in the middle
Speaker 4: of this.
Speaker 3: Market, right, yeah, And this gives us this, I think
Speaker 3: gives us a perfect way to explore something that was
Speaker 3: on your mind and on the team's mind for the
Speaker 3: entirety of your investigation, which is the ethical quandaries, or
Speaker 3: as you have often referred to them as ethical gray areas. Right,
Speaker 3: what is as a journalist? What is your what is
Speaker 3: your responsibility for protection of means and sources? Or what
Speaker 3: is your equally if not higher, responsibility toward being able
Speaker 3: to save a human life? Could could you tell us
Speaker 3: maybe spin out for us in a little more detail,
Speaker 3: the depth of the ethical gray areas that you ran
Speaker 3: into and how you and the team navigated them through
Speaker 3: the pipeline.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, yeah, Ben Is, I mean, really the
Speaker 4: main experience to me, and one of the main threads
Speaker 4: that we really wanted a foregram and telling the story
Speaker 4: was exactly that. Being thrown into this investigation was extremely disorientating,
Speaker 4: like morally disorientating, professionally disorientating, and there was absolutely no
Speaker 4: clear guidance or precedent or anything like that that we
Speaker 4: could find that could help us know what was the
Speaker 4: right thing to do. I think we quickly began to
Speaker 4: feel like we weren't really acting as journalists anymore. If
Speaker 4: I'm honest with you, I don't think journalists would typically
Speaker 4: like step in and intervene in the way that we
Speaker 4: were doing. And I don't think that they would drive
Speaker 4: the story in the way or cause the story almost
Speaker 4: in the way we were doing by handing stuff over
Speaker 4: to the police and then trying to get them to
Speaker 4: do an investigation. And you know, that's just not what
Speaker 4: you normally do. You sit back and you watch, and
Speaker 4: you report, and you know, you try not to step
Speaker 4: in and become muddled in the middle of it. Our
Speaker 4: kind of guiding moral north star was that people's eyes
Speaker 4: were in danger, and all the decisions that we really
Speaker 4: took had to be about trying to make those lives
Speaker 4: as safe as we could, and that's what we did.
Speaker 4: So that was very clear. One. If you don't think
Speaker 4: the police are going to be reached or investigate properly,
Speaker 4: make make contact with the targets, okay, And so basically
Speaker 4: all of those were quite straightforwards, but they all caused
Speaker 4: it's kind of profusion of like additional quandaries around it.
Speaker 4: So then it's like, okay, if you're stepping in, how
Speaker 4: how to do it safely? Like so many tactical like
Speaker 4: day to day like trade offs around all of that.
Speaker 4: How quickly should you do it? You know, how do
Speaker 4: you balance doing it in a way which is like
Speaker 4: slower and safer in one sense, you know, learning more
Speaker 4: about their life, learning where they might be, learning where
Speaker 4: they might be alone, versus you don't know whether that
Speaker 4: person sending those messages is genuinely in the middle of
Speaker 4: plotting a physical attack on the person themselves. Likewise, with
Speaker 4: the you know, the decision around and handing everything over
Speaker 4: to the police. I think most and this would say
Speaker 4: that's not their job. Like it's not to just be
Speaker 4: a adjunct to law enforcement. You know, you've got a
Speaker 4: different priority. It's a journey. It's just supposed to tell
Speaker 4: the story. But again for us, when lives are at risk,
Speaker 4: and obviously we've got to know many of these people,
Speaker 4: like you actually care about them as people. They're not
Speaker 4: just sorted or targets that I don't know what they
Speaker 4: really were, like maybe Frank, I mean I've got invited
Speaker 4: to one of their weddings.
Speaker 2: So Chris describes what you guys became within medium as
Speaker 2: a small podcast production team turned semi effective intelligence gathering
Speaker 2: in criminal investigations force. So have you considered.
Speaker 4: Starting your own is high Prades?
Speaker 2: By the way, have you considered starting your own international
Speaker 2: intelligence agency? I feel like we could use you and
Speaker 2: your whole team. Let's just do it.
Speaker 4: I really hope I never have to do anything like
Speaker 4: this again. Matt.
