This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss our top games of the year, air traffic control, and posting through it.
JOSEPH: Jason did a bit of this last week, but here’s my stab at reflecting briefly on the past year. Here are my favourite articles I did this year: I published detailed documents on what phones Cellebrite and Graykey are able (or unable) to unlock; I revealed Apple quietly included code that reboots iPhones, locking out cops (Apple has still not officially documented this feature as far as I know); I along with other journalists showed how Locate X, a surveillance tool bought by the U.S. government, can be used to track visitors to abortion clinics; I verified that two students combined Meta’s smart Ray Ban glasses with the facial recognition service Pimeyes which entirely shatters our understanding of privacy; I went deep on how the walls were closing in on the hacker suspected of some of the most significant breaches this year (the suspect was later arrested); I found a CISA official had broken with his agency’s narrative on SS7, and shown the issue is much more pressing than some may want to admit; I found a site was selling Discord messages and that it was linked to notorious harassment site Kiwi Farms; I showed that money launderers were using betting platform FanDuel; I continued to verify real world acts of physical violence emerging from the cybercrime underground; I mapped out the complex supply chain that ends up with hackers ordering mountains of oxy and adderall; I revealed that a site called OnlyFake was using “neural networks” to churn out realistic photos of fake IDs; and I exposed a global phone spy tool monitoring billions (which Google then took action on).