Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Noel is on an adventure, but will be
returning soon.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
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
(00:54):
and accurately explored in the information age. Matt, what's the
most basic definition of the dark net?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
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
(01:36):
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
(01:58):
author and host of the number one podcast kill List,
Carl Miller. Carl, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
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,
(02:54):
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
(03:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
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.
(04:05):
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
(04:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
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
(05:05):
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
(05:27):
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
(05:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
The dark net.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
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
(06:25):
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,
(06:47):
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
(07:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
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
(07:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
List and vigilante style too?
Speaker 4 (08:00):
I mean Chris is a hacker.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yeah, it professional.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
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
(08:28):
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
(08:49):
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
(09:12):
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
(09:34):
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
(09:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
That was just how.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
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
(10:26):
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
(10:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
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
(11:35):
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
(11:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
It was.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
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,
(12:42):
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
(13:03):
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
(13:25):
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.
(13:46):
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.
(14:07):
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
(14:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
Wow. And the administrators did not know this was occurring at.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
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
(15:30):
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?
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Well?
Speaker 4 (15:48):
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
(16:09):
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
(16:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
So there was always something.
Speaker 4 (16:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
How much money are we tarking?
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Coral?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
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
(17:16):
be a lot more.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
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.
(17:42):
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
(18:04):
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?
Speaker 4 (18:23):
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
(18:44):
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
(19:04):
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,
(19:25):
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,
(19:46):
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
(20:07):
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,
(20:29):
going on for months and months.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
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.
(20:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:03):
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
(21:24):
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.
(21:45):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
I see, uh huh, jurisdiction.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
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
(23:39):
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
(23:59):
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,
(24:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
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
(25:00):
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
(25:21):
beginning to conduct.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
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.
(25:45):
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
(26:08):
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
(26:31):
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,
(26:54):
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
(27:19):
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.
(27:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
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
(28:22):
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?
Speaker 4 (28:35):
Quite poorly?
Speaker 3 (28:38):
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
(28:58):
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
(29:20):
answer an unfamiliar number at all. Right, So with these
initial reactions, how many people thought you might be doing
a scale?
Speaker 4 (29:30):
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
(29:52):
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,
(30:14):
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
(30:35):
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
(30:59):
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
(31:20):
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
(31:41):
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
(32:02):
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
(32:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
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
(32:58):
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.
(33:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
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,
(33:52):
by the way, is we begin to act a little
bit like a hit man. Yeah, we are taking outside
of people's facts.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
Figure out either figure the routine out.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
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
(34:22):
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.
(34:42):
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
(35:03):
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
(35:24):
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,
(35:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
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,
(36:24):
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,
(36:45):
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
(37:06):
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.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
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
(37:47):
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
(38:10):
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
(38:31):
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
(38:52):
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
(39:14):
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
(39:35):
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
(39:57):
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
(40:18):
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
(40:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
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,
(41:25):
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
(41:49):
into and how you and the team navigated them through
the pipeline.
Speaker 4 (41:53):
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
(42:14):
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
(42:35):
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
(42:57):
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
(43:19):
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
(43:41):
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
(44:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
Starting your own is high Prades?
Speaker 2 (44:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (44:53):
I really hope I never have to do anything like
this again. Matt.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
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,
(45:24):
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
(45:47):
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,
(46:10):
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
(46:30):
you and your team gleaned from that recognition. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (46:34):
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
(46:55):
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
(47:17):
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,
(47:38):
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
(47:58):
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
(48:19):
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.
(48:41):
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
(49:02):
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,
(49:25):
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.
(49:46):
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
(50:09):
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
(50:31):
of normalcy and respectability in them going about their lives.
Most of them had jobs.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
You know, how did somebody like a doctor in Washington
State in the United States end up on that website
requesting a hit man?
Speaker 3 (50:46):
Like?
Speaker 2 (50:46):
How does that happen? How did they know that these
sites even existed?
Speaker 4 (50:51):
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
(51:11):
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
(51:32):
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
(51:54):
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
(52:14):
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
(52:38):
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
(52:59):
reputation site and that brought you onto his dot net empire.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
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.
(53:26):
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
(53:49):
be comfortable giving us and the audience just a little
bit about Guido?
Speaker 4 (53:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
Maybe changed his life and became a better person.
Speaker 4 (54:16):
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
(54:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:54):
Not the best op.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
SEC and he just went away and he's like, that
was weird and that was end the story, right, No.
Speaker 4 (55:01):
It's not mad, No, we couldn't. You can dedicate an
episode to that could.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
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
(55:27):
the weirdest thing about speaking in front of NATO.
Speaker 4 (55:31):
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,
(55:52):
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
(56:14):
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
(56:35):
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
(56:57):
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
(57:19):
do we do to try and make them like harder
for adversaries and autocrats and others to actually infiltrate and use.
Speaker 3 (57:28):
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
(57:50):
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
(58:14):
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.
Speaker 4 (58:34):
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
(58:54):
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
(59:15):
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
(59:36):
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
(59:57):
a compound word. Everyone should spend a weekend day if
you've got it, and and do adversarial ocent on yourself.
You really should.
Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
We've left open source intelligence.
Speaker 4 (01:00:13):
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?
Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Like?
Speaker 4 (01:00:33):
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
(01:00:54):
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
(01:01:14):
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
(01:01:35):
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
(01:01:57):
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
(01:02:18):
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
(01:02:38):
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
(01:02:59):
algorithm way that has your best interests to heart, I
can assure you.
Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
So we call it, we call it the dopamine Casino
of social media.
Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
Yeah, what do you do? That's not heavy, Carl. Do
you play video games or anything?
Speaker 4 (01:03:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:03:15):
Okay, good, Oh that's good.
Speaker 3 (01:03:17):
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.
(01:03:37):
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?
Speaker 4 (01:04:02):
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
(01:04:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
It was.
Speaker 4 (01:04:40):
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
(01:05:02):
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
(01:05:22):
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
(01:05:43):
any of that, And so yeah, psychologically it was tough,
physical danger. I mean, your guess is as good as mine.
Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (01:05:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
Six years still, Ronald dillg gets out.
Speaker 4 (01:05:59):
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,
(01:06:20):
if I'd have like stepped away from it. And I
think that that just it was that decision that informed
everything else.
Speaker 2 (01:06:27):
I think. I think it's amazing what you did. I
think anybody who listens to this.
Speaker 3 (01:06:31):
Yeah, that's a majority of Yah.
Speaker 2 (01:06:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:06:48):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:07:02):
Back always, yeah, I have to you too.
Speaker 2 (01:07:05):
So social media intelligence, I made up the word for it, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:07:30):
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
(01:07:51):
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
(01:08:12):
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
(01:08:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:08:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
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
(01:09:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:10:02):
For sure.
Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:10:10):
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
(01:10:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:10:39):
Use, and have multiple. You could choose from uh. You
could call one eight three three std WYTK that is
our voicemail system. When you call in, give yourself a
cool nickname and let us know if we can use
your name and message on the air. If you got
more to say than can fit in a voicemail message,
or you can't find conspiracy stuff or conspiracy stuff show
(01:10:59):
on line somewhere, why not instead send us a good
old fashioned email. We are the.
Speaker 3 (01:11:04):
Entities that read every single piece of correspondence we receive.
Be well aware yet unafraid, particularly if you go by Griffin.
Sometimes the Void writes back, is it true? Do you
guys read every email? Do you sometimes respond? I don't know.
That sounds like modern folklore. Well there's one way to
(01:11:25):
find out for yourself. Join us here in the dark
Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:11:50):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your face favorite
shows