Uncover - S37 E7: Hope in West Texas | The Expert Witness

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

In Midland, Texas, prosecutor Lisa Borden took a different approach with Cybercheck. After closely questioning Adam Mosher and finding Cybercheck lacked peer review and proper authentication, she refused to use it in court, concluding the technology was not scientifically reliable. Sam Mullins’ gets to sit down with Cybercheck creator Adam Moser. Mosher tells him his backstory as a movie buff. He explains that the technology was inspired by crime TV and movies and built with the help of government grants and technology students. And then just as COVID hit, Moser says, cyber check started reaching out to its first potential clients. But he wasn’t prepared for what happened next.Binge all 9 episodes of this season on our YouTube page, or get them ad-free on CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts.A listener's guide to Uncover: Where to go next

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. We might have found a tiny bit of hope in a corner of West Texas. Have you seen the television show Landman? Lisa Borden is a prosecutor in Midland, Texas. And Landman is a prestige drama about the oil business. in West Texas.

And it stars Billy Bob Thornton, just Billy Bob Thorntoning his ass off. To outsiders, the brutality and grotesque wealth of the oil barons in the show might seem sent up, almost campy, but to Lisa,

the series feels more like a documentary. They nailed it. It is hysterical, and it drives our billionaires crazy. It's a natural world in which to set a gritty oil drama, a place with, with immense wealth disparity

and a precarious social balance that feels like a powder keg. Everybody is tied to the oil industry in some way. It's extremely dangerous work. Many of them are convicted felons because you can be a sex offender, you can be a habitualized offender. It is a rough group of men that go out there,

but they earn more money than I do. So there's all the crimes that goes along with that. So we have a significant human trafficking problem, a lot of violent crime, and we do not have the law enforcement capacity to even remotely take it down. Like so many other places in America, the police are overwhelmed with cases, and there's not enough boots on the ground or resources to clear the backlog. There presents an opportunity for someone, say, a Canadian cowboy, to blow into town. dismount his horse and offer a helping hand.

My LT came to me because he was very excited about this new technology and the sheriff's department was looking at entering into a contract with them. An LT is a police lieutenant. You know, the technology itself is fascinating and potentially terrifying. I remember thinking, are you serious? And he's like, yeah, basically every time your phone lights up trying to connect with some other Wi-Fi, it can be tracked. And I was like, that's nuts. Is there a way to turn that off on my phone?

I'm doing it right now. I'm Sam Mullins. And from CBC's Uncover, this is the expert witness. Episode 7. Hope in West Texas. Something like Cybercheck would solve so many problems for Lisa and her colleagues. There were so many cases where she had theories about what happened. Cases where what happened seemed almost obvious.

So Sapphire Armenta was a drug runner for the cartel. She came from a crime family in El Paso, and she would drive El Paso, pick up. the drugs, bring them back. She lived a very dangerous lifestyle. Making things even more precarious for Sapphire. She was in a relationship with a menacing guy from the drug world, Sergio Antonio Cerna, a guy who you don't want to cross.

She stole Sergio's load of dope. He put a hit out for her and sent some threatening text messages This is the part that's hard to listen to. He told her that he was in big trouble, so he was going to do to her what the guys above him were threatening to do to him. I'm going to find you. There's nothing left for me,

but to cut off your fingers and watch you beg for your life. I'm going to burn your body. And that's exactly what happened. Some good Samaritans, spotted a brushfire on the side of the road. And it was only once they put the flames out that they realized that there was a corpse. Yeah, it was very graphic, very gruesome.

