Why Edward Snowden created a device to tell if your iPhone's radios are spying
The device, created by Edward Snowden and hardware hacker Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang, is particularly aimed at journalists working overseas.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden is seen on a screen as he delivers a speech during the Roskilde Festival in Roskilde, Denmark in June. On Thursday, Mr. Snowden and hardware hacker Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang unveiled a design for a device that lets users tell when their iPhone's antennas are transmitting, which could indicate that someone, such as a foreign government, is listening in.
Mathias Loevgreen Bojesen/Scanpix Denmark/Reuters/File
Three years after he exposed a series of massive government surveillance programs, Edward Snowden is using his expertise to help journalists concerned about government surveillance.
Teaming up with Andrew 鈥淏unnie鈥� Huang, a hacker known for modifying consumer products such as an Xbox, he鈥檚 working on a device that alerts iPhone users to when their phones' internal radio antennas are transmitting.
By wiring into the iPhone鈥檚 circuitry through its SIM card slot, which stores a user's personal data, the device could alert users, particularly journalists, about when someone, such as a foreign government, is listening in.
鈥�,鈥� Mr. Snowden told a crowd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday, speaking via video stream, Wired reports. 鈥淭his makes them a target, and increasingly tools of their trade are being used against them.鈥�
The device, which is still in the design stage, is also of determining whether the phone鈥檚 radios are off rather than the 鈥渁irplane mode,鈥� which can be hacked and made to look as if it is not transmitting.
Even turning an iPhone off entirely isn鈥檛 foolproof, because some malicious software can make the phone appear to be off when it is actually transmitting data, Snowden .听
For journalists, especially those working in foreign countries, the phones鈥� ubiquity 鈥� as portable cameras, recording devices, and notepads 鈥� make them particularly vulnerable to sophisticated spying technology, Snowden and Mr. Huang say.
In a report last year, the Pew Research Center of the US members of the nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors organization said they suspected the American government has collected聽data about their phone calls, emails, and online communications.
鈥淚 figure everything I do is tracked, watched, stored and shared and if ever the government, or hackers, wanted to know or expose everything I do, they could and would,鈥� one journalist told Pew. 鈥淪cary, but I鈥檓 resigned to it.鈥�
For some journalists, those concerns had affected how they communicated with their sources, Pew found.
The anti-spying device is particularly geared toward reporters working overseas, Huang told Wired, with journalists covering conflicts in Syria and Iraq, for example, .听
鈥淥ur approach is:聽state-level adversaries are powerful, assume the phone is聽compromised,鈥� he told Wired. 鈥淟et鈥檚 look at hardware-related signals that are extremely difficult to fake. We want聽to give a you-bet-your-life assurance聽that the聽phone actually聽has its radios聽off when it says it does.鈥�
They point to the case of Marie Colvin, an American war correspondent who died four years ago in shelling by government forces in the Syrian city of Homs. Ms. Colvin鈥檚 against the Syrian government, alleging that they tracked her movements by monitoring her electronic communications.
Snowden's iPhone device, known as an 鈥渋ntrospection engine,鈥� aims to prevent surveillance by alerting a user through either messages or an audible alarm to when the radios were transmitting anything when they were intended to be off.
The device would work by using wires run through the SIM card slot to examine electrical signals from the phone鈥檚 two antennas to see if they were transmitting, Wired reports. The SIM card would be moved to another location to make that possible.
On Thursday, Snowden and Huang explaining the device. Now, they hope to create a prototype and eventually a supply chain in China that could provide the modified iPhones to newsrooms and individual journalists.