FILE- In this May 13, 2013, file photo, the photo of Journalist Marie Colvin who was killed in Syria while she was reporting from there, is seen on the wall of the Newseum during the Journalist Memorial... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE- In this May 13, 2013, file photo, the photo of Journalist Marie Colvin who was killed in Syria while she was reporting from there, is seen on the wall of the Newseum during the Journalist Memorial... (Associated Press) 
 
 WASHINGTON (AP) — Relatives of Marie Colvin, a U.S.-born journalist who worked for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, have filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that Syrian government officials targeted and killed her in 2012 to silence her reporting on Syria and the besieged city of Homs. 
 
 The lawsuit says Syrian officials launched a rocket attack on a makeshift broadcast studio in a neighborhood of Homs. Colvin, a veteran correspondent for The Sunday Times, died in that attack along with French photojournalist Remi Ochlik. 
 
 Colvin, 56, a native of New York City, was killed Feb. 22, 2012. Just hours before her death, she filed another report on the Syrian government's crackdown and its impact on civilians. The attack by Syrian army forces also killed several activists. 
 
 The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said at the time that circumstantial evidence and witnesses pointed to the possibility that government forces had taken deliberate action that led to the deaths of Colvin and Ochlik. More than two dozen journalists were reported killed in Syria in 2012 alone. 
 
 The wrongful-death lawsuit filed Saturday in Washington by Cathleen Colvin, Marie Colvin's sister, and Justine Araya-Colvin, the reporter's niece, said the Assad regime "hunted down journalists and media activists" who were trying to tell the story of the government's deadly crackdown on Syrian rebels. The government has contended that its attacks targeted terrorists. 
 
 The lawsuit, which seeks compensatory and punitive damages, said there were no lawful military targets in the vicinity of the media center at the time of the attack and no armed rebels were present in or around the center. The occupants targeted by the Assad regime were unarmed civilians, the suit claims. ||||| When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the NSA’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar. 
 
 On Thursday at the MIT Media Lab, Snowden and well-known hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang plan to present designs for a case-like device that wires into your iPhone’s guts to monitor the electrical signals sent to its internal antennas. The aim of that add-on, Huang and Snowden say, is to offer a constant check on whether your phone’s radios are transmitting. They say it’s an infinitely more trustworthy method of knowing your phone’s radios are off than “airplane mode,” which people have shown can be hacked and spoofed. Snowden and Huang are hoping to offer strong privacy guarantees to smartphone owners who need to shield their phones from government-funded adversaries with advanced hacking and surveillance capabilities—particularly reporters trying to carry their devices into hostile foreign countries without constantly revealing their locations. 
 
 “One good journalist in the right place at the right time can change history,” Snowden told the MIT Media Lab crowd via video stream. “This makes them a target, and increasingly tools of their trade are being used against them.”1 
 
 “They’re overseas, in Syria or Iraq, and those [governments] have exploits that cause their phones to do things they don’t expect them to do,” Huang elaborated to WIRED in an interview ahead of the MIT presentation. “You can think your phone’s radios are off, and not telling your location to anyone, but actually still be at risk.” 
 
 Huang’s and Snowden’s solution to that radio-snitching problem is to build a modification for the iPhone 6 that they describe as an “introspection engine.” Their add-on would appear to be little more than an external battery case with a small mono-color screen. But it would function as a kind of miniature, form-fitting oscilloscope: Tiny probe wires from that external device would snake into the iPhone’s innards through its SIM-card slot to attach to test points on the phone’s circuit board. (The SIM card itself would be moved to the case to offer that entry point.) Those wires would read the electrical signals to the two antennas in the phone that are used by its radios, including GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular modem. And by identifying the signals that transmit those different forms of radio information, the modified phone would warn you with alert messages or an audible alarm if its radios transmit anything when they’re meant to be off. Huang says it could possibly even flip a “kill switch” to turn off the phone automatically. 
 
 “Our approach is: state-level adversaries are powerful, assume the phone is compromised,” Huang says. “Let’s look at hardware-related signals that are extremely difficult to fake. We want to give a you-bet-your-life assurance that the phone actually has its radios off when it says it does.”1 
 
 You might think you can achieve the same effect by simply turning your iPhone off with its power button, or placing it in a Faraday bag designed to block all radio signals. But Faraday bags can still leak radio information, Huang says, and clever malware can make an iPhone appear to be switched off when it’s not, as Snowden warned in an NBC interview in 2014. Regardless, Huang says their intention was to allow reporters to reliably disable a phone’s radio signals while still using the device’s other functions, like taking notes and photographs or recording audio and video. 
 