When you hear these stories and you're outside the law world, it's obvious to be like, well, the guy who sent the threatening texts obviously did it, so go arrest him and prosecute him. But getting convictions isn't so simple. It took us seven to ten days to even identify the body. Let alone be able to identify a suspect. And then once they figured out who they had,

there was the challenge of the size of the crime scene. This scene was huge. It went from El Paso, Texas to Dallas. I mean, that is a 12-hour drive. By now, they had more than a strong hunch who had committed this act. They just needed a way to prove it. So they asked Cybercheck,

hey, can you see if anyone, anyone at all, perhaps a person named Sergio Antonio Cerna, was near this spot at this time? Cybercheck had said that they had found this defendant's at or near the time of the body being found on fire. Ask and you shall receive. So now the barrier between Lisa and the conviction was the fact that she not only didn't know what Cybercheck was,

but the entire realm of technology is a big blind spot for her. We're not math and science people. There's a reason we went to lawyer school. Lisa was perplexed by lots of things involving her computer. And the defense attorney, her adversary in this case, who would also need to be brought up to speed if she was going to bring Moser's tech into court, was even worse off than her. The fence of three at the time is maybe he's not 10 years older than me, but he's from the next

generation. He may still have a flip phone. And he's like, you're checking what in the cyberspace now and you're going to use this do-hickie as evidence? I was like, no, Paul, you don't understand. Even if I don't use this evidence, we at least have to start testing it out because it's coming. This really works in AI's speculative favor, this idea of its inevitability. Open a newspaper, turn on the TV, or scroll through TikTok. Everyone's saying that AI is on your doorstep, and if you don't let it in, you're going to be left behind. Paul finally is like, oh, I'm going to need some help. And I'm like, yes, you're going to need some help.

So Lisa, just like the lawyers we met in Ohio and Colorado, needed to learn everything there was to learn about Cybercheck. It involved hours on the phone with Adam Mosher. Lisa wrote down her many questions, and Mosher patiently would address her every concern. And as she learned more and discovered that Cybercheck is new, and as far as she could discern, had never been used in a case like this,

she realized that she was hurtling toward a Dobert hearing. You remember our good friend Dobert hearings, right? So whenever a new science comes out, this is what you've got to do in order for it to be used in court. It needs to go through a pretty critical analytical process to make sure that it should come into evidence and then it meets some basic scientific criteria. Keeping the junk science out.

out. So if there was, if there was a cyber check case somewhere else and another prosecutor was like, I'm going to hold a daubert hearing, would that have been easy for you to just look up and be like, oh, we don't have to have a dauburn hearing because all the information we need was exposed in this Doberate hearing in this other state? Oh, I knew you're going to ask you this. Okay, so let's just get to your real question. Why didn't anybody else have a Dober hearing? I don't know why nobody else had a Dobert hearing.

At the time, it had me scratching my head. I don't want to be critical of the other prosecutors and the other defense attorneys. And my defense attorney didn't come right out of the gates and demand a Dobert hearing. I had to walk him through it. Like, we're having a Dobert hearing. And he just kind of looked at me funny. I'm like, no, we're having one. We wanted to know why other prosecutors didn't do this

and request this showdown hearing, especially over in Ohio. And in Summit County's solitary statement to us, they rejected the motion outright. They said, quote, it was the defendant's duty to request a Dober hearing, and it is unheard of for a party to, request a Dobert hearing regarding its own evidence, end quote. Well, clearly they're mistaken,

because Lisa, in a case where she felt she knew the accused was guilty and she knew how helpful it would be to place him at the scene, was willing to risk jeopardizing everything. And why would a prosecutor do that? When you're talking about taking away somebody's freedom, you want to tread carefully. My philosophy is, and it always has been, it's my job to make sure the defendant gets a fair trial, not just the defense attorney's job to make sure that the defendant gets a fair trial. So this is due technology. There should be a dauburn hearing. It doesn't really matter which side it comes from. It needed to be vetted. And that's why I did it. So with Cybercheck's first Daubert hearing fast approaching.

To make her own assessment of cyber check and whether a judge would give a thumbs up or thumbs down, Lisa brings in Mosier. I'm like, what? Do you bring the goods or you don't? Did he bring the goods? No. And there were two legal basis

that that evidence wasn't coming in. Basis number one. It had never been peer reviewed. Until it gets peer reviewed, it shouldn't ever come in. under the Doberts standard. And basis number two.

