Intelligence agencies around the world could be listening to your phone conversations right this moment says Edward Snowden. The former CIA employee turned whistleblower was recently interviewed by the BBC's Panorama news program where he revealed a host of secrets regarding the security of our smartphones.
Snowden says that any phone on the planet can be hacked into via a simple text message. Once the SMS is received, there's little a user can do to prevent hackers from gaining access to its camera and microphone.
The set of tools used by spies to infiltrate devices is called 'Smurf Suite'. The program has a variety of tools that control various aspects of the phone. Snowden enumerated them as:
- "Dreamy Smurf": powers the phone on and off
- "Nosey Smurf": gives access to the microphone, even if the device itself is switched off
- "Tracker Smurf": a geo-location tool which allows hackers to follow you with a greater precision than you would get from the typical triangulation of cellphone towers.
- "Paranoid Smurf": hides the fact that the phone has been compromised. The tool will stop people from recognizing that the phone has been tampered with if it is taken in for maintenance.
'When I was sitting at my desk working with tools of mass surveillance every day, I saw that ... all of our communications were being intercepted all of the time in the absence of any suspicion of wrong doing. Says Snowden.
He also gave a low down on British Intelligence Agency GCHQ. He described it as,
'GCHQ is for almost all intent and purpose a subsidiary of the NSA, they provide technology, they provide tasking and direction as to what they should go after. And in exchange GCHQ provides access to communications that are collected in the United Kingdom.'
