Former National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden is working with an MIT Media Lab researcher to build a device to protect journalists’ smartphones from government spies. 
 
 Former National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden is working with an MIT Media Lab researcher to build a device to protect journalists’ smartphones from government spies. 
 
 “Increasingly the tools of their trade are being used against them,” said Snowden during a Thursday conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the device that he’s designing with Media Lab research affiliate Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, will detect whether a phone is sending or receiving unauthorized radio signals. 
 
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 Snowden, who addressed the symposium via teleconference, has lived in hiding somewhere in Russia since 2013. He fled the United States after revealing a variety of secret surveillance programs that collected information on millions of Americans. 
 
 The simplest way to avoid smartphone snooping is to leave the device at home, or switch it off. But many journalists use their phones to shoot video and still images, record interviews with sources or take notes. So to avoid broadcasting their locations, they can set the phone to “airplane mode,” which is supposed to switch off its cellular, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi radios. 
 
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 But Snowden said it’s possible that spy agencies could infect phones with malware that would leave the radios in operation even when a phone appeared to be in airplane mode. In addition, phone user can deliberately or accidentally switch on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth even in airplane mode. 
 
 The proposed device would eliminate these risks. It would be a plastic sleeve designed to slide over an Apple iPhone 6. The electronics in the device would monitor the phone’s antennas to detect any incoming or outgoing signals from the cellular, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, or NFC radio chips. It would trigger an alarm to warn the user of possible snooping. Because the device is a separate piece of hardware, it would be secure against any effort to hack the phone’s operating system. 
 
 “The technical goal here is to make sure that the radios are really off,” said Huang. “Think of the thing we’re doing as like a designated driver for the phone.” 
 
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 Snowden said that the creation of such a device would make spying less likely because it would increase the risk that an agency would be caught at it. “The NSA, for example, is very nervous about being caught red-handed,” he said. “They don’t want to risk the political impact of being seen targeting groups, like journalists, like American lawyers.... If we can create a track record of unlawful or unethical activity, we can begin creating a framework to overturn a culture of impunity.” 
 
 Snowden’s firsthand experience as a whistleblower may have inspired the project. He worked closely with several news organizations, including the Washington Post and the UK’s Guardian newspaper, to publicize his allegations. One Guardian reporter working on the Snowden story was detained at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2013, and his phone, laptop, and camera were confiscated. 
 
 For now, Snowden’s proposed spy detector exists only on paper. Huang couldn’t say when it would become available, or how much it would cost. ||||| In early 2012 , Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria, while reporting for London’s Sunday Times. She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.” Despite the covert approach, Syrian forces still managed to get to Colvin; under orders to “kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil,” they bombed the makeshift media center she was working in, killing her and one other journalist and injuring two others. 
 
 Syrian forces may have found Colvin by tracing her phone, according to a lawsuit filed by Colvin’s family this month. Syrian military intelligence used “signal interception devices to monitor satellite dish and cellphone communications and trace journalists’ locations,” the suit says. 
 
 In dangerous environments like war-torn Syria, smartphones become indispensable tools for journalists, human rights workers, and activists. But at the same time, they become especially potent tracking devices that can put users in mortal danger by leaking their location. 
 
 National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has been working with prominent hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang to solve this problem. The pair are developing a way for potentially imperiled smartphone users to monitor whether their devices are making any potentially compromising radio transmissions. They argue that a smartphone’s user interface can’t be relied on to tell you the truth about that state of its radios. Their initial prototyping work uses an iPhone 6. 
 
 “We have to ensure that journalists can investigate and find the truth, even in areas where governments prefer they don’t,” Snowden told me in a video interview. “It’s basically to make the phone work for you, how you want it, when you want it, but only when.” 
 
 Huang made a name for himself by using a technique known as reverse engineering to hack into Microsoft’s Xbox and other hardware devices locked down using various forms of encryption, and Snowden said he’s been an invaluable research partner. 
 
 “When I worked at the NSA, I worked with some incredibly talented people,” Snowden said, “but I’ve never worked with anybody who had such an incredible outpouring of expertise than I have with Bunnie.” 
 
 Snowden and Huang presented their findings in a talk at MIT Media Lab’s Forbidden Research event today and published a detailed paper. 
 