 Wireless devices are kind of like kryptonite to me. Edward Snowden 
 
 Snowden, who performed the work in his capacity as a director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, adds that their goal isn’t merely just protection for journalists. It’s also detection of otherwise stealthy attacks on phones, the better to expose governments’ use of hidden smartphone surveillance techniques. “You need to be able to increase the costs of getting caught,” Snowden said in a video call with WIRED following the presentation. “All we have to do is get one or two or three big cases where we catch someone red-handed, and suddenly the targeting policies at these intelligence agencies will start to change.”2 
 
 The problem, for Snowden, is personal. He tells WIRED he hasn’t carried a smartphone since he first began leaking NSA documents, for fear that its cellular signals could be used to locate him. (He notes that he still hasn’t “seen any indication” that the U.S. government has been able to determine his exact location in Russia.) “Since 2013, I haven’t been able to have a smartphone like normal people,” he says. “Wireless devices are kind of like kryptonite to me.” 
 
 Huang and Snowden’s iPhone modification, for now, is little more than a design. The pair has tested their method of picking up the electrical signals sent to an iPhone 6’s antennae to verify that they can spot its different radio messages. But they have yet to even build a prototype, not to mention a product. But on Thursday they released a detailed paper explaining their technique. They say they hope to develop a prototype over the next year and eventually create a supply chain in China of modified iPhones to offer journalists and newsrooms. To head off any potential mistrust of their Chinese manufacturers, Huang says the device’s code and hardware design will be fully open-source. 
 
 Huang, who lives in Singapore but travels monthly to meet with hardware manufacturers in Shenzhen, says that the skills to create and install their hardware add-on are commonplace in mainland China’s thriving iPhone repair and modification markets. “This is definitely something where, if you’re the New York Times and you want to have a pool of four or five of these iPhones and you have a few hundred extra dollars to spent on them, we could do that.” says Huang. “The average [DIY enthusiast] in America would think this is pretty fucking crazy. The average guy who does iPhone modifications in China would see this and think it’s not a problem.” 
 
 The two collaborators have never met face-to-face. Snowden says he first met Huang after recommending him to television producers at Vice, who were looking for hardware hacking experts. “He’s one of the hardware researchers I respect the most in the world,” Snowden says. In late 2015, they began talking via the encrypted communications app Signal about Snowden’s idea of building an altered phone to protect journalists from advanced attacks that could compromise their location. 
 
 Huang insists that Snowden’s focus for the project from the beginning has been protecting that breed of vulnerable reporters, not from the NSA, but from foreign governments that are increasingly able to buy zero-day vulnerability information necessary to compromise even hard-to-hack targets like the iPhone. As a case study, they point in their paper to the story of Marie Colvin, the recently murdered American war correspondent whose family is suing Syria’s government; Colvin’s family claims she was tracked based on her electronic communications and killed in a targeted bombing by the country’s brutal Assad regime for reporting on civilian casualties. 
 
 Huang says he’s tried to develop the most no-frills protection possible that still meets Snowden’s rightfully paranoid standards. “If it wasn’t for the fact that Snowden is involved, I think this would seem pretty mundane,” Huang says almost bashfully. “My solution is simple. But it helps an important group of people.” 
 
 Here’s Snowden and Huang’s full paper on their iPhone “introspection engine”: 
 
 1Updated 10am 7/21/2016 to add comments from Snowden and Huang’s presentation. 
 
 2Updated 11:20am 7/21/2016 to add comments from an interview with Snowden. ||||| In early 2012 , Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria, while reporting for London’s Sunday Times. She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.” Despite the covert approach, Syrian forces still managed to get to Colvin; under orders to “kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil,” they bombed the makeshift media center she was working in, killing her and one other journalist and injuring two others. 
 
 Syrian forces may have found Colvin by tracing her phone, according to a lawsuit filed by Colvin’s family this month. Syrian military intelligence used “signal interception devices to monitor satellite dish and cellphone communications and trace journalists’ locations,” the suit says. 
 
 In dangerous environments like war-torn Syria, smartphones become indispensable tools for journalists, human rights workers, and activists. But at the same time, they become especially potent tracking devices that can put users in mortal danger by leaking their location. 
 
 National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has been working with prominent hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang to solve this problem. The pair are developing a way for potentially imperiled smartphone users to monitor whether their devices are making any potentially compromising radio transmissions. They argue that a smartphone’s user interface can’t be relied on to tell you the truth about that state of its radios. Their initial prototyping work uses an iPhone 6. 
 
