The duo presented the proposed iPhone-case design via video stream at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab on Thursday, The Guardian, 9to5Mac and Engadget reported.
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Snowden and the device’s co-designer Andrew Huang refer to it and its systems as an “introspection engine”, one that has the ability to stop journalists and anyone else who’d prefer to do what they do in secret from being “betrayed by their tools”.
Ideally, the device would notify iPhone owners if their iPhone is transmitting signals covertly.
He added “You can think your phone’s radios are off, and not telling your location to anyone, but actually still be at risk”.
In an interview with Wired, Snowden stressed that the new invention is not just to protect journalists in the field, but also to shed a public light on governments’ use of techniques to spy on people via their smartphones.
The introspection device, now just a prototype and not available for sale, is user-inspectable and relies on open-source software, according to Huang’s description.
While the “airplane mode” is most phones is created to turn off location and communication services, Huang and Snowden argued that the setting is merely a “soft switch” that does not necessarily relate to the state of the phone’s hardware.
The device, which is still in the design stage, is also meant to be a much more trustworthy method of determining whether the phone’s radios are off rather than the “airplane mode”, which can be hacked and made to look as if it is not transmitting.
While most citizens won’t require the level of security that this phone case provides, journalists and political dissidents will undoubtedly find it useful.
Status information about these components will be read from test points on a phone’s circuit board that can be reached via a connector that plugs in through the device’s sim card slot.
“We want to give a you-bet-your-life assurance that the phone actually has its radios off when it says it does”, Huang says.
The project is an extension of Snowden’s work to inform the public about the surveillance capabilities available to governments around the world. The hope is that a prototype can be built within the next year.
For those who do not know Edward Snowden’s partner on this mission, Andrew Huang is an M.I.T. alum who studied electrical engineering at the prestigious school.
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To keep their process transparent, they have made a decision to keep the device’s hardware design and code completely open-source. But in the paper, Snowden and Huang say the same basic principles should apply to any other phone, it’s just that one device needed to be selected for demonstration and deployment purposes, so they chose one of the most popular phones now used by journalists.
