Cellphones In Unsafe Pockets, Snowden Warns Of The Dangers Of Easy-to-use Spyware

Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower warns of the dangers of spyware. (photo: unsplash)

JAKARTA - Former computer intelligence consultant at the US National Security Agency (NSA) Edward Snowden called smartphones "worse than a spy in your pocket".

Edward Joseph Snowden is a former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013. He was an employee and subcontractor for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He is now believed to be hiding in Russia.

In an exclusive interview with The Guardian, recently, Snowden urged governments to impose a global moratorium on the international spyware trade. If this is not done then in the near future will face a world, where no cell phone is safe from state sponsored hackers.

Following the revelations about a client of Israel's NSO Group, whose software Pegasus was used to hack cellphones for surveillance, Snowden said findings from the Amnesty International consortium illustrate "how commercial malware is enabling repressive regimes to put more people under the most invasive types of surveillance".

For traditional police operations, such as planting bugs or tapping a suspect's phone, law enforcement has traditionally needed to break into someone's home, or go to their car, or go to their office, with a warrant.

"If they can do the same thing remotely, with little cost and no risk, they start doing it all the time," Snowden said.

“If you don't do anything to stop the sale of this technology, then it won't just be 50,000 targets. This could be a 50 million target, and it will happen much faster than we expected," Snowden warned.

Snowden compared companies that commercialize vulnerabilities in widely used cell phone models to industrial "infectious" ones that deliberately try to develop new types of disease.

"It's like an industry where the only thing they do is make a special variant of COVID to avoid a vaccine," he said.

“Their only product is an infection vector. They are not security products. They do not provide any protection, any prophylaxis. They don't make vaccines - the only thing they sell is the virus," Snowden said.

Snowden says commercial malware like Pegasus is so powerful, that ordinary people can't do anything to stop it.

When asked how people can protect themselves, Snowden replied: “What can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons?”

“There are certain industries, certain sectors, where there is no protection, and that is why we are trying to limit the proliferation of this technology. We don't allow a commercial market for nuclear weapons," Snowden said. He hopes the same applies to spyware.