Shayer said he met with two engineers from Bechtel, a U.S. defense contractor, and was told they would build the iPod – all he had to do was provide any assistance they needed from Apple. The iPods had to look and function like normal iPods, but contained some custom hardware that could record data and not be detected by the average user, Shayer said.
“This was not a collaboration with Bechtel with a contract and payment,” Shayer wrote. “It was Apple who made a favorite under the table for the Department of Energy.”
Apple, Bechtel and the Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the project.
The apparent collaboration with the government to add secret features to Apple products runs in stark contrast to the company’s clashes with the FBI and the Department of Justice in recent years over its refusal to build backdoors into iPhones. Apple has repeatedly backed the demands of the US authorities to give access to the iPhones of suspects in mass shootings, saying that building such a solution would infringe on the privacy of all its users.
Shayer said he never found out exactly what type of hardware the two Bechtel engineers were looking to add to the secret iPod, and they were careful to keep it from him. However, he has a theory: they may have built a “stealth Geiger counter” to measure radioactivity.
“You could walk around a city, casually listen to your tunes while recording evidence of radioactivity – scanning for emerald or steel uranium, for example, as evidence of a dirty bomb development program – with no chance that the press or audience would get wind of what was going on. happened, “he wrote.
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