Authentication. If the Cybercheck report says that Sergio Serna's phone attempted to interact with a wireless printer that was X amount of yards away from where the body was, found at such and such time, we need to know how

Cybercheck knows that. My understanding from talking to him previously was that Cybertech had the ability to authenticate that data, that his 98% accuracy or whatever was an authentication process. But as I questioned him about that on the sand, he admitted that that was not going to be sufficient for my courtroom. Because it turns out that the computer says you were there is not a solid argument on its own in certain counties.

It's not because those records existed in that AI had found them, it's that you then have to go actually get those records and bring those records into the courtroom and say, see, here are the records. We just had this AI hit saying, oh, these records were located. There was a house that had a printer or something. What more do you need? As far as I'm concerned in the courtroom,

we're no place close to being able to use that. So Lisa pulled Cybercheck out. There's no Doberts Showdown in front of a judge for the AI Tech in Midland, Texas. Not because of a fired-up defense attorney taking on multiple murder cases or blowing his gasket. Just because a simple assessment was made by a prosecutor who saw the writing on the wall. I felt really comfortable walking away from it. Absolutely no way. Was I going to risk this case on that?

In the end, Lisa Borden was able to... to get a conviction without the help of Adam Mosher. And Cerna was sentenced to life in prison. Long after the case was closed, Lisa was driving with one of her lawyer friends one day, and they were discussing this trial. And her friend was like, I think you could have gotten it in. I don't think that defense attorney would have done anything about it.

A sobering thought. I was like, yeah, you're probably right. But then what would have happened? Maybe later someone somewhere would discover. that Cyberjack had flaws and should never have been used in the first place. Lisa told me that prosecutors in Texas have a saying. I don't love any case so much that I want to try it twice. It wasn't worth the risk.

You're not topicing necessarily to a typical prosecutor. If you interviewed a hundred of them, only a handful would have handled it this way, but I am not going to apologize for it. So it was the right thing to do. Moser can come after me if he wants, but it's the law. And maybe I'm the dumb lawyer, that's fine. But my little law school in West Texas, that's what we're going to do.

When Lisa says Mosher can come after me here, it seemed kind of funny. The idea of Cybercheck ever showing up in Lisa's corner of Texas again, let alone ever tracking someone down. I thought that until Cybercheck successfully found me when we first started reporting this story before we told anyone about our reporting a simple, friendly email arrived in our inbox inviting us to talk. If you sold somebody a loaded gun

who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman.

Available now wherever you get your podcasts. I first came across this story in December 2024. By then, it seemed like CyberTech's time had gone the way of the leaf. It had blossomed, its moment in the sun and then changed color before falling to the ground dead. And our team wasn't very far into our reporting when one day the dead leaf emailed us out of the blue. Good afternoon. My name is Rob Lindsay and I am part of the leadership team here at Global Intelligence. I've been made aware of your recent interest and attempt to conduct research for

a potential article on our company. We are keen to understand the intent of your article. I encourage you to reach out to me if you feel like a conversation with our company would support your efforts. So obviously, we reached out and talked to Rob. Hey, good morning. How are we?

Morning. How are you? Good. Rob, it turns out, is a big believer in global intelligence and cybercheck. I have not came across a company that does things the way cybercheck does things. That, I think we can all agree on. Our first conversation with Rob was a little awkward.

It's unusual to have an interviewee approach you, but Rob was really generous with his time and was keen to tell us about all the ways that AI can improve on a human workforce. Typically an analyst who is limited on time, has vacations, has birthdays to go to, has emotions, right? How can we replicate that individual but yet take out the, oh, I had a fight with my boyfriend, and husband before I came to work. And then really allow us to focus on... Rob also told us why his company had never engaged with reporters in the past.

You know, the journalism side of it or the stories that were coming out, although fabricated and not necessarily fully truthful, spun in a way for, you know, to help influence or put fear and certainty and doubt in certain areas. The company refrained from, you know, diving into that because the value for us and the customer was better. No disrespect to Cyberchek's executive vice president, but the person we were really hoping to speak with about all this was Cyberchek's creator, Adam Mosher. Did Rob know where he was? Did he know how we could speak to him?

