Ex-Apple engineer lifts lid on Uncle Sam's top-secret plan to cram 'Geiger counter' into customized iPod
- Reference: 1597817287
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/19/apple_nuclear_ipod/
- Source link:
David Shayer, a former engineer with Apple's iPod outfit, this week [1]recounted the yarn of how he came to build a custom bit of kit for the US Department of Energy (DOE) in 2005.
As these things tend to go, Shayer doesn't have much in the way of details on the project, other than claiming that the whole thing was an effort to put something like a Geiger counter in an iPod – or attach it in some way – and allow for covert detection and recording of radioactive materials.
The former Apple code jockey said that, back in 2005, he was tapped by a senior Apple boss to chaperone two government contractors, chaps named "Paul and Matthew" who worked for engineering outfit Bechtel. The pair, it is said, were tasked with creating a customized version of the iconic Apple media player that could not only deliver music and video, but also hold other hardware. The purpose, Shayer reckons, was to create a discrete Geiger counter that could also pass as a media player.
"Something that DOE agents could use without furtively hiding it," Shayer wrote. "Something that looked innocuous, that played music, and functioned exactly like a normal iPod. You could walk around a city, casually listening to your tunes, while recording evidence of radioactivity — scanning for smuggled or stolen uranium, for instance, or evidence of a dirty bomb development program — with no chance that the press or public would get wind of what was happening."
On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others [2]READ MORE
"We discussed the best way to hide the data they recorded. As a disk engineer, I suggested they make another partition on the disk to store their data," he added. "That way, even if someone plugged the modified iPod into a Mac or PC, iTunes would treat it as a normal iPod, and it would look like a normal iPod in the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. They liked that, and a hidden partition it was.
"After a few months of on-again, off-again work in their requisitioned office, Paul and Matthew finished integrating their custom hardware into the iPod and wrapped up the project."
Interestingly, the story paints a picture of Apple having stricter security than the government. The suits were not allowed on the company network, couldn't get an internal Wi-Fi connection, and weren't allowed to walk off with the source code of the project they were working on.
"I gave them a copy of the current source code on a DVD and explained it couldn’t leave the building," Shayer said. "Ultimately, they were allowed to keep the modified copy of the iPod OS they built, but not the source code for it.
"Only employees cleared for our building were allowed in," he recounts. "On each floor, there was another locked door and badge reader, and only people cleared for that floor were allowed in. Whenever I asked Paul and Matthew what they were building, they changed the subject and started arguing about where to go for lunch. Standard geeks."
While we have no reason to refute this story, don't expect any help from Apple on the matter. The Cupertino giant did not return a request for comment, and if Shayer is to be believed, it is not going to talk about it.
"Only four people at Apple knew about this secret project. Me, the director of iPod Software, the vice president of the iPod Division, and the senior vice president of Hardware," said Shayer. "None of us still work at Apple. There was no paper trail. But now you know." ®
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[1] https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ipod/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/05/dead_steve_jobs_saint/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Apple should launch this for the public.
For sure, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing... wait til idiots accost some poor radiotherapy patient for being a terrorist.
DARPA have a programme looking into the problem of separating natural or mundane sources from those that suggest something more sinister is going on... roving sensors and big data, etc. Not just radionuclides, but precursors to conventional explosive too. High acetone reading, ah, but it's outside a nail salon, likely mundane source.
Re: Apple should launch this for the public.
"...but precursors to conventional explosive too."
Don't see how you can possibly do that without too high a false positive rate. Remember, Oklahoma City was done completely with materials available to any farmer .
Re: Apple should launch this for the public.
> Don't see how you can possibly do that without too high a false positive rate.
That is what I was hinting at by including the Acetone / Nail Bar example that the DARPA programme manager gave. False positives are expected. Their plan is is use roving sensors (they talked of cars, but chemical sensors masquerading as smartphones fit this model too) to build a huge real-time data set and then use algorithms to highlight unusual cases. Fertilizer on a farm or agricultural wholesaler = normal. Fertilizer by a government building = worthy of investigation.
