It was 1985, and federal agents in New York were running cases against drug dealers, mobsters, and money launderers. They’d managed to take down gangs and expose criminal networks thanks to the bounty of evidence provided by one simple, reliable tool: the wiretap. Agents had insinuated themselves into the inner workings of their targets by surreptitiously snatching their own words off copper phone lines. Crime fighting had a certain, comforting order owing to the simple engineering of the phone system: Everyone who used it was tied to the ground by a wire. On any given day an agent could stand on a street corner in Manhattan, gaze up at an apartment building, with its neat rows and columns of units stacked atop one another, and know that inside each one there was a telephone tethered by thin copper wire to a single point, sometimes several miles away. In his mind’s eye he could have imagined shrinking himself to the size of an electron and traveling over the phone line, down to the bottom of the building, then shooting beneath the streets, until he ended up in the basement of the telephone company’s switching station.
