In this episode, Joseph Cox (https://x.com/josephfcox) tells us the story of anom. A secure phone made by criminals, for criminals.This story comes from part of Joseph’s book “Dark Wire” which you should definitely read. Get yours here https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-cox/dark-wire/9781541702691.
Full Episode
So I was looking through WikiLeaks the other day, as one does, right? And I came across something that I found rather fascinating. There's a thing that the CIA developed called Weeping Angel. So if you have a Samsung smart TV, there's a really odd feature in it. It's called fake off. And when the TV is on, you can push mute 182, then power, and the TV appears to turn off, but it doesn't.
Now, these smart TVs often have a microphone built in so you can give them voice commands. And when the TV is off, the mic isn't listening. But when the TV is in fake off, the mic is still active. So what the CIA did was they developed some kind of spyware for the Samsung smart TV where it would record the audio from the mic and store it on the TV.
So I imagine a scenario is that a CIA agent would want to plant a listening device in someone's bedroom and goes in, but then sees, oh, they've got a Samsung smart TV, which is already a listening device. No need to leave behind a bug that might get discovered. Let's just live off the land, as they say.
So the CIA agent uploads the spyware onto the TV and then puts the TV in fake off mode and leaves. And the TV sits there recording all the audio in the room, but appears to be off. And then the CIA agent can remotely connect back to the TV and get the audio files or come back into the room later and retrieve them off the TV.
It's wild what spy gear is developed by the federal authorities, isn't it? These are true stories from the dark side of the Internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries. Support for this episode comes from Delete Me. Feels like a war out there. Companies all over trying to scrape and store all kinds of personal data about me.
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