WikiLeaks: The Government Uses Your iPhone To Spy On You

According to the latest document from Wikileaks, The government is using your iPhone to spy on you. The document is called “Spyfiles” and it’s about the “mass interception industry”, It’s the surveillance community which has been build after 9/11 that electronically snoops on entire populations.

Your iPhone Is Spying On You

The government buys software – some of it by Trojans- that can take over your iPhone even in standby and track every use, movement, recognizes your voice, record your conversationsand even can capture a video or an audio.
This isn’t exclusive to the iPhone of course. There are several spywares that works on PCs, Android and Blackberry. The CIA uses the voice print to recognize its subject to target drone strikes in the Middle East and Central Asia.

This spyware is developed by the British company Gamma International. What this spyware does is sending fake iTunes update to the subject. Recently, Apple has patched the hole in the iTunes 10.5.1 but there is some claims that Apple knew of the problem three years ago.
FinFisher claims that there spyware is legal and it’s used to monitor political activists in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya during the Arab Spring.

According to a major Wikileaks story in The Washington Post:

“We are seeing a growing number of repressive regimes get hold of the latest, greatest Western technologies and use them to spy on their own citizens for the purpose of quashing peaceful political dissent or even information that would allow citizens to know what is happening in their communities,”Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for human rights, said in a speech last month in California. “We are monitoring this issue very closely.”
Surveillance companies like SS8 in the U.S., Hacking Team in Italy and Vupen in France manufacture viruses (Trojans) that hijack individual computers and phones (including iPhones, Blackberries and Androids), take over the device, record its every use, movement, and even the sights and sounds of the room it is in. Other companies like Phoenexia in the Czech Republic collaborate with the military to create speech analysis tools. They identify individuals by gender, age and stress levels and track them based on ‘voiceprints’. Blue Coat in the U.S. and Ipoque in Germany sell tools to governments in countries like China and Iran to prevent dissidents from organizing online.