“Surveillance companies can use your iPhone to take photos of you and your surroundings without your knowledge, said a representative from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at a panel chaired by Julian Assange today,” Anna Leach reports for The Register. “‘Who here has an iPhone, who has a Blackberry, who uses Gmail?’ Assange asked. ‘Well you’re all screwed,’ he continued, ‘the reality is that intelligence operations are selling right now mass surveillance systems for all those products.'”
“Companies also sell products that will let them change the messages you write, track your location and nick your email contacts, claimed speakers on the panel that included representatives from Privacy International and the aforementioned bureau,” Leach reports. “The privacy campaigners, speaking in London, pulled out some of the most sensational revelations in the 287 documents about the international surveillance industry published today by WikiLeaks (but you read it here first) The documents cover a total of 160 companies in 25 countries.”
Leach reports, “Steven Murdoch of Cambridge Security group said such software was being made by British companies including ones based in Surrey and Oxford. He added that even lawful interception was no longer targeted and backed up by suspicions. ‘We’re seeing increasingly wholesale monitoring of entire populations with no suspicion of wrongdoing – the data is being monitored and stored in the hope that it might one day be useful.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Um, yeah, we understand how it could happen with other mobile OSes, but how does this software get on our iPhones? The article gives no explanation as to how this immaculate installation of spy software supposedly takes place. Just because firms are selling spy software doesn’t mean it can magically materialize within your non-jailbroken iOS device.
Related article:
Apple: We stopped supporting Carrier IQ with iOS 5; never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other info – December 1, 2011