 “We have to ensure that journalists can investigate and find the truth, even in areas where governments prefer they don’t,” Snowden told me in a video interview. “It’s basically to make the phone work for you, how you want it, when you want it, but only when.” 
 
 Huang made a name for himself by using a technique known as reverse engineering to hack into Microsoft’s Xbox and other hardware devices locked down using various forms of encryption, and Snowden said he’s been an invaluable research partner. 
 
 “When I worked at the NSA, I worked with some incredibly talented people,” Snowden said, “but I’ve never worked with anybody who had such an incredible outpouring of expertise than I have with Bunnie.” 
 
 Snowden and Huang presented their findings in a talk at MIT Media Lab’s Forbidden Research event today and published a detailed paper. 
 
 Location Privacy and Smartphones 
 
 Smartphones come with a variety of different types of radio transmitters and receivers: cellular modems (for phone calls, SMS messages, and mobile data), wifi, bluetooth, and others. But using any of these radios could leak your physical location to an adversary who is watching the airwaves. 
 
 Journalists and activists use their phones to communicate with sources and colleagues, post updates and livestream to social media, and accomplish countless other networked tasks. If they need to keep their location secret, for example in a war zone, they need to turn off all of the radios within their phones. Even so, phones can still be vital tools even when offline; internet access is not needed to take photographs, record video or audio, take notes, use certain maps, or manage schedules. 
 
 Snowden and Huang have been researching if it’s possible to use a smartphone in such an offline manner without leaking its location, starting with the assumption that “a phone can and will be compromised.” After all, journalists and activists are often under-resourced and face off against well-funded intelligence services. They also, necessarily, use their phones to talk to, and open documents from, a wide variety of sources, leaving them especially vulnerable to targeted phishing, or “spearphishing,” attacks, where an attacker baits a victim into opening an enticing document that actually contains an exploit. 
 
 The research is necessary in part because the most common way to try to silence a phone’s radio — turning on airplane mode — can’t be relied on to squelch your phone’s radio traffic. “Malware packages, peddled by hackers at a price accessible by private individuals, can activate radios without any indication from the user interface,” Snowden and Huang explain in their blog post. “Trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive.” 
 
 Image: Andrew Huang 
 
 Introspection Engine 
 
 Since a smartphone can essentially be made to lie about that state of its radios, the goal of Snowden and Huang’s research, according to their post, is to “provide field-ready tools that enable a reporter to observe and investigate the status of the phone’s radios directly and independently of the phone’s native hardware.” In other words, they want to build an entirely separate tiny computer that users can attach to a smartphone to alert them if it’s being dishonest about its radio emissions. 
 
 Snowden and Haung are calling this device an “introspection engine” because it will inspect the inner-workings of the phone. The device will be contained inside a battery case, looking similar to a smartphone with an extra bulky battery, except with its own screen to update the user on the status of the radios. Plans are for the device to be able to sound an audible alarm and possibly also to come equipped with a “kill switch” that can shut off power to the phone if any radio signals are detected. “The core principle is simple,” they wrote in the blog post. “If the reporter expects radios to be off, alert the user when they are turned on.” 
 
 The introspection engine also must fit a number of design goals, including: It should be entirely open source, with open hardware, to make it easy for experts to inspect; it should operate in a separate “security domain” than the phone. Basically, the introspection engine should work even if the phone is hacked and actively lying to you; it should have a simple and intuitive user interface and require no special training to use; it should be usable on a daily basis with minimal impact on workflow. 
 
 Introspection engines don’t exist yet, and the research Snowden and Huang presented today is only the beginning. In order to begin work on a prototype, the pair needed to pick a specific model of smartphone to target. They chose the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, based on their understanding of “the current preferences and tastes of reporters.” However, introspection engines could be designed for any model phone. 
 
 Jacking Into the iPhone 
 
 Huang, an American who currently lives in Singapore, traveled to the metropolis of Shenzhen, China to explore the electronics markets of Hua Qiang, which he described as “ground zero for the trade and practice of iPhone repair.” While there, he bought spare parts and repair manuals that contained detailed blueprints of the target device. 
 
 Photo: Andrew Huang 
 
 Using information gleaned from these manuals, Snowden and Huang discovered that the iPhone’s logic board has several test points designed by the manufacturer that can be exploited to learn the status of various on-board radios. These test points, which are built-in to many consumer devices, are crucial to improving customer experience. When a customer returns a defective device, engineers rely on them to determine the cause of the defect. 
 
 Snowden and Huang discovered 12 test points that could be used to monitor the status of the cellular radios, the GPS radio, and the wifi and bluetooth radios. While they didn’t find a test point to monitor the Near Field Communication chip, the part that makes Apple Pay possible, they discovered that they could disconnect its antenna, vastly reducing its range. 
 