So I can definitely take that forward. I think it would be great. Like I said, I'd have to vet with them first and see if they're okay with it and they'd have to understand kind of the angle you're looking at. Rob wasn't sure. Yeah. Let's stay close. Let's take close. I appreciate your conversation and in your candor.

So, yeah, let's stay close on this. So in the coming weeks and months, we did. We stayed close. They took it away. They ran it up the pole. We scheduled touch points in the near future. We explored options. We ideated.

We circled back. We hopped on calls. You name it. And at the end, we got what we hoped for. I was cordially invited to come meet with Adam Mosher at Cybercheck, headquarters. My entire relationship with Fredericton is that when I was in grade three, I had to memorize all the provincial capitals and learn how to spell them.

Fredericton, with a sneaky E between the D and R, is the capital of New Brunswick. And it's a charming town that looks like it's straight out of a Christmas snow globe. There's lots of spires and architectural flourishes on the bigger places that make me feel like I'm in Stephen King's New England. And there's lots of quaint little places with neat piles of firewood stacked outside the front door. Everything's clean,

the friendliness factor lives up to the region's reputation, and the downtown has one of the best art galleries I've ever been in. I couldn't imagine a place less likely to be home to something like Cybercheck. All right.

I've just arrived at 10 Knowledge Park Drive in Fredericks and New Brunswick. And I'm about to meet Adam Mosier. He agreed to meet me at his Cybercheck office. I feel nervous. We were still just a few months into reporting this story. And since Mosier had no presence that we could find on the internet, doing background research had been nearly impossible.

And what was worse, from what I'd read about Cybercheck, I had a strong suspicion that its creator might know everything about me. Going into that interview, I figured my best bet for a game plan was to try to get them talking for as long as possible. This wasn't going to so much be a hard-hitting interrogation, but an attempt to try to turn the black silhouette with a question mark for a face into something that more resembled a human. The building looks as unremarkable as any three-story office you'd find in any industrial park. On the exterior, there was no signage. On the chrome-mounted directory inside is a sharp blue plastic cybercheck logo.

With the much less sharp words, global intelligence printed on a piece of paper haphazardly taped up beside it. There's no doorbell, only a key card scanner, so I knock. I think I hear someone walk up to the other side of the door and just stand there. When finally. Hello. Hi. I'm Sam. I'm here to meet Adam.

Oh, yeah. Nice to meet you. Is Adam in the house? I think Adam is just down in the boardroom right over. There's a chat. Right this way. Perfect. I'm pointed in the direction of the boardroom at the back.

And to get there, I go through the large main space of the office. where there are many cubicles and many workspaces, but I only see one person using one. I don't see their face, only the top of their head. I don't see any personal effects. There's no family photos or New Yorker cartoons or Dilbert strips pinned up. I obviously don't think they moved into the place earlier that day

or anything like that, but it looks like they did. I'm good for coffee, thank you. Okay, sounds good. Thanks so much. The boardroom where we'll be conducting the interview is standard issue. Long table, swivel chairs, flat screen. In the corners by the window are two six-foot-tall banners. One says, identify the unidentifiable.

Cybercheck hit. I start setting up my gear, and suddenly, there he is. Adam Mosher. Hey, guys. How are you? Good. And alongside him is Cybercheck's current chief operative. officer, Jeff Shaw. So nice to meet you. Yeah. Nice to meet you, too.

Moser has a Mollskin notebook with him that he opens up in front of him, and both pages that I see are completely full. The writing is small. Things are underlined. There's arrows. There's circles. I wonder what that's all about.

All right. So where did you grow up? I grew up in Nova Scotia in the country. Yeah. Pretty standard, you know, grew up in a small community, had a lot of parents-mandated activities. Yeah. Were you adept at technology as a kid? No. Computers wasn't really a thing even in the area that I grew up in. It was very old-school parenting, old-school traditions, you know, church every Sunday, that type of stuff. Look, I know it might sound annoying to start an important interview like this by asking these first.

date questions. But I ask these questions because, just like on a first date, occasionally you might hit on something genuinely interesting. Like an origin story. And then, of course, I enjoyed the arts. I love the arts. Tell me about that. Movies. Movies and television. I absolutely loved understanding the structure of a story in cinema. Like what kind of movies? It was like Henry Porter of Serial Killer. That was a genre-defining movie for me and something that I found absolutely fascinating to propel my interest in law enforcement and just crime in general. A light went on and his love for crime stories became the main thing about Adam. He couldn't get enough of them.

