‘Smartphones are worse than a spy in your pockets’, warns US whistleblower Snowden

In an exclusive interview with The Guardian, Snowden expressed his concern against the use of mass surveillance software by global governments to snoop on the smart devices of anyone.

The whistleblower urged governments to impose a global moratorium on the international spyware trade or face a world in which no mobile phone is safe from state-sponsored hackers.

Snowden stated, “If the trade between companies that make for-profit software – which can become a surveillance weapon in the wrong hands, such as Israel’s NSO Group – and the governments continues, we will soon see a world in which no mobile phone is safe from state-sponsored hackers”.

He further warned, “If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect”.

Snowden compared companies commercialising vulnerabilities in widely used mobile phone models to an industry of “infectioneers” deliberately trying to develop new strains of disease.

“It’s like an industry where the only thing they did was create custom variants of COVID to dodge vaccines,” he added.

Snowden said commercial malware such as Pegasus was so powerful that ordinary people could in effect do nothing to stop it.

As per details, the Pegasus spyware can be installed on a mobile phone through a loophole and help the government or the user harvest information.

The Pegasus software could have been used to see call logs, text messages, photos, videos, stored files, as well as firing the camera unknowingly to surreptitiously record or click what the phone’s camera can see.