Speaker 3: We'll pause here for a word from our sponsor and
Speaker 3: return with more from Carl Miller. And we've returned, let's
Speaker 3: dive in. Matt. I think you make an excellent point
Speaker 3: referencing Chris's conversation there, if you're looking at the scope,
Speaker 3: we're talking about an investigation that crossed more than eleven countries,
Speaker 3: leveraging a lot of your previous research into the borderless
Speaker 3: areas of this second world called online interaction, and you
Speaker 3: are involved with local, state level international law enforcement, and
Speaker 3: you start to dig into these larger trends right where
Speaker 3: we're looking at individual trees, and now we start to
Speaker 3: see the view of a terrifying forest. One thing that
Speaker 3: stands out is when you all are initially looking at
Speaker 3: these potential targets, they don't appear to be closely linked, right,
Speaker 3: Not everybody works for the same big company or in geo,
Speaker 3: not everybody is related. But you find that the majority
Speaker 3: of targets are women. Could you tell us a little
Speaker 3: bit about these disturbing demographic commonalities and maybe what insights
Speaker 3: you and your team gleaned from that recognition. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, firstly, as as you say, Ben, the investigation
Speaker 4: begins to balloon and expands very quickly. There are one
Speaker 4: or two substantially serious new cases falling in at least
Speaker 4: every month, and so once we made the decision, of course,
Speaker 4: well we need to intervene we need to do that.
Speaker 4: Of course, for every single one of these cases. We're
Speaker 4: also having to kind of triage every single order that
Speaker 4: comes in, so that's open source intelligence, it's cryptocinth, so
Speaker 4: tracing the payments and trying to work out whether each
Speaker 4: one does constitute a threat to life or not, which
Speaker 4: itself can be a judgment call ultimately. I mean, obviously
Speaker 4: we erd on the side of treating these things as
Speaker 4: serious unless there was kind of like clear evidence they weren't.
Speaker 4: And actually, in that moment, it took quite a long
Speaker 4: time for us to be able to step back and
Speaker 4: begin to see the wood for the trees, and in
Speaker 4: that moment, it felt very much like being in the
Speaker 4: middle of a bunch of trees, because what we were
Speaker 4: having to deal with was investigation after investigation, thread after threads,
Speaker 4: each one normally dealing with a different law enforcement agency,
Speaker 4: a different target, a different local journalist, different jurisdiction, different
Speaker 4: legal system, different approach that the police would have with us,
Speaker 4: a different sense of threat, and different personality of the
Speaker 4: person that we were reaching and trying to help. And
Speaker 4: these weren't shutting down because, like you know, the investigations
Speaker 4: could go on for weeks or months, and even after
Speaker 4: an arrest it would continue and then that it would
Speaker 4: then go into this new phase around the around the trial,
Speaker 4: and you know, and then and and and all the
Speaker 4: kind of legal shenanigans that happened in the run up
Speaker 4: to a prosecution. So we were for a while it
Speaker 4: really you know, it was expanding, and it really felt
Speaker 4: like the investigation was going to fall apart. And during
Speaker 4: all you know, we were knackered. Sorry, that's a British term.
Speaker 4: I think we were very, very tired. We were up
Speaker 4: like quite a lot of the night because we were
Speaker 4: having to deal with like cases in Australia and stuff
Speaker 4: like that, very anxious, under a lot of psychological pressure.
Speaker 4: And it was it was just at that moment, I think,
Speaker 4: when we really were like discussing how much longer can
Speaker 4: we actually practically keep doing this, that we began working
Speaker 4: with the FBI. So the FBI reached out and we
Speaker 4: began a kind of strategic global kind of like disclosure
Speaker 4: regime with them where they would then begin to if
Speaker 4: it wasn't in the US, vouch for us with the
Speaker 4: local police forces. And that really kind of changed the
Speaker 4: whole nature of the investigation. We really started to see meaningful,
Speaker 4: effective investigations. At that point, the FBI were inventive in
Speaker 4: a way that most local police forces around the world
Speaker 4: were not around how they could draw out the perpetrators,
Speaker 4: how they could get that evidence that they needed without
Speaker 4: having to force us into a court. They were actually
Speaker 4: really good and I think really really saved us there.
Speaker 4: And it was then a bit later, so as that
Speaker 4: was all happening, then finally we could begin to catch
Speaker 4: our breath and we began to look at what we
Speaker 4: had done and what all these people kind of constituted together.
