Former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked thousands of pages of previously classified NSA intelligence documents has dropped another bombshell, sort of. It was actually his lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who made the revelation in an interview with the Russian media agency RIA Novosti. Nevertheless, Anatoly has just exposed why Snowden never use Apple iPhone, no matter how sexy the latest iPhone 6 Plus is.

The whistleblower’s lawyer claims iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner, having to press a button and gather information about him, hence Snowden never believes in using an iPhone. It is not clear if the “special software” being referred to in the interview is made up of standard diagnostic tools, or if the whistleblower thinks the U.S. intelligence agencies have ways to compromise Apple iOS.

 

After all, Apple was among the first companies accused of participating in the PRISM data mining project of the NSA. Apparently based on leaked PowerPoint slides, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple were participating in the project that “extract[s] audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

Apple reportedly joined PRISM in 2012, some five years after Microsoft became the first corporate entity to take part in the program. Of course, Apple immediately denied the accusation, saying at the time that they “have never heard of PRISM” and that they “do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers.” NSA had created spyware targeted at the popular iPhone, the leaks subsequently showed.

Apple also claimed that the company has never been involved with the NSA in the creation of “backdoor software” for any of the company’s products. Now, in layman term what this mean is iPhone iOS somehow is preloaded with software similar to TeamViewer for remote access, if what Snowden claims is true. But unlike TeamViewer where the owner needs to launch the software before providing “ID and Password”, iPhone special software doesn’t need to.

 

Obviously, this special software will always run in the background, waiting for its master daemon from NSA to call. And when the U.S. intelligence agency uses this master key to wake up your iPhone special software, it’s ready to perform whatever tasks remotely on your iPhone, without even you realise it. Hence, you don’t have to press any button, let alone enter password to allow the remote party gains access to all your data in your iPhone.

What type of phone that Edward Snowden uses? It’s a simple phone, says his lawyer Anatoly Kucherena. Could it be the once famous brick-sized Nokia or highly popular Motorola MicroTAC analog phones? It’s unknown but certainly it has to be dumb phones as smartphones are too dangerous to high profile whistleblower such as Snowden.

 

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January 26th, 2015 by financetwitter

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