Then my parents for birthdays, Christmas, things like that, they would seek out books around that and whatever they could to kind of draw that interest. If I asked you when you were 15 years old what you want to be when you grow up, what would you have said? It would have been something in the movie business. Not on the acting side or something like that, but anything technical that I could assist with. Because when I was living in Toronto after high school, I spent a lot of time on movie sets. Doing like PA work? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Grunt work.

Yeah. And how was that? Fascinating. Love it. Yeah. So how did this movie nerd working on film? film sets come to be the creator of Cybercheck. What does this have to do with that? I simply believed that the movies were more than just movies. I'm not talking about documentaries. I'm talking about fictional stories. I truly believe that what was presented in these fictional stories could be possible. Shows like The Wire, where they did, you know, hardware-based

technologies that was able to provide information that would solve crimes. In the hit series, the Wire, cops would use wiretaps, hidden mics, cloned pagers, and phone intercepts. Person of interest. A network series, about an elusive billionaire who uses an AI machine to analyze vast streams of surveillance footage, phone records, and digital data to identify people involved in future violent crimes. Huh. Highly fictionalized story, but the underlying technology about collection and

analysis of data, stuff like that can be possible. So when you trace it all back and look at the beginning of all of this, this literally starts with Adam Mosher and his TV remote. Watching scripted shows where law enforcement would catch bad guys in innovative ways using innovative tools and thinking, I want to make something like that. That's what really drove a lot of the vision around this technology. when it came to where we are now

and over the years of how we got to this point. Moser was inspired by the characters who were wizards on the computer. He wanted to become that guy. To take this fictionalized stuff that you see in the movies and apply it to law enforcement, because law enforcement was always my passion. Not to become a cop or anything like that,

but ultimately to provide information around intelligence that they could leverage to solve crimes. So if, as Moser told me, he wasn't especially adept with computers, how was he going to break into this very specialized field? Probably lots of schooling, right? I'm not a university guy that likes to sit in and learn about the history of technology. I can do that on my own time. In Moser's mind, going to a traditional school wouldn't better prepare him

for taking down the types of criminals he was after, the self-taught. Bad guys are just sitting there and learning from dark web forums, deep web forums. They're not sitting in a classroom learning the theory of how a firewall works. They want to know how to bypass that firewall. Moser looked around to find the programs that were the fastest track to where he was heading, with very specialized certifications where he was able to choose his own adventure. Certifications was a big thing. Places like the Sands Institute, which would end up giving Cybercheck part of its bad press in that fateful wired article.

I want to know when you press this button and you go to this website and when you see this data, how does it all work? Adam got his certifications and landed a job at a digital security company called Bulletproof. By the way, if you ever want a unique journalistic challenge, try to verify whether or not someone once worked at a digital security company. Those folks will not call you back. But he says that he worked for Bulletproof for many years. And while he gained lots of invaluable experience, he couldn't shake the most common entrepreneurial thought there is. I thought to myself there has to be a better way to do this. Can you put in layman's terms what Cybercheck was trying to do in development that hadn't been done before?

Like what was the sort of core idea of Cybercheck? That you don't have to rely on hardware. to tell the story and get the data that we're looking for. Law enforcement puts a tracker on a vehicle. That's something extremely tangible. They can touch it, they can feel it, they can understand it because they are tracking everything that vehicle does. On a wiretap, they physically have a result from the telephone carrier

that comes back and says, here's what they are doing. You pick up your headphones and you listen to the live calls. I wanted to be able to do that except in the open source data. All of the information is already out there, Mosher explains. Every device with an internet connection is pinging, communicating, bleeding from our phones at all hours. And somewhere on the internet are the traces that law enforcement is looking for. If I throw out a cleanings that I used in the morning on the curbside, law enforcement can go get that clinics and see if my DNA is on.

on it. When you've checked a terms of service agreement and user license policy that says, man, I'm giving TikTok all my data and it can do whatever it wants with it, you have given up your clinics on the internet. That's what we bank on. Open source data refers to all the things on the internet that you can find and view legally. And this isn't a brand new idea in law enforcement. Investigations use open source routinely. But what was new, Adam says, was that he wanted to train AI to search and locate information and then evaluate it. This was the whole pioneering premise, his machine. And crucially, in doing this, I did not want to be able to create a technology where we had to bring the data back.

