Snowden’s app aims to protect whistleblowers
UNITED STATES: If anyone has good reason to be wary, it is Edward Snowden, exiled in a secret Moscow location since 2013 and one of the world’s most wanted men.
To help anyone else in fear of snatch squads, the whistleblower has created a counter-surveillance app to prevent ‘‘the worst kind of people from silencing citizens without getting caught’’.
The Haven app was designed by Snowden and colleagues to assist ‘‘people at risk of forced disappearance’’. It is available at the Android store.
Snowden, a former CIA operat- ive, leaked thousands of classified documents from the United States’ National Security Agency. He claims that he has used the Haven app for his own protection while travelling.
Unlike apps that check a phone for spyware, Haven is designed to monitor the device’s surroundings for real-world intruders. Users install it on a spare handset that they can leave as a monitoring device near any sensitive information.
Micah Lee, a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, of which Snowden is director, said: ‘‘Imagine you are a journalist in a hostile foreign country and you are worried about security services breaking into your room and rifling through your belongings and computer. Haven detects changes in the environment using the sensors in a typical smartphone, such as the camera, microphone, gyroscope, ambient light and USB power, to alert you if anyone enters your space or attempts to tamper with your devices.’’
The app sends encrypted alerts to a primary phone over the messaging app Signal. Users can monitor activity remotely using the anonymous Tor dark-web browser.
Snowden said that knowledge of the app’s existence would give hostile agents pause for thought. ‘‘If you’re secret police making people disappear ... you have to worry that every cellphone might be a witness,’’ he told US technology magazine Wired.
Some commentators have expressed concerns about Snowden’s ties to Russia. One reader wrote on technology website The Intercept: ‘‘So a guy completely controlled by Vladimir Putin has developed software to protect your computer. Have you imbeciles learned nothing from Kaspersky?’’
Kaspersky Lab makes software that has been banned for use by US federal agencies over concerns about the company’s alleged ties with Russian security services. Kaspersky denies the allegations.
In Wired‘s tests, the app’s detection was ‘‘hair-triggered’’, sending large numbers of alerts for nonevents. The developers said they were still testing the app and finetuning the controls. – The Times