Edward Snowden Presents iPhone Attachment to Detect Radio Transmissions

Josh Luckenbaugh | July 21, 2016
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On Thursday at the MIT Media Lab, famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, along with hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, introduced the idea of a case-like attachment for smartphones that can detect the radio transmissions within a device. 

According to Snowden and Huang, the project is designed to ensure that journalists are not being tracked by malicious forces when working under uncertain circumstances:

 [...] [G]overnments and powerful political institutions are gaining access to comprehensive records of phone emissions unwittingly broadcast by device owners. This leaves journalists, activists, and rights workers in a position of vulnerability. This work aims to give journalists the tools to know when their smart phones are tracking or disclosing their location when the devices are supposed to be in airplane mode. We propose to accomplish this via direct introspection of signals controlling the phone’s radio hardware. The introspection engine will be an open source, user-inspectable and field-verifiable module attached to an existing smart phone that makes no assumptions about the trustability of the phone’s operating system.
The pair cited the death of American war correspondent Marie Colvin in 2012, who was killed while covering the war in Syria. A civil lawsuit filed earlier this month claimed that Colvin's death was the result of a targeted attack on journalists by the Syrian military, which was able to find Colvin by tracking electronic signals, including cellphone communications. 
 
 
Snowden has a complicated history with government surveillance, to say the least. The former CIA and Booz Allen Hamilton controversially released thousands of NSA documents to journalists in 2013 in an effort to unmask the extent of the government's surveillance measures. 
 
The whistleblower, now living in exile, has also previously shown a mistrust for the radio signals in cell phones. During a 2013 meeting with lawyers in Hong Kong, Snowden asked his guests to put their devices in a refrigerator to prevent any unwanted eavesdropping. This latest project's goal is to make sure journalists do not have to go to such extreme measures to protect themselves.
 
"We have to ensure that journalists can investigate and find the truth, even in areas where governments prefer they don’t," Snowden told The Intercept. "It’s basically to make the phone work for you, how you want it, when you want it, but only when."
 
While Snowden and Huang's engine does not yet have a working prototype, the attachment (which they said would "look and behave like a typical battery case") will surely draw plenty of attention if it ever becomes a reality. 
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