Edward Snowden wants you to know at all times whether the NSA is keeping tabs on your iPhone.
Along with his co-author and fellow hacker Andrew Huang, Snowden presented his research on phone “hardware introspection” at MIT, which aims to give users the ability to see whether their phone is sending out secret signals to an intelligence agency.
“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,” the pair wrote in their technical paper.
Snowden, an ex-NSA contractor currently living in exile in Moscow, and Huang, a prominent hacker who has reverse-engineered the Xbox and other hardware, believe their solution can protect journalists and activists from being betrayed by their smartphones.
In their paper, they mention Marie Colvin, a journalist who was killed by Syrian forces in 2012. A 2016 lawsuit against the Syrian government alleges that her cell phone signals were intercepted and she was deliberately targeted.
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