Yes, you read that right: a former senior Apple engineer says the U.S. government made an iPod into a secret geiger counter. Or, rather, a large U.S. defense contractor turned an iPod into a secret device that was probably a geiger counter – and only four people at Apple ever knew about it.
The story is told by David Shayer, who is a trusted source, played an important role in the development of the iPod …
I was the second software engineer hired for the iPod project when it started in 2001. Apple Marketing had not yet come up with the name iPod; the product became known by the code name P68. The first software engineer later became the director of iPod Software, the servant who gave me this special assignment. I wrote the file system of the iPod and later the SQLite database that followed all the songs. Over time, I worked on almost every part of the iPod software, except the audio codecs that convert MP3 and AAC files into audio.
He told the story before TidBITS.
It was a gray day in late 2005. I was sitting at my desk writing code for next year’s iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software – my boss’s boss – abruptly closed the door behind him. He cut to the chase. ‘I have a special assignment for you. Your boss does not know about it. You will help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report me only ” […]
They did not actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large American defense company in the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from that custom hardware on the iPod disk in a way that could not be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod. They would do all the work. My job was to provide the help they needed from Apple […]
Only four people at Apple knew about this secret project. I, the Director of iPod Software, the Vice President of the iPod Department, and the former Vice President of Hardware.
Because Shayer’s role was simply to make sure the Bechtel engineers had the training and resources they needed, he said it was never clear what the secret device would be.
The process sounds like something straight out of a spy movie. Apple did not know what the government wanted the iPod to do, and contractors were not allowed to access Apple’s servers or use Apple hardware or software tools. Apple did not even give them the iPods: Bechtel bought them from retail stores.
Every Shayer knew for sure that some hardware would be added to the iPods to record some data, which should remain secret, and the adjustments to the iPods did not have to be completely detectable, even if one by one in a Mac or PC plug.
They had added special hardware to the iPod, which generated data they secretly wanted to record. They were careful to make sure I never saw the hardware, and I never did.
We discussed the best way to hide the data they recorded. As a disk engineer, I suggested that they create another partition on disk to store their data. That way, even if one were to pack the custom iPod into a Mac or PC, iTunes would treat it like a normal iPod, and it would look like a normal iPod in the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. They wanted that, and it was a hidden party.
Next, they wanted an easy way to start and stop recording. We chose the deepest menu path of the preferences and at the end added an innocent-sounding menu. I helped her hook this to the code, which was previously not obvious. In all other respects, the device functioned like a normal iPod.
A 5th-gen iPod was used because it had a large hard disk, so a lot of data space; the housing could be opened to install the additional hardware without leaving marks; and the OS was not digitally signed by Apple, which made it hackable.
Although Shayer never knew what they were building, a top secret project for the Dept of Energy provides a great clue, he believes, that it was a secret geiger counter.
My judgment is that Paul and Matthew built something like a stealth Geiger counter. Something that DOE agents could use without being secretly hidden. Something that looks innocent, that music played and just functioned like a normal iPod. 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 happened. Like all other electronic gadgets, Geiger counters have become smaller and cheaper, and I was amused to run over the Radiation Alert Monitor 200, which looks a lot like a classic iPod.
FTC: We use revenue-generating links for auto-affiliate. More.
Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:
