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