 Location Privacy and Smartphones 
 
 Smartphones come with a variety of different types of radio transmitters and receivers: cellular modems (for phone calls, SMS messages, and mobile data), wifi, bluetooth, and others. But using any of these radios could leak your physical location to an adversary who is watching the airwaves. 
 
 Journalists and activists use their phones to communicate with sources and colleagues, post updates and livestream to social media, and accomplish countless other networked tasks. If they need to keep their location secret, for example in a war zone, they need to turn off all of the radios within their phones. Even so, phones can still be vital tools even when offline; internet access is not needed to take photographs, record video or audio, take notes, use certain maps, or manage schedules. 
 
 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.” After all, journalists and activists are often under-resourced and face off against well-funded intelligence services. They also, necessarily, use their phones to talk to, and open documents from, a wide variety of sources, leaving them especially vulnerable to targeted phishing, or “spearphishing,” attacks, where an attacker baits a victim into opening an enticing document that actually contains an exploit. 
 
 The research is necessary in part because the most common way to try to silence a phone’s radio — turning on airplane mode — can’t be relied on to squelch your phone’s radio traffic. “Malware packages, peddled by hackers at a price accessible by private individuals, can activate radios without any indication from the user interface,” Snowden and Huang explain in their blog post. “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.” 
 
 Image: Andrew Huang 
 
 Introspection Engine 
 
 Since a smartphone can essentially be made to lie about that state of its radios, the goal of Snowden and Huang’s research, according to their post, 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 be able to sound an audible alarm and possibly also to come equipped with a “kill switch” that can shut off power to the phone if any radio signals are detected. “The core principle is simple,” they wrote in the blog post. “If the reporter expects radios to be off, alert the user when they are turned on.” 
 
 The introspection engine also must fit a number of design goals, including: It should be entirely open source, with open hardware, to make it easy for experts to inspect; it should operate in a separate “security domain” than the phone. Basically, the introspection engine should work even if the phone is hacked and actively lying to you; it should have a simple and intuitive user interface and require no special training to use; it should be usable on a daily basis with minimal impact on workflow. 
 
 Introspection engines don’t exist yet, and the research Snowden and Huang presented today is only the beginning. In order to begin work on a prototype, the pair needed to pick a specific model of smartphone to target. They chose the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, based on their understanding of “the current preferences and tastes of reporters.” However, introspection engines could be designed for any model phone. 
 
 Jacking Into the iPhone 
 
 Huang, an American who currently lives in Singapore, traveled to the metropolis of Shenzhen, China to explore the electronics markets of Hua Qiang, which he described as “ground zero for the trade and practice of iPhone repair.” While there, he bought spare parts and repair manuals that contained detailed blueprints of the target device. 
 
 Photo: Andrew Huang 
 
 Using information gleaned from these manuals, Snowden and Huang discovered that the iPhone’s logic board has several test points designed by the manufacturer that can be exploited to learn the status of various on-board radios. These test points, which are built-in to many consumer devices, are crucial to improving customer experience. When a customer returns a defective device, engineers rely on them to determine the cause of the defect. 
 
 Snowden and Huang discovered 12 test points that could be used to monitor the status of the cellular radios, the GPS radio, and the wifi and bluetooth radios. While they didn’t find a test point to monitor the Near Field Communication chip, the part that makes Apple Pay possible, they discovered that they could disconnect its antenna, vastly reducing its range. 
 
 They don’t think that modifying an iPhone 6 to install an introspection device could be done by just anyone, but “any technician with modest soldering skills can be trained to perform these operations reliably in about 1-2 days of practice on scrap motherboards.” 
 
 Supply Chain 
 
 The next step is to develop a working prototype, which Snowden and Bunnie hope to complete over the next year. Their blog post says that the project is currently operating on a “shoestring budget” and “donated time.” 
 
 If it proves successful, they may seek funding through the Freedom of the Press Foundation to develop and maintain a supply chain. The nonprofit, of which both Snowden and I are board members, could then distribute iPhones that have been modified to include introspection devices to journalists who work in dangerous environments to use in the field. ||||| When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the NSA’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar. 
 