Speaker 4: And I think number one, they were normal people. Everyone
Speaker 4: seemed to be normal people. And that was still like
Speaker 4: so crazy to me. I mean, like, I don't know
Speaker 4: what you guys think, but going into this, I kind
Speaker 4: of assumed maybe there's going to be like Gangland or
Speaker 4: like drug deals gonna rye or I don't know, at
Speaker 4: least like some kind of major business fallings out or
Speaker 4: something like that, and in fact it really wasn't. It
Speaker 4: was you know, a Galician fishmonger and an air traffic
Speaker 4: controller from Wisconsin and a nurse from Amsterdam, all these
Speaker 4: people that just seem to be living normal lives and
Speaker 4: the perpetrators too, like insanely it seemed to be to
Speaker 4: most intents and purposes, keeping up this kind of facade
Speaker 4: of normalcy and respectability in them going about their lives.
Speaker 4: Most of them had jobs.
Speaker 2: You know, how did somebody like a doctor in Washington
Speaker 2: State in the United States end up on that website
Speaker 2: requesting a hit man?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: How does that happen? How did they know that these
Speaker 2: sites even existed?
Speaker 4: Yes? Well, okay, two great questions there. Let's talk first
Speaker 4: about how they know the sites existed, because this is fascinating,
Speaker 4: and this acquaints us with a character that we haven't
Speaker 4: I haven't mentioned yet, but it's quite important to a
Speaker 4: story called Eura. So Eura is the shadowy Romanian cyber
Speaker 4: criminal who at least set up the site and then
Speaker 4: probably in some way or another, continue to run it,
Speaker 4: probably with a growing a growing gang. Eura is not
Speaker 4: very good at cybersecurity. In fact, Chris has managed to
Speaker 4: run circles around Europe for many years. He hacked You're
Speaker 4: Out of his own email address at one point, and
Speaker 4: then had a bizarre conversation with euro when Urine started
Speaker 4: emailing himself amazing, but is actually a very inventive digital
Speaker 4: marketer and disinformation merchant. And what he did was build
Speaker 4: a marketing pipeline to lure people onto the site which
Speaker 4: begins with Google and believe it or not, a hit
Speaker 4: man for higher comparison site that sits on the light nare.
Speaker 4: So he thought, okay, well, my clients are going to,
Speaker 4: like all clients are going to be trying to sort
Speaker 4: between all the different brands, you know, and how do
Speaker 4: they know which brand to go for? So he needed
Speaker 4: to build brand equity around his own assassination site. There
Speaker 4: are others out there, and so a hit matha high
Speaker 4: comparison site on the light net, purports to help you
Speaker 4: navigate all those difficult assassination website. Decisions shows you which
Speaker 4: ones are scans, shows you which ones are real, and
Speaker 4: actually gives some genuinely quite useful advice around cybersecurity. It
Speaker 4: provides a link you can download, tour you can go
Speaker 4: on the Darknet. He'd managed to manipulate Google so that
Speaker 4: if you searched how to hire a hitman, his website
Speaker 4: basically he came up first. I think it was second.
Speaker 4: It was above the New York Times. He'd suborned thousands
Speaker 4: of websites Chinese wedding dress shops, Brooklyn foody blogs to
Speaker 4: basically all be actually secretly linking to his site, so
Speaker 4: that Google thought it was this really well respected, high
Speaker 4: reputation site and that brought you onto his dot net empire.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's that's brilliant ethics. Aside, that is brilliant marketing, right,
Speaker 3: And I love that you're introducing the comparison, right, the
Speaker 3: the smart shopper aspect of someone who wants to wants
Speaker 3: to find a hit man. I mean, the worst way
Speaker 3: to say it is get the most bang for their buck.
Speaker 3: There's a very interesting, fascinating interaction you have later in
Speaker 3: the show with someone related to the appearance of this
Speaker 3: online economy. I don't know if it's too far for
Speaker 3: us to talk about it now, Carl, because I don't
Speaker 3: want to spoil the show here entirely, But would you
Speaker 3: be comfortable giving us and the audience just a little
Speaker 3: bit about Guido?
Speaker 4: Guido? Sure? Yes, this this is this is last, this
Speaker 4: is the last episode of kill Lists come out, Yes,
Speaker 4: Guido Finelli. So we couldn't speak to Era, of course,
Speaker 4: because he's either arrested or in hiding or running some
Speaker 4: other kind of scam or.