I daresay that a similar approach is applied to purchases made online. Gallons of acetone supplied to a nail salon raises fewer flags than if it were supplied to a residential address in a certain area.
Re: Apple should launch this for the public.
Yes, the terrorists choice of champions is ANFO, Ammonia Nitrate (a common fertiliser) mixed with fuel oil, which incidentally was used by the US as the biggest non-nuclear bomb in history for a blast effect test (see https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35418/this-was-the-largest-conventional-explosion-america-ever-set-off)
Re: Apple should launch this for the public.
"Ammonia Nitrate (a common fertiliser)"
..Uhm.. Next time you get out of the bunker, you might want to read about Lebanon.
You do not need to explain ammonium nitrate anymore.
Re: Apple should launch this for the public.
i thought that was the russian equivalent of the Saturn5 blowing up?
@AC I Call BS... Re: Apple should launch this for the public.
The whole story is cover for a failed attempt of selling ipods to Russia to help monitor people around Chernobyl.
We are through the looking glass
Spooks can imagine it, geeks can make it work?
Re: We are through the looking glass
Spooks can imagine it, geeks can make it work? .... chivo243
I wouldn't be so sure that is the right way round, chivo243, given what one might know what spooks can do and have been doing since forever.
However, that should in no way suggest your question is wrong worded and does not accurately represent the true nature of current developments with future horizons in present events.
Oh, the stories I could tell.
But I won't ... as I signed the Official Secrets Act and various companies security policies, and I believe in trust, integrity and professional standards!
To be fair, the current government don't believe in any of those things, so you might as well tell all...
You could indeed tell stories, but that's all they would be. Same as I could.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
What the f*** did you just f***ing say about me, you little b****? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the f*** out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my f***ing words. You think you can get away with saying that s*** to me over the Internet? Think again, f***er. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're f***ing dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little s***. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your f***ing tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will s*** fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're f***ing dead, kiddo.
Lots of woofs
Copypasta the dog
Quote: "I am trained in gorilla warfare"
So you're used to wrestling with Silverbacks then?
Well done, you just broke the Official Secrets Act by telling us you've signed it. I know this because I've signed it too, a very long time ago. Really it doesn't make you special.
Me too! but i used the AC tag, clever eh?
So if you cant tell people you've signed it ... then the whole "i'd tell you but id have to kill you " thing is out the window...
where does it end?
"What do you do at BAE?"
"cant tell you"
"Aha! because you've signed the official secrets act! i'm reporting you for admitting that!"
I think at least 10% of my friends have signed it at some point in their lives.
"Really it doesn't make you special."
Signing the Official Secrets Act is on my bucket list. It would make me *feel* special, and that's all that matters.
Not supposed to tell anyone you have been subject to OSA.
Supposition!
> a customized version of the iconic Apple media player that could not only deliver music and video, but also hold other hardware. The purpose, Shayer reckons , was to create a discrete Geiger counter that could also pass as a media player.
So it was only a guess that the iPod would host a radiation detector. That function doesn't sound very plausible to me. Would they go around "the city" waving their iPod at people, or what? Though it would be a good cover story.
Given that an iPod is primarily a storage device, my guess would be that it would make an innocuous bug. Since iPods already had a microphone, there wouldn't be much point making them audio bugs. However due to being commonplace, they wouldn't raise much suspicion if spotted lying around somewhere - an office or laboratory, perhaps. Somewhere with a lot of, say, radio activity (as opposed to radioactivity). Especially as WiFi was starting to be popular around 2005.
As for a modus operandi, we all know about [1]"lost and found" thumbdrives . Devices that are left for unsuspecting but targetted individuals to find and plug into their computers out of curiosity. This could be similar, but less suspicious as it wouldn't need to be plugged in to anything. Just have the "mark" find an iPod that looked lost, pick it up, take it into their secure work environment and it sniffs the internal WiFi. Even inside shielded building.
And better still, it plays music!
[1] https://www.redteamsecure.com/blog/usb-drop-attacks-the-danger-of-lost-and-found-thumb-drives/
Re: Supposition!
think you're right about the geiger counter being a plausible lie for children. Less sure about it being a simple bug. In 2005, there many ways of doing that without this level of complexity, but I suppose it would be useful if someone was liable to be searched for a wire.