 On Thursday at the MIT Media Lab, Snowden and well-known hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang plan to present designs for a case-like device that wires into your iPhone’s guts to monitor the electrical signals sent to its internal antennas. The aim of that add-on, Huang and Snowden say, is to offer a constant check on whether your phone’s radios are transmitting. They say it’s an infinitely more trustworthy method of knowing your phone’s radios are off than “airplane mode,” which people have shown can be hacked and spoofed. Snowden and Huang are hoping to offer strong privacy guarantees to smartphone owners who need to shield their phones from government-funded adversaries with advanced hacking and surveillance capabilities—particularly reporters trying to carry their devices into hostile foreign countries without constantly revealing their locations. 
 
 “One good journalist in the right place at the right time can change history,” Snowden told the MIT Media Lab crowd via video stream. “This makes them a target, and increasingly tools of their trade are being used against them.”1 
 
 “They’re overseas, in Syria or Iraq, and those [governments] have exploits that cause their phones to do things they don’t expect them to do,” Huang elaborated to WIRED in an interview ahead of the MIT presentation. “You can think your phone’s radios are off, and not telling your location to anyone, but actually still be at risk.” 
 
 Huang’s and Snowden’s solution to that radio-snitching problem is to build a modification for the iPhone 6 that they describe as an “introspection engine.” Their add-on would appear to be little more than an external battery case with a small mono-color screen. But it would function as a kind of miniature, form-fitting oscilloscope: Tiny probe wires from that external device would snake into the iPhone’s innards through its SIM-card slot to attach to test points on the phone’s circuit board. (The SIM card itself would be moved to the case to offer that entry point.) Those wires would read the electrical signals to the two antennas in the phone that are used by its radios, including GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular modem. And by identifying the signals that transmit those different forms of radio information, the modified phone would warn you with alert messages or an audible alarm if its radios transmit anything when they’re meant to be off. Huang says it could possibly even flip a “kill switch” to turn off the phone automatically. 
 
 “Our approach is: state-level adversaries are powerful, assume the phone is compromised,” Huang says. “Let’s look at hardware-related signals that are extremely difficult to fake. We want to give a you-bet-your-life assurance that the phone actually has its radios off when it says it does.”1 
 
 You might think you can achieve the same effect by simply turning your iPhone off with its power button, or placing it in a Faraday bag designed to block all radio signals. But Faraday bags can still leak radio information, Huang says, and clever malware can make an iPhone appear to be switched off when it’s not, as Snowden warned in an NBC interview in 2014. Regardless, Huang says their intention was to allow reporters to reliably disable a phone’s radio signals while still using the device’s other functions, like taking notes and photographs or recording audio and video. 
 
 Wireless devices are kind of like kryptonite to me. Edward Snowden 
 
 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 just protection for journalists. It’s also detection of otherwise stealthy attacks on phones, the better to expose governments’ use of hidden smartphone surveillance techniques. “You need to be able to increase the costs of getting caught,” Snowden said in a video call with WIRED following the presentation. “All we have to do is get one or two or three big cases where we catch someone red-handed, and suddenly the targeting policies at these intelligence agencies will start to change.”2 
 
 The problem, for Snowden, is personal. He tells WIRED he hasn’t carried a smartphone since he first began leaking NSA documents, for fear that its cellular signals could be used to locate him. (He notes that he still hasn’t “seen any indication” that the U.S. government has been able to determine his exact location in Russia.) “Since 2013, I haven’t been able to have a smartphone like normal people,” he says. “Wireless devices are kind of like kryptonite to me.” 
 
 Huang and Snowden’s iPhone modification, for now, is little more than a design. The pair has tested their method of picking up the electrical signals sent to an iPhone 6’s antennae to verify that they can spot its different radio messages. But they have yet to even build a prototype, not to mention a product. But on Thursday they released a detailed paper explaining their technique. They say they hope to develop a prototype over the next year and eventually create a supply chain in China of modified iPhones to offer journalists and newsrooms. To head off any potential mistrust of their Chinese manufacturers, Huang says the device’s code and hardware design will be fully open-source. 
 
