Snowden spoke with BBC1’s Panorama programme about more weighty matters this week, where he claimed the British Government’s intelligence agency has access to tools that can listen in on phones and smart devices, and further tools to stop people from realising their phone had been accessed or tampered with.
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The Smurf army arrives by TXT messages, Snowden says, without users ever being aware of the message or its payload arriving or altering their phones in any way.
According to the British Broadcast programme, the United Kingdom government had allowed to spy.
GCHQ has offered no comment to Snowden’s allegations, which can be accessed in full here for readers in the United Kingdom or using VPNs to circumvent BBC geo-blocking.
Whilst it was never stated if GCHQ or NSA were aiming to mass-monitor private communications but one thing has been said, both agencies have put a whole lot of research into technology capable of hacking smartphones. Snowden said, “You paid for it [your phone], but whoever controls the software owns the phone”.
GCHQ has dubbed these capabilities the “Smurf Suite”, named after the mushroom-shaped-house dwelling cartoon characters.
Speaking to Peter Taylor on tonight’s Panorama, the whistleblower said: ‘If I was a traitor, who did I betray?
At least 167,000 Americans think Snowden did do the right thing, though, as voiced by the petition they signed in July calling for Snowden to be pardoned, a request that was reinforced in a letter to editors at The New York Times last week. He and his lawyers are still waiting for the USA government to “call us back”, he said.
Snowden also referred to a tool titled Paranoid Smurf, which essentially allows a device to protect itself from being detected as a spy tool if a user begins to suspect that something’s wrong with it. This would serve to prevent any technicians from being able to uncover the tracking tools that had been implemented in the device.
“Nosy Smurf is the “hot mic” tool”.
“They [the NSA] provide technology, they provide tasking and direction as to what they [GCHQ] should go after”, he explained.
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“All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee”. All standard operating stuff, nothing exotic.
