Sunday, 22 February 2015
If you didn’t know how easy it was for hackers to grab information off of your smartphone before, you should now.
The Intercept reported earlier this week that the National Security Agency (NSA) and the British equivalent spy agency GCHQ had allegedly hacked into and stole information from millions of SIM cards produced by the Dutch company Gemalto. This may have given both agencies access to phone communications around the world and should serve as a warning to all that we need to protect our smartphones.
The good news is that the technology already exists to protect your text and phone messaging data. “Encrypted text messaging and phone systems are so easy to protect that we all have an obligation to secure ourselves,” American Civil Liberties Union senior policy analyst Chirs Soghoian told TechCrunch over the phone.
Soghoian believes it would be irresponsible to tell people the government might be hacking into their private information and then not give them the tools to protect themselves. So he hopped on the phone with me to go through some of the free tools we already have at our fingertips to protect our private information.
Apple doesn’t market iMessage or FaceTime this way, but according to Soghoian, both are very secure means of sending information. “FaceTime is portrayed as a tool to talk to your kids at night before they go to bed, but it’s actually pretty secure for audio and video use,” he says. The other Apple product Soghoian recommends is iMessage. “Apple encrypts the iPhone to iPhone messaging to the point where it can’t un-encrypt the data. So even if the government wanted that information and demanded it from Apple, Apple doesn’t have it,” he says.