 Huang, who lives in Singapore but travels monthly to meet with hardware manufacturers in Shenzhen, says that the skills to create and install their hardware add-on are commonplace in mainland China’s thriving iPhone repair and modification markets. “This is definitely something where, if you’re the New York Times and you want to have a pool of four or five of these iPhones and you have a few hundred extra dollars to spent on them, we could do that.” says Huang. “The average [DIY enthusiast] in America would think this is pretty fucking crazy. The average guy who does iPhone modifications in China would see this and think it’s not a problem.” 
 
 The two collaborators have never met face-to-face. Snowden says he first met Huang after recommending him to television producers at Vice, who were looking for hardware hacking experts. “He’s one of the hardware researchers I respect the most in the world,” Snowden says. In late 2015, they began talking via the encrypted communications app Signal about Snowden’s idea of building an altered phone to protect journalists from advanced attacks that could compromise their location. 
 
 Huang insists that Snowden’s focus for the project from the beginning has been protecting that breed of vulnerable reporters, not from the NSA, but from foreign governments that are increasingly able to buy zero-day vulnerability information necessary to compromise even hard-to-hack targets like the iPhone. As a case study, they point in their paper to the story of Marie Colvin, the recently murdered American war correspondent whose family is suing Syria’s government; Colvin’s family claims she was tracked based on her electronic communications and killed in a targeted bombing by the country’s brutal Assad regime for reporting on civilian casualties. 
 
 Huang says he’s tried to develop the most no-frills protection possible that still meets Snowden’s rightfully paranoid standards. “If it wasn’t for the fact that Snowden is involved, I think this would seem pretty mundane,” Huang says almost bashfully. “My solution is simple. But it helps an important group of people.” 
 
 Here’s Snowden and Huang’s full paper on their iPhone “introspection engine”: 
 
 1Updated 10am 7/21/2016 to add comments from Snowden and Huang’s presentation. 
 
 2Updated 11:20am 7/21/2016 to add comments from an interview with Snowden. ||||| • US and UK spy agencies piggyback on commercial data • Details can include age, location and sexual orientation • Documents also reveal targeted tools against individual phones 
 
 The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents. 
 
 The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger. 
 
 Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect. 
 
 Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes. 
 
 Scooping up information the apps are sending about their users allows the agencies to collect large quantities of mobile phone data from their existing mass surveillance tools – such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks – rather than solely from hacking into individual mobile handsets. 
 
 Exploiting phone information and location is a high-priority effort for the intelligence agencies, as terrorists and other intelligence targets make substantial use of phones in planning and carrying out their activities, for example by using phones as triggering devices in conflict zones. The NSA has cumulatively spent more than $1bn in its phone targeting efforts. 
 
 The disclosures also reveal how much the shift towards smartphone browsing could benefit spy agencies' collection efforts. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest A May 2010 NSA slide on the agency's 'perfect scenario' for obtaining data from mobile apps. Photograph: Guardian 
 
 One slide from a May 2010 NSA presentation on getting data from smartphones – breathlessly titled "Golden Nugget!" – sets out the agency's "perfect scenario": "Target uploading photo to a social media site taken with a mobile device. What can we get?" 
 
 The question is answered in the notes to the slide: from that event alone, the agency said it could obtain a "possible image", email selector, phone, buddy lists, and "a host of other social working data as well as location". 
 
 In practice, most major social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, strip photos of identifying location metadata (known as EXIF data) before publication. However, depending on when this is done during upload, such data may still, briefly, be available for collection by the agencies as it travels across the networks. 
 
 Depending on what profile information a user had supplied, the documents suggested, the agency would be able to collect almost every key detail of a user's life: including home country, current location (through geolocation), age, gender, zip code, marital status – options included "single", "married", "divorced", "swinger" and more – income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, and number of children. 
 
 The agencies also made use of their mobile interception capabilities to collect location information in bulk, from Google and other mapping apps. One basic effort by GCHQ and the NSA was to build a database geolocating every mobile phone mast in the world – meaning that just by taking tower ID from a handset, location information could be gleaned. 
 
 A more sophisticated effort, though, relied on intercepting Google Maps queries made on smartphones, and using them to collect large volumes of location information. 
 
 So successful was this effort that one 2008 document noted that "[i]t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system." 
 