 They don’t think that modifying an iPhone 6 to install an introspection device could be done by just anyone, but “any technician with modest soldering skills can be trained to perform these operations reliably in about 1-2 days of practice on scrap motherboards.” 
 
 Supply Chain 
 
 The next step is to develop a working prototype, which Snowden and Bunnie hope to complete over the next year. Their blog post says that the project is currently operating on a “shoestring budget” and “donated time.” 
 
 If it proves successful, they may seek funding through the Freedom of the Press Foundation to develop and maintain a supply chain. The nonprofit, of which both Snowden and I are board members, could then distribute iPhones that have been modified to include introspection devices to journalists who work in dangerous environments to use in the field. ||||| Former National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden is working with an MIT Media Lab researcher to build a device to protect journalists’ smartphones from government spies. 
 
 Former National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden is working with an MIT Media Lab researcher to build a device to protect journalists’ smartphones from government spies. 
 
 “Increasingly the tools of their trade are being used against them,” said Snowden during a Thursday conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the device that he’s designing with Media Lab research affiliate Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, will detect whether a phone is sending or receiving unauthorized radio signals. 
 
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 Snowden, who addressed the symposium via teleconference, has lived in hiding somewhere in Russia since 2013. He fled the United States after revealing a variety of secret surveillance programs that collected information on millions of Americans. 
 
 The simplest way to avoid smartphone snooping is to leave the device at home, or switch it off. But many journalists use their phones to shoot video and still images, record interviews with sources or take notes. So to avoid broadcasting their locations, they can set the phone to “airplane mode,” which is supposed to switch off its cellular, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi radios. 
 
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 But Snowden said it’s possible that spy agencies could infect phones with malware that would leave the radios in operation even when a phone appeared to be in airplane mode. In addition, phone user can deliberately or accidentally switch on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth even in airplane mode. 
 
 The proposed device would eliminate these risks. It would be a plastic sleeve designed to slide over an Apple iPhone 6. The electronics in the device would monitor the phone’s antennas to detect any incoming or outgoing signals from the cellular, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, or NFC radio chips. It would trigger an alarm to warn the user of possible snooping. Because the device is a separate piece of hardware, it would be secure against any effort to hack the phone’s operating system. 
 
 “The technical goal here is to make sure that the radios are really off,” said Huang. “Think of the thing we’re doing as like a designated driver for the phone.” 
 
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 Snowden said that the creation of such a device would make spying less likely because it would increase the risk that an agency would be caught at it. “The NSA, for example, is very nervous about being caught red-handed,” he said. “They don’t want to risk the political impact of being seen targeting groups, like journalists, like American lawyers.... If we can create a track record of unlawful or unethical activity, we can begin creating a framework to overturn a culture of impunity.” 
 
 Snowden’s firsthand experience as a whistleblower may have inspired the project. He worked closely with several news organizations, including the Washington Post and the UK’s Guardian newspaper, to publicize his allegations. One Guardian reporter working on the Snowden story was detained at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2013, and his phone, laptop, and camera were confiscated. 
 
 For now, Snowden’s proposed spy detector exists only on paper. Huang couldn’t say when it would become available, or how much it would cost.
– Smartphones can create a quandary for journalists, humanitarians, and activists in dangerous places where they are closely monitored: The devices are vital in terms of facilitating their work—and also exceptional tracking devices. It's not a plight to be taken lightly, as the Intercept makes clear with this example: A lawsuit filed by journalist Marie Colvin's family claims Syrian military intelligence used signal interception technology to trace her via her phone and bomb her makeshift media center, killing her. Whistleblower Edward Snowden, who says he hasn't been able to use a smartphone since leaking those NSA docs in 2013, intends to alter that paradigm. On Thursday he presented research via teleconference from an undisclosed location in Russia on what the Boston Globe has dubbed a "smartphone spy catcher." As the Intercept explains, a phone's cellular, Bluetooth, wifi, and GPS radios can betray a user, and the easiest way to shut down those radios—switch to airplane mode—can be rendered useless, without the user's knowledge, by malware. Snowden's partner, hardware hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, says it's best to always "assume the phone is compromised," reports Wired, and their goal is to create a device that reveals whether this is the case. Though they say a prototype (for the iPhone 6) is at least a year away, their so-called "introspection engine" will be a tiny open-source computer that looks like an external battery, affixes to a smartphone, and displays radio statuses on a screen. If a status is compromised, the pair suggest an alarm could sound; the device could potentially even then activate a "kill switch."