A company that sold encrypted phones was run by crime lords

You’ve probably heard the idiom of the fox guarding the hen house — but how about the one of the encrypted phone company run by drug lords?

Okay, that’s obviously not an idiom, but it’s a true story chronicled by Vice’s Joseph Cox. In the story, Cox tells how MPC — a now-seemingly defunct company that apparently sold phones, tablets, and computers running custom firmware with significant encryption protections — was ultimately controlled by two at-large criminal kingpins known as The Brothers.

As Cox’s reporting explains, The Brothers apparently first bought and used encrypted BlackBerrys before hiring developers to make a custom operating system that could theoretically offer them even more privacy and loaded it on phones. The story...

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