 The information generated by each app is chosen by its developers, or by the company that delivers an app's adverts. The documents do not detail whether the agencies actually collect the potentially sensitive details some apps are capable of storing or transmitting, but any such information would likely qualify as content, rather than metadata. 
 
 Data collected from smartphone apps is subject to the same laws and minimisation procedures as all other NSA activity – procedures that the US president, Barack Obama, suggested may be subject to reform in a speech 10 days ago. But the president focused largely on the NSA's collection of the metadata from US phone calls and made no mention in his address of the large amounts of data the agency collects from smartphone apps. 
 
 The latest disclosures could also add to mounting public concern about how the technology sector collects and uses information, especially for those outside the US, who enjoy fewer privacy protections than Americans. A January poll for the Washington Post showed 69% of US adults were already concerned about how tech companies such as Google used and stored their information. 
 
 The documents do not make it clear how much of the information that can be taken from apps is routinely collected, stored or searched, nor how many users may be affected. The NSA says it does not target Americans and its capabilities are deployed only against "valid foreign intelligence targets". 
 
 The documents do set out in great detail exactly how much information can be collected from widely popular apps. One document held on GCHQ's internal Wikipedia-style guide for staff details what can be collected from different apps. Though it uses Android apps for most of its examples, it suggests much of the same data could be taken from equivalent apps on iPhone or other platforms. 
 
 The GCHQ documents set out examples of what information can be extracted from different ad platforms, using perhaps the most popular mobile phone game of all time, Angry Birds – which has reportedly been downloaded more than 1.7bn times – as a case study. 
 
 From some app platforms, relatively limited, but identifying, information such as exact handset model, the unique ID of the handset, software version, and similar details are all that are transmitted. 
 
 Other apps choose to transmit much more data, meaning the agency could potentially net far more. One mobile ad platform, Millennial Media, appeared to offer particularly rich information. Millennial Media's website states it has partnered with Rovio on a special edition of Angry Birds; with Farmville maker Zynga; with Call of Duty developer Activision, and many other major franchises. 
 
 Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, said it had no knowledge of any NSA or GCHQ programs looking to extract data from its apps users. 
 
 "Rovio doesn't have any previous knowledge of this matter, and have not been aware of such activity in 3rd party advertising networks," said Saara Bergström, Rovio's VP of marketing and communications. "Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned [NSA and GCHQ]." 
 
 Millennial Media did not respond to a request for comment. 
 
 In December, the Washington Post reported on how the NSA could make use of advertising tracking files generated through normal internet browsing – known as cookies – from Google and others to get information on potential targets. 
 
 However, the richer personal data available to many apps, coupled with real-time geolocation, and the uniquely identifying handset information many apps transmit give the agencies a far richer data source than conventional web-tracking cookies. 
 
 Almost every major website uses cookies to serve targeted advertising and content, as well as streamline the experience for the user, for example by managing logins. One GCHQ document from 2010 notes that cookie data – which generally qualifies as metadata – has become just as important to the spies. In fact, the agencies were sweeping it up in such high volumes that their were struggling to store it. 
 
 "They are gathered in bulk, and are currently our single largest type of events," the document stated. 
 
 The ability to obtain targeted intelligence by hacking individual handsets has been well documented, both through several years of hacker conferences and previous NSA disclosures in Der Spiegel, and both the NSA and GCHQ have extensive tools ready to deploy against iPhone, Android and other phone platforms. 
 
 GCHQ's targeted tools against individual smartphones are named after characters in the TV series The Smurfs. An ability to make the phone's microphone 'hot', to listen in to conversations, is named "Nosey Smurf". High-precision geolocation is called "Tracker Smurf", power management – an ability to stealthily activate an a phone that is apparently turned off – is "Dreamy Smurf", while the spyware's self-hiding capabilities are codenamed "Paranoid Smurf". 
 
 Those capability names are set out in a much broader 2010 presentation that sheds light on spy agencies' aspirations for mobile phone interception, and that less-documented mass-collection abilities. 
 
