Slashdot Mirror
Edward Snowden's New Research Aims To Keep Smartphones From Betraying Their Owners (theintercept.com)
Smartphones become indispensable tools for journalists, human right workers, and activists in war-torn regions. But at the same time, as Intercept points out, they become especially potent tracking devices that can put users in mortal danger by leaking their location. To address the problem, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and hardware hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang have been developing a way for potentially imperiled smartphone users to monitor whether their devices are making any potentially compromising radio transmissions. "We have to ensure that journalists can investigate and find the truth, even in areas where governments prefer they don't," Snowden told Intercept. "It's basically to make the phone work for you, how you want it, when you want it, but only when." Snowden and Huang presented their findings in a talk at MIT Media Lab's Forbidden Research event Thursday, and published a detailed paper. From the Intercept article: Snowden and Huang have been researching if it's possible to use a smartphone in such an offline manner without leaking its location, starting with the assumption that "a phone can and will be compromised." [...] The research is necessary in part because most common way to try and silence a phone's radio -- turning on airplane mode -- can't be relied on to squelch your phone's radio traffic. Fortunately, a smartphone can be made to lie about the state of its radios. The article adds: According to their post, the goal is to "provide field-ready tools that enable a reporter to observe and investigate the status of the phone's radios directly and independently of the phone's native hardware." In other words, they want to build an entirely separate tiny computer that users can attach to a smartphone to alert them if it's being dishonest about its radio emissions. Snowden and Haung are calling this device an "introspection engine" because it will inspect the inner-workings of the phone. The device will be contained inside a battery case, looking similar to a smartphone with an extra bulky battery, except with its own screen to update the user on the status of the radios. Plans are for the device to also be able to sound an audible alarm and possibly to also come equipped with a "kill switch" that can shut off power to the phone if any radio signals are detected.Wired has a detailed report on this, too.
Prolific, savior of humanity.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The difficulty seems to be that they're trying to hack privacy onto phones that are not really designed for it.
The vast majority of phones seem to be designed around the idea of apps, particularly social apps.
The hardware on these phones are typically black boxes and the software is designed in the interests of the vendors.
It's not difficult to make your computer private. You can build it from component pieces and put an open source OS on it.
In contrast, I've found a little information on building your own phone.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/bl...
That's the best I could find and it's a long way from being a practical phone.
For starters I can't find any CDMA circuit boards so you can't use it with Verizon. As bad as they are they have the best network in the US.
But ultimately being able to really own our phones is the only way to insure privacy on them.
The NSA is one of the world's leading secret agencies, what should you expect?
Probably lots of NSA employees are experts on security. Being experts is their job. Even if you aren't one if you start at NSA, their training will make you an expert, at least if compared to what the public knows about these things.
This would be an ideal solution, however...
In an NSA/corporation controlled world, we must be mindful of what smartphone manufacturers define as "hardware switch". By definition, such a switch would use physical/mechanical hardware to completely deactivate the hardware itself (in this case, the radio). However, I can tell you now that if smartphone manufacturers have any say, any hardware switch" would merely trigger a software action that would put the phone into Airplane mode. Thus, we end up needing Snowden's device to make sure the radio is truly deactivated.
I thought he was just a pretty average govt. tech employee that decided to leak a bunch of documents. Now he seems to be treated like a leading expert on security? Is there something I missed here? Is his research something beyond a Google search?
How does one become an expert on security? Spend lots of time reading, thinking and studying. What else do you think Snowden has been doing for the last three years? He may not have been a security expert before collecting and leaking the documents, but he's clearly a pretty smart guy, and very motivated to care about security and privacy issues. He's been trying to use the pulpit his fame has given him to highlight those issues, and he's also clearly been doing his homework.
Aside from all of that, though, what's the point in questioning his expertise? If what he's saying doesn't make sense, say so. Your post isn't "insightful", it's just a variation of the argument from authority fallacy... in this case trying to discredit his ideas by citing his lack of authority, rather than addressing the ideas themselves.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.