Given they didn't come back, it may have been a general toolkit: that their software changes would have allowed for a variety of hardware.
Re: Supposition!
If you remember the fear of terrorist attacks of all sorts in 2005, a department given money to develop a disguised Geiger counter sounds plausible, especially since using roving mobile sensors is DARPAs stated MO.
Audio recording could be done on a 2005 era phone, and supply data back to base in real time.
So, why an iPod rather than a then-ubiquitous flip-phone? The iPod has greater internal volume to fit sensors, especially if the HDD is swapped for solid state (one assumes that high cost of solid state storage wouldn't have been an issue for the client, though the lack of disk noise might mark the iPod as suspect). In 2005, an iPod might be allowed into areas where a phone might not be. Or, it might be that someone waving an iPod around arouses less suspicion than someone waving a flip phone around.
An iPod wouldn't send data back to base in real time, but I guess the agents could plug it into a laptop whenever they returned to their vehicle.
Re: Supposition!
I can think of a lot of useful uses of being able to wander around with an hidden Geiger counter. Bearing in mind that this is from 2005 and the whole Iranian reactor thing that's happened since it's not totally improbable and in fact it'd be a rather handy toy for nuclear inspectors to have.
In fact, it'd be a lovely toy to add to every iPhone to create a live worldwide radiation survey, with hot spots automatically flagged for investigation.
However, to be honest as you say once you've got an iPod modified to leave empty room for a payload then one imagines that it's not beyond the wit of man to modify it to contain a different payload. I'd imagine that the OS wouldn't know what you were doing with it; probably the most integration with the OS that you'd want is an on/off command.
Re: Supposition!
I guess this guy only did the 'hiding data' part. Others elsewhere in Apple did the 'read values from this widget' part, others did the 'new hardware design which leaves an x * y * z space', and others did the 'new screwholes inside the case here, here, and here' part.
If they all wake up in The Cube one day it'll be because this guy blabbed.
Re: Supposition!
Would they go around "the city" waving their iPod at people, or what?
yeah , they'd be better housing it in one of those PKE detectors from Ghostbusters, much less suspicious and more room for the components
Re. iNuk
Actually I looked into doing this with "Step" pedometer counters as they were a convenient size and less likely to arouse suspicion.
Problem turned out to be making the sensor low power enough as the tube(s) typically needed 350V and though APDs were also
available they needed 100-200V making them even less likely to suit the task.
It would have worked with a single crystal Si photodiode but this wasn't sensitive enough.
Useful tip: there are now single chip HV supplies available based around EL driver technology, even I2C controlled.
AC because I got in enough trouble already for my "other" projects.
:-)
Nice one, Shaun Nichols in San Francisco. Uncle Sam/Silicon Valley/Wall Street/Departments of Defence needs the likes of you.
The cool thing is that he can say whatever he wants, and nobody can disprove it... Even the Geiger counter is just his assumption, it could be any piece of hardware, like a dumb hidden microphone secretly recording conversations.
I call BS
If you want to differentiate between materials, you need something with energy discrimination- a scintillation counter, not a Geiger counter. That implies a liquid or solid scintillator... No need for high voltage electronics and photomultiplier tubes these days, we have silicon photomultipliers. See:
https://www.hamamatsu.com/sp/hc/osh/sipm_webinar_1.10.pdf
But sensitivity varies directly as the volume of your scintillator. Something small enough to fit in a ipod will have very little volume and roughly the sensitivity of Helen Keller. Workable, but you need a lot of patience. Instead of wandering the city, you would be standing or lying still for tens of minutes to an hour until your pulse height discriminator has something to work with. Then you move another half meter. Unless you're pretending to sleep rough, this is not suspicious at all. Size matters.
My coat? The one with the zinc sulphide in the pocket.
Apple should launch this for the public.
Nothing would beat wandering around and realisng that the world is, and always has been, a radioactive place, to cure people of Nuclear Derangement Syndrome