Adam wanted to share the conclusions of the AI. But if anyone asked, to see the report's bibliography, where this information had come from. He'd simply say, The Internet was our source of information. It was a big idea, a bold one. In fact, a totally brand new one. So it wasn't going to be easy to build, but Mosier was unafraid. From my upbringing of movies, you know, I believe it can be done.

Then we tried to make a go of it. Next step, funding. And where better to get Canadian? than the Canadian government and its provinces, who funded CyberTech with more than a million dollars in grants and other cash injections. Organizations like New Brunswick Office of the Controller, National Research Council of Canada, Public Works and Government Services Canada, Canada National Research Council, and Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, which meant CyberTech could do some hiring.

We had a team, mainly students, from the university here. Why did you hire students versus, I don't know, people more established in their careers? Sometimes with the students, when you can get one or two really good ones, it's worth their weight in gold. Did you need to hire people with a specific specialization, or were they just like general technology students? General technology students. Right. Yep. we did have one that was specializing in biology. It's nice to have a different viewpoint when you're

talking about behaviors online and things like that. So it was a mix. Mojer and his Atlantic Canadian young adults of varying technological and scientific experience got building. And when you're building something that is fundamentally based on machine learning, the building all hinges on how you train the machine. I'll tell you how we did it. We would look at news articles. We would look up the homicide to see if there was a court transcript that gave details on, you know, who, the where, the what's. We used a lot of information around high-profile killings because those are great school shootings. Another great resource to ingest data to see if it can tell a story. So the general idea was, if there's a murder and someone was

arrested and convicted, then we're going to try to build a machine that can look at this place and prove that this guy did it just using open source data. Can we put him at that scene based purely on digital profile information? Can our technology prove that? Mojure claims that on the test cases it was running, the machine was starting to get a passing grade, pointing to the same suspects from the guilty verdicts in the newspaper reports. The problem was it only did that part of of the time. Sometimes we could, sometimes we could not. And it still holds true to this day.

Many times we can provide pieces of information to law enforcement. There are times where our technology cannot. In early 2020, just as COVID hit, Moser says Cybercheck started reaching out to its first potential clients. And then, as the lockdowns lifted, Cybercheck roared to life. Like we would be doing thousands of cases through the system. and seeing the results and things like that, I was high that the technology would return results.

Moser looked down at the notebook scrawlings on the table between us, and his face seemed to change. What I was not counting on was what came after. So my confidence was high, but it was the other things that I wasn't prepared for and the company wasn't prepared for. As soon as you label it for law enforcement, you've got to have some thick skin because people are coming for you.

You've been listening to The Expert Witness from CBC's Uncover. The series is produced by RAW for CBC. The show was written and hosted by me, Sam Mullins. Our producer is David Waters. The series was developed and reported by David Waters and Jessica Hatcher. Our editor is Veronica Simmons. Coordinating producer is Emily Connell. Mix by Garrett Tiedeman.

At RAW, Deborah Duggen is the head of podcasts. The production executive is Letitia Kizza-Souza. Special thanks to Emma Wood and Olivia Bhutan. Additional audio from 19 News, 3 News, News 5 Cleveland, CBC News, WKYC, WSOCTV, and WBRZ. At CBC, the executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and RF Naurani is the director of CBC Podcasts. Tune in next week for an all-new episode of The Expert Witness. Or you can listen ahead to the full series now by subscribing to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts

or by subscribing to the CBC True Crime channel on YouTube. Links in the description. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.