Speaker 3: Maybe changed his life and became a better person.
Speaker 4: Maybe he's maybe he's reformed somehow. I profoundly doubt that,
Speaker 4: but you never know. Yeah, So we we went to
Speaker 4: the next best thing and spoke to someone who runs
Speaker 4: a assassination site and his name is his name is Guido,
Speaker 4: and he set up a hire a Hitman dot com.
Speaker 4: It was initially a joke. It was supposed to be
Speaker 4: actually weirdly in a weird parallel with you, a marketing company.
Speaker 4: But he then went away and did other things and
Speaker 4: came back several years later and found that people were
Speaker 4: emailing into the site looking to hire a hit man.
Speaker 3: Not the best op.
Speaker 2: SEC and he just went away and he's like, that
Speaker 2: was weird and that was end the story, right, No.
Speaker 4: It's not mad, No, we couldn't. You can dedicate an
Speaker 4: episode to that could.
Speaker 2: Well, let's not spoil it though, listen to that episode
Speaker 2: as well as we're going through this, Carl, We've we've
Speaker 2: taken so much of your time. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for being here. Man. You do so many strange things.
Speaker 2: And I don't mean that in a weird bad way.
Speaker 2: I just mean you've spoken to NATO before. What is
Speaker 2: the weirdest thing about speaking in front of NATO.
Speaker 4: Oh, I mean compared to all of this like that,
Speaker 4: that's a that's nice saying to do nothing nothing apart
Speaker 4: from you know, some stern looking some stern looking people
Speaker 4: in informal military dress. It's it's not particularly weird at all. Well,
Speaker 4: although I do, I do reflect on all of this,
Speaker 4: you know, because it's when we first started doing all this,
Speaker 4: you know, looking at influence operations or the shadowy roll
Speaker 4: of state, saw things like that. This was a kind
Speaker 4: of geeky think tank discipline that me and my friends
Speaker 4: began to do, you know, that we would just put
Speaker 4: out these kind of think tank reports and that would
Speaker 4: be that. And this was ten years ago more fourteen
Speaker 4: years ago now, and when I was actually about to
Speaker 4: step onto a NATO stage just at the end of
Speaker 4: last year, I kind of paused and I thought, it's
Speaker 4: incredible how this world that began there has now kind
Speaker 4: of flooded into the world of serious multilateral institutions, geopolitics,
Speaker 4: information warfare. And what I was really talking about to
Speaker 4: NATO was how information spaces have become these like key
Speaker 4: venues for geopolitical competition absolutely, you know, and their kind
Speaker 4: of systematic manipulation and ways of therefore like reliably trying
Speaker 4: to change the behavior or the beliefs of the people
Speaker 4: that live in those information spaces. This has become this
Speaker 4: absolutely kind of key like tradecraft that lots of people,
Speaker 4: States included, are deploying and trying to work on and
Speaker 4: trying to improve on, you know, and it's I've kind
Speaker 4: of often felt like the attacker is very much winning
Speaker 4: that battle in the moment. And so, you know, I
Speaker 4: was talking to NATO and lots of other people about
Speaker 4: how on Earth we like protect information spaces, but what
Speaker 4: do we do to try and make them like harder
Speaker 4: for adversaries and autocrats and others to actually infiltrate and use.
Speaker 3: I love that you're getting to that point, because this
Speaker 3: brings us to a larger context, right, and this is
Speaker 3: something that your work explores in depth, and it must
Speaker 3: it must be devilishly difficult to explore something that is
Speaker 3: unfolding as you research it, right as you are arriving
Speaker 3: at these new thoughts, all these intervening variables and global
Speaker 3: sea changes that occur. Maybe we take it to a
Speaker 3: local level with two very important questions. The first question
Speaker 3: is for everyone listening now, who is hearing these heroin stories,
Speaker 3: who is encountering kill list, encountering your other work? Their
Speaker 3: first question is going to be, well, thanks Carl, what
Speaker 3: can I do now? Like, what can I do today
Speaker 3: with my you know, with my social media presence or
Speaker 3: the various ways in which society increasingly forces people to
Speaker 3: interact in a digital sphere.
