Federal agents on Thursday announced the arrest of a suspect charged with planting the two pipe bombs discovered near the US Capitol complex on the eve of January 6, 2021. Authorities identified the man as Brian J. Cole Jr., a resident of Woodbridge, Virginia. The arrest marks a major break in a case that has vexed authorities for nearly five years.

Cole, 30, is charged with transporting an explosive device across state lines with the intent to kill, injure, intimidate, or destroy property and with attempting to damage and destroy the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national committees by means of an explosive device. If convicted, he would face the prospect of decades in prison.

According to an affidavit, investigators linked Cole to the bombs through a combination of surveillance footage, historical cell-site data, and years of purchase records showing he bought each major component used to construct the devices. Agents allege Cole acquired the same model of galvanized pipe, matching end caps, and nine-volt connectors, among other items, across multiple hardware stores in northern Virginia in 2019 and 2020.

Cole continued buying components used in bomb-making after his bombs in the Capitol were discovered, agents allege, listing the purchase of a white kitchen timer and two nine-volt batteries from a Walmart on January 21, as well as galvanized pipes from Home Depot the following day.

Senior Trump administration officials quickly cast the arrest as a vindication of their own leadership, claiming the case had gone cold. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she hoped the arrest would restore public trust following what she characterized as a “total lack of movement” on a case that had “languished for four years.” In their telling, the breakthrough was proof that the case only advanced once they were empowered to “go get the bad guys” and stop “focusing on other extraneous things,” as FBI deputy director Dan Bongino put it.

“Though it had been nearly five years, our team continued to churn through massive amounts of data and tips that we used to identify this suspect,” said Darren Cox, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division.

The bombs were planted near the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night of January 5, 2021, as Congress prepared to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory over Donald Trump. Both failed to detonate, but their discovery the following day added to the chaos and confusion unfolding as a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol building, causing millions of dollars in damage and injuring approximately 140 Capitol and Metropolitan Police Department officers.

As for Wilcox, he’s long been one of that small group of privacy zealots who buys his SIM cards in cash with a fake name. But he hopes Phreeli will offer an easier path—not just for people like him, but for normies too.

“I don’t know of anybody who’s ever offered this credibly before,” says Wilcox. “Not the usual telecom-strip-mining-your-data phone, not a black-hoodie hacker phone, but a privacy-is-normal phone.”

Even so, enough tech companies have pitched privacy as a feature for their commercial product that jaded consumers may not buy into a for-profit telecom like Phreeli purporting to offer anonymity. But the EFF’s Cohn says that Merrill’s track record shows he’s not just using the fight against surveillance as a marketing gimmick to sell something. “Having watched Nick for a long time, it’s all a means to an end for him,” she says. “And the end is privacy for everyone.”

Merrill may not like the implications of describing Phreeli as a cellular carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But there’s little doubt that some of the company’s customers will use its privacy protections for crime—just as with every surveillance-resistant tool, from Signal to Tor to briefcases of cash.

Phreeli won’t, at least, offer a platform for spammers and robocallers, Merrill says. Even without knowing users’ identities, he says the company will block that kind of bad behavior by limiting how many calls and texts users are allowed, and banning users who appear to be gaming the system. “If people think this is going to be a safe haven for abusing the phone network, that’s not going to work,” Merrill says.

But some customers of his phone company will, to Merrill’s regret, do bad things, he says—just as they sometimes used to with pay phones, that anonymous, cash-based phone service that once existed on every block of American cities. “You put a quarter in, you didn’t need to identify yourself, and you could call whoever you wanted,” he reminisces. “And 99.9 percent of the time, people weren’t doing bad stuff.” The small minority who were, he argues, didn’t justify the involuntary societal slide into the cellular panopticon we all live in today, where a phone call not tied to freely traded data on the caller’s identity is a rare phenomenon.

The T10 also includes a voice-cloning feature similar to those offered by the Vasco Q1 and the Google Pixel 10. With this function, you recite a few sample sentences, press the “clone” button, and in a few minutes, you can have the T10 speak in a simulacrum of your own voice instead of its generic “male” or “female” tones. This system is much more impressive than Vasco’s, based on my testing, with my cloned voice sounding eerily like my own, just with a rich Spanish, Russian, or Tamil accent applied. Note that by default, the app can only store one cloned voice at a time.

The 60-mAh battery charges via USB-C and promises 15 hours of continuous usage and 100 days of standby time. That’s tough to test thoroughly, as the device automatically shuts itself off after just a few minutes of disuse. Despite many hours of testing over several days, the in-app battery indicator never wavered from a 100-percent charge.

The Subscription Push

The T10 is a capable, if complex, translation system, and I’d be more enamored with it if not for the fact that it includes only 180 days of service before you are pressed to upgrade to one of two subscription plans. For $14 per month or $100 per year, you receive 600 minutes per month of service across many of its real-time features. For $25 per month or $179 per year, that moves up to unlimited service (and adds a second voice cloning slot). Without a subscription, users get just 120 minutes of real-time translations per month and lose call translation and AI Mind Map features completely. The cross-app translation feature, face-to-face mode, and text/photo translations are free across all modes.

Another major issue I had with the T10 is how rough the InnAIO Pro app is. The badly translated interface is particularly troubling, not just because a good portion of it is in pidgin English but because some of it isn’t translated at all. For example, if you save a recording of a real-time translation session, the identities of the two languages used in the recording appear in Chinese.

The T10 has a novel approach and some unique features you won’t find in competing gear or on a phone app, but at present, it’s all too haphazard and undercooked to wholly recommend. The push for a very costly subscription after such a short period of free access makes that calculus all the more difficult.