A former Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) software engineer David Shayer claims he took a hush-hush assignment while he was at the company building a “top secret” iPod for the U.S. Department of Energy, CNN reported Wednesday.
The top secret iPod: Shayer says an Apple executive asked him to take on a ‘special assignment’, and two engineers from the energy department’s contractor Bechtel Corporation assisted in building a custom iPod.
The devices they would build would be similar to any other iPod, but contained custom hardware that could store data without being detected by a user. The only people at Apple who knew about the project were the iPod division vice president and the senior vice president of hardware, both of whom have been leaving the company, Shayer wrote in a blog post dated August 17th. .
A Custom Geiger Counter? Although Shayer claims he never found what kind of hardware the two engineers added to the custom iPod, he theorized that the men built a “stealth Geiger counter.”
The engineer wrote that such a device could be useful for scanning “for example, uranium smuggled as steel or as evidence of a dirty bomb development program – with no chance that the press or the public would get wind of what happened.”
Apple’s delay just unusual: In January, reports appeared that Apple complied with, and was ready to assist government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in gathering private information.
This is in contrast to the public image of the company, where it often submits lawsuits seeking co-operation on criminal as well as national security matters. A notable case was Apple’s opposition to giving access to the two smartphones used by the Pensacola Naval Air Station shooter, a Saudi national, in January this year.
Price action: Apple shares traded 0.4% lower at $ 461 in the pre-market session Thursday.
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