Speaker 4: Great question. Yeah, By the way, I love researching things
Speaker 4: that are unfolding generally. I actually wrote talking about kind
Speaker 4: of random think tank PDFs that no one, no one's
Speaker 4: read wrote. I wrote exactly on that in I think
Speaker 4: about twenty fifteen called real Time the Emergence of real
Speaker 4: time Research, and I was saying, look, the way that
Speaker 4: we've done this in the past, it takes months to
Speaker 4: get like a survey out to field and get the
Speaker 4: results back and all the cross hand and crunch all
Speaker 4: the numbers. And now look, we can like research literally
Speaker 4: a phenomena that's unfolding in front of you. You know,
Speaker 4: you can be collecting the data, doing the analysis, doing
Speaker 4: the outputs, you know, in a time, you know, quick
Speaker 4: enough to actually affect the thing that you're researching. And
Speaker 4: that to me has always been one of the most
Speaker 4: exciting kind of reasons to do this kind of work.
Speaker 4: And there's you know, of all of the scary things
Speaker 4: about our information space is becoming key venues of geopolitical conflict.
Speaker 4: It's not make me feel irrelevant. I think it's it's
Speaker 4: something in fact, actually more people should be working on
Speaker 4: and more mind should be bent towards trying to trying
Speaker 4: to think up solutions. But in terms of what people
Speaker 4: can do, I've got maybe two pieces of advice and
Speaker 4: if you want the show, I can send you links
Speaker 4: if you want to stick in show notes. By the way,
Speaker 4: everyone to send people to these. Number one you mentioned
Speaker 4: a great word. I think it was you ben opsec
Speaker 4: a compound word. Everyone should spend a weekend day if
Speaker 4: you've got it, and and do adversarial ocent on yourself.
Speaker 4: You really should.
Speaker 3: We've left open source intelligence.
Speaker 4: You should sit there open source intelligence. You should sit there,
Speaker 4: pretend that you are Eura or someone like him, and
Speaker 4: try and learn as much as you can about yourself
Speaker 4: that might make you vulnerable, Like could could could you
Speaker 4: construct a pattern of life about yourself? Could you construct
Speaker 4: a psychological profile as well? Like what what gets you going?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 4: What what you really care? About like what makes you angry,
Speaker 4: what kind of information spaces you might live in, how
Speaker 4: might how might you get your own attention and and
Speaker 4: really do that because like I think we we often
Speaker 4: really don't realize like the vulnerabilities that we leave in
Speaker 4: our various trails online. And that might be everything from
Speaker 4: like cybersecurity in past words, all the way through to
Speaker 4: the kind of soft and more psychological stuff. But then
Speaker 4: behavior wise, and I began to think about this over COVID,
Speaker 4: and so many of us were kind of falling into
Speaker 4: all kinds of weird spaces online, you know, and we're
Speaker 4: all very anxious and some of the things that I
Speaker 4: thought were important behaviorally for us, all is number one
Speaker 4: guard against outrage online. And I don't mean don't get
Speaker 4: angry about things that you should get angry about. That's fine.
Speaker 4: But when I put apart these operations, these kind of
Speaker 4: influence operations like outrage activation is probably like the key
Speaker 4: dynamic that they use in order to get people roped
Speaker 4: in and paying attention. It's almost always the use of
Speaker 4: some kind of grievance that they'll try and deploy and
Speaker 4: recontextualize in a certain way. Outrage thinks a hook into
Speaker 4: your primordial lizard brain to get you to act in
Speaker 4: ways that are much more automatic than any kind of
Speaker 4: more conscious thought or consideration. So guard against outrage, I
Speaker 4: think is quite key. Slow down, just simply slow down
Speaker 4: your online activities. Like so many of us, we share,
Speaker 4: we send, we reply, And when you're a scammer, fraudster,
Speaker 4: cyber criminal you are, or in a minuipulator, you're really
Speaker 4: relying on that kind of automatic response, whether that's to
Speaker 4: get you to change your behavior, whether that's a gain
Speaker 4: you send that email or kick that link. Slowing down
Speaker 4: is a really great way of giving yourself a tiny
Speaker 4: bit of time for your brain to tick in. And
Speaker 4: then lastly, and I think this has become so much
Speaker 4: more important than even it was in twenty twenty, but
Speaker 4: where the infinite scroll, Beware the way in which information
Speaker 4: is created online like that it's so gainable, Like the
Speaker 4: information's basically living that are fed and shaped by algorithms.