 The cover sheet of the document sets out the team's aspirations: 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cover slide for a May 2010 GCHQ presentation on mobile phone data interception. Photograph: Guardian 
 
 Another slide details weak spots in where data flows from mobile phone network providers to the wider internet, where the agency attempts to intercept communications. These are locations either within a particular network, or international roaming exchanges (known as GRXs), where data from travellers roaming outside their home country is routed. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest While GCHQ uses Android apps for most of its examples, it suggests much of the same data could be taken from iPhone apps. Photograph: Guardian 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest GCHQ's targeted tools against individual smartphones are named after characters in the TV series The Smurfs. Photograph: Guardian 
 
 These are particularly useful to the agency as data is often only weakly encrypted on such networks, and includes extra information such as handset ID or mobile number – much stronger target identifiers than usual IP addresses or similar information left behind when PCs and laptops browse the internet. 
 
 The NSA said its phone interception techniques are only used against valid targets, and are subject to stringent legal safeguards. 
 
 "The communications of people who are not valid foreign intelligence targets are not of interest to the National Security Agency," said a spokeswoman in a statement. 
 
 "Any implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is focused on the smartphone or social media communications of everyday Americans is not true. Moreover, NSA does not profile everyday Americans as it carries out its foreign intelligence mission. We collect only those communications that we are authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes – regardless of the technical means used by the targets. 
 
 "Because some data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA's lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of data. In addition, NSA actively works to remove extraneous data, to include that of innocent foreign citizens, as early as possible in the process. 
 
 "Continuous and selective publication of specific techniques and tools lawfully used by NSA to pursue legitimate foreign intelligence targets is detrimental to the security of the United States and our allies – and places at risk those we are sworn to protect." 
 
 The NSA declined to respond to a series of queries on how routinely capabilities against apps were deployed, or on the specific minimisation procedures used to prevent US citizens' information being stored through such measures. 
 
 GCHQ declined to comment on any of its specific programs, but stressed all of its activities were proportional and complied with UK law. 
 
 "It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters," said a spokesman. 
 
 "Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework that 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 our operational processes rigorously support this position." 
 
 • A separate disclosure on Wednesday, published by Glenn Greenwald and NBC News, gave examples of how GCHQ was making use of its cable-tapping capabilities to monitor YouTube and social media traffic in real-time. 
 
 GCHQ’s cable-tapping and internet buffering capabilities , codenamed Tempora, were disclosed by the Guardian in June, but the new documents published by NBC from a GCHQ presentation titled “Psychology: A New Kind of SIGDEV" set out a program codenamed Squeaky Dolphin which gave the British spies “broad real-time monitoring” of “YouTube Video Views”, “URLs ‘Liked’ on Facebook” and “Blogspot/Blogger Visits”. 
 
 A further slide noted that “passive” – a term for large-scale surveillance through cable intercepts – give the agency “scalability”. 
 
 
 
 The means of interception mean GCHQ and NSA could obtain data without any knowledge or co-operation from the technology companies. Spokespeople for the NSA and GCHQ told NBC all programs were carried out in accordance with US and UK law. 
 
 • This article was amended on 28 January 2014. It referred to martial status, instead of marital status. This has been corrected.
– Smartphones can create a quandary for journalists, humanitarians, and activists in dangerous places where they are closely monitored: The devices are vital in terms of facilitating their work—and also exceptional tracking devices. It's not a plight to be taken lightly, as the Intercept makes clear with this example: A lawsuit filed by journalist Marie Colvin's family claims Syrian military intelligence used signal interception technology to trace her via her phone and bomb her makeshift media center, killing her. Whistleblower Edward Snowden, who says he hasn't been able to use a smartphone since leaking those NSA docs in 2013, intends to alter that paradigm. On Thursday he presented research via teleconference from an undisclosed location in Russia on what the Boston Globe has dubbed a "smartphone spy catcher." As the Intercept explains, a phone's cellular, Bluetooth, wifi, and GPS radios can betray a user, and the easiest way to shut down those radios—switch to airplane mode—can be rendered useless, without the user's knowledge, by malware. Snowden's partner, hardware hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, says it's best to always "assume the phone is compromised," reports Wired, and their goal is to create a device that reveals whether this is the case. Though they say a prototype (for the iPhone 6) is at least a year away, their so-called "introspection engine" will be a tiny open-source computer that looks like an external battery, affixes to a smartphone, and displays radio statuses on a screen. If a status is compromised, the pair suggest an alarm could sound; the device could potentially even then activate a "kill switch."