The cellphone battery case, or “introspection engine” is designed for the iPhone 6 to monitor the electrical signal sent to its internal antennas. A 2016 lawsuit against the Syrian government alleges that her cell phone signals were intercepted and she was deliberately targeted.
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According to Snowden, the radio signals emitted by the mobile device and used by phone companies can be manipulated and used by third parties.
Snowden and Andrew Huang, a hardware hacker, presented the design before an audience at the MIT Med Lab in Boston, Massachusetts on Thursday, according to Wired magazine.
If in case the device detects any radio information being transmitted it will warn the user with an audible alarm.
“Trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive”, they wrote on their paper.
The add-on hardware will give the iPhone some added juice, while also giving a digital readout of whether the a user’s device is “dark” – not transmitting when it’s not supposed to – or whether a Global Positioning System, cellular, Bluetooth, or WiFi signal has betrayed them.
“You can think your phone’s radios are off, and not telling your location to anyone, but actually still be at risk”, Huang told Wired.
Therefore, it should hardly be surprising that Snowden, who once asked reporters to place their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that could be used to silently activate their devices’ microphones or cameras in a Hong Kong hotel, is returning to the smartphone radio surveillance problem by offering a solution that is more manageable than a hotel mini-bar.
Snowden, who performed the work in his capacity as a director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, adds that their goal isn’t merely protection for journalists. Snowden appeared via video feed, McClatchy reports.
This one’s different, trust us. The two hope to be able to eventually produce a prototype, and eventually work with manufacturers in China to build modified devices to sell or distribute to reporters.
The device is still in the early design stages, but the duo have detailed the plan and now working on a prototype for potential production.
Now, Edward Snowden has announced that he will be partnering with Andrew Huang to develop an iPhone that protects journalists from government intrusion.
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The aim of that add-on, Huang and Snowden say, is to offer a constant check on whether your phone’s radios are transmitting. One good example of this, as Edward Snowden noted in his speech, was an attack in Syria that left an American journalist, Marie Colvin, dead while she was reporting for a London media group.