Speaker 4: It's so gainable by all kinds of people, whether that's
Speaker 4: the platforms themselves, whether that's advertisers that want to get
Speaker 4: you to change your behavior, whether that's criminals and manipulators
Speaker 4: and others, and very rarely are the people shaping the
Speaker 4: algorithm way that has your best interests to heart, I
Speaker 4: can assure you.
Speaker 3: So we call it, we call it the dopamine Casino
Speaker 3: of social media.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what do you do? That's not heavy, Carl. Do
Speaker 2: you play video games or anything?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Okay, good, Oh that's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Something that's a great question. That's something to get
Speaker 3: you out of there, out of that headspace because we
Speaker 3: had We've talked about this, Matt and our co host
Speaker 3: Nola and I over several years. It's something that that
Speaker 3: comes up with cases of this magnitude of kill list.
Speaker 3: The question we always ask, is we often ask, is
Speaker 3: did you or your team ever feel that you were
Speaker 3: personally in physical danger? And to add on to that,
Speaker 3: I would like to just in the spirit of Matt's question,
Speaker 3: ask how did this affect your mental wellbeing? You know,
Speaker 3: how are you doing after after this heroine saga? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Well, that was another decision that we made, was to
Speaker 4: actually excavate that kind of psychological journey. We went through
Speaker 4: and put that into the podcast as well, because I
Speaker 4: didn't want us to come across like some kind of
Speaker 4: teflon action hero group like that can just do that
Speaker 4: sort of stuff and shrug it off and then go
Speaker 4: to the next kind of you know, emergency that That's
Speaker 4: not how any of this ever felt like. And I'm
Speaker 4: not sure any normal human being can go through that
Speaker 4: sort of stuff and not you know, be affected by it,
Speaker 4: but like psychologically very difficult. I mean, I was having
Speaker 4: recurring nightmares for quite a long time.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 4: It's quite an invasive experience in the sense that it
Speaker 4: does stay in your thoughts the whole time. It's very hard,
Speaker 4: you know, it's very hard to switch off that. Plus COVID,
Speaker 4: it really meant that we were like living in this
Speaker 4: weird dark world for quite a long time. I'm doing
Speaker 4: much better now. We didn't by also because it was
Speaker 4: so unexpected, We didn't anticipate in it, and we went
Speaker 4: from like we're just going about this, you know, retrospective,
Speaker 4: nice six week long podcast, and then suddenly we've got
Speaker 4: live kill orders. We had absolutely no time to really
Speaker 4: spin up like any real welfare structures in retrospect. Now,
Speaker 4: if that were to ever happen again, or if this
Speaker 4: happens to anyone listening, like do that, like you need
Speaker 4: to do that, and you would now if you were
Speaker 4: doing anything like this and you were actually planning to
Speaker 4: do it, you would obviously have counseling, You would obviously
Speaker 4: have various kinds of processes in place to mean that
Speaker 4: you can talk to people and you can kind of
Speaker 4: step out of things and not feel like you're endangering
Speaker 4: someone's life by having a break. But we didn't have
Speaker 4: any of that, And so yeah, psychologically it was tough,
Speaker 4: physical danger. I mean, your guess is as good as mine.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I don't know whether I was. I don't know whether
Speaker 4: I am. I don't know whether I will be, And
Speaker 4: there's not really much to do about it.
Speaker 2: Six years still, Ronald dillg gets out.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that isn't lost on me. And all I
Speaker 4: would say is that we all felt like we had
Speaker 4: to do what we did. And I don't think that anyone,
Speaker 4: any normal human being would have behaved differently. I think
Speaker 4: people do try and help each other. And there's no
Speaker 4: way I could have looked myself in the mirror, you know,
Speaker 4: if I'd have like stepped away from it. And I
Speaker 4: think that that just it was that decision that informed
Speaker 4: everything else.
Speaker 2: I think. I think it's amazing what you did. I
Speaker 2: think anybody who listens to this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a majority of Yah.
Speaker 2: Yeah for sure. Wow. So thank you so much Carl
Speaker 2: for chatting with us today. Has been incredible. Make sure
Speaker 2: you get out there and listen to kill list from
Speaker 2: Wondering and Novel right now. It's wherever you can find
Speaker 2: your podcast.
Speaker 3: And with that, there is so much more we haven't
Speaker 3: we haven't been able to explore with you today. Carl
Speaker 3: would love to have you back on the show in
Speaker 3: the future if you want to get the band back,
Speaker 3: to get me.
Speaker 4: Back always, yeah, I have to you too.
Speaker 2: So social media intelligence, I made up the word for it, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3: So we also I want to give a huge tip
Speaker 3: of the cap to the larger context that you explore
Speaker 3: in depth. Could we end with this, could you tell
Speaker 3: us a bit about the Center for the Analysis of
Speaker 3: Social Media.
Speaker 4: Sure, So that's my that's the group that I set up,
Speaker 4: and it's always kind of existed as two things really,
Speaker 4: So it's been in a think tank called DEMOS, which
Speaker 4: is one of you know, half a dozen main political
Speaker 4: think tanks in Westminster in the UK. That's where I
Speaker 4: began all of this internet research and it's and then
Speaker 4: it's a standardone tach organization and it's kind of there
Speaker 4: always been about trying to build better ways of basically
Speaker 4: trying to research the Internet and deal with online harms,
Speaker 4: whether that's kind of hate speech or terroristics, imitation online
Speaker 4: or other things like that. And that's kind of, by
Speaker 4: the way, I should say to anyone listening that neither
Speaker 4: Demos nor chasm Tech nor any in his organization had
Speaker 4: anything to do with kill lists, just just to not
Speaker 4: cross wires, because they made none of these decisions. And
Speaker 4: I don't want them to feel like they're being exposed
Speaker 4: to any of the things I've spoken about, so that
Speaker 4: they are separate, but they're both things that I've done
Speaker 4: and been part of and being so lucky to be
Speaker 4: part of, which I've always tried to fuse together these,
Speaker 4: like I think, two different and equally important and sometimes
Speaker 4: kind of intention ways of trying to make sense of
Speaker 4: all this, you know, journalism investigations on the one hand,
Speaker 4: and learning about how to write about people and get
Speaker 4: to know people, and then the kind of numbers and
Speaker 4: technology on the other.
Speaker 3: Wow, thanks again to Carl Miller, thanks to our friends
Speaker 3: at Wondery and Novel that I always my spider sense
Speaker 3: always tells me we're cooking with gas. When we walk
Speaker 3: away and I look at all the questions I had
Speaker 3: and I realized we didn't get to a bunch of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh same. I felt the exact same way. We
Speaker 2: could have talked with Carl forever. And we're not joking
Speaker 2: when we're talking about listening to the show, it just
Speaker 2: captures you, dude, how about that theme song, Come on,
Speaker 2: come ons and theme songs let's go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Carl's research too. Outside of this, you know,
Speaker 3: we're we're talking primarily about kill List. We're not blowing smoke.
Speaker 3: Please do check it out. It is a phenomenal, timely
Speaker 3: and disturbing exploration should you should be aware of what
Speaker 3: can happen online, but also in the larger context of
Speaker 3: Carl's work. There's a lot going on, and one of
Speaker 3: the things that we like to do when we're figuring
Speaker 3: out what is going on is to go to the
Speaker 3: primary sources, of which Carl is is very much a
Speaker 3: pre eminent example.
Speaker 2: Yes, and in that book that you mentioned at the
Speaker 2: top of the episode, the Death of the Gods, the
Speaker 2: New Global Power Grab, that is one of the primary sources.
Speaker 3: For sure.
Speaker 2: Carl's got a website if you want to learn more
Speaker 2: about him and his work, go check that out. It's
Speaker 2: c A R L M I L L E R.
Speaker 3: And while you are on the internet, we would love
Speaker 3: to hear your thoughts. We have some ocent and opseca
Speaker 3: cybersecurity enthusiast, we'll say, and indeed we have some professionals
Speaker 3: in the crowd. Thank you for joining us. You can
Speaker 3: find us online all sorts of the social medias you've
Speaker 3: heard it all the time. You can also contact us
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Speaker 3: Entities that read every single piece of correspondence we receive.
Speaker 3: Be well aware yet unafraid, particularly if you go by Griffin.
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