Back in 2005, for the iPhone, Apple almost helped a U.S. Secretary of Energy contract a 5th-generation iPod to record and store secret data. The exact reason why a mystery remains, but an ex-Apple engineer involved in the project thinks it could have been a surprising Geiger counter.
This bonkers story comes with courtesy of David Shayer, a former Apple software engineer who was involved the company 18 years and worked on devices such as the iPod and Apple Watch. Shayer, who wrote the story for TidBITS, tells of a ‘gray day late 2005’ when his boss’s boss, the director of iPod software, told him he was assigned to a top-secret project with two engineers from the U.S. Department of Energy to design a “special iPod.”
In fact, the two engineers were from Bechtel, an American defense company for the DOE. The request was to build a normal, functioning iPod that could also secretly record data on personal hardware. In other words, some spy level shit. At the time, the iPod was not a particularly easy device to change. That’s because, according to Shayer, the iPod’s operating system was not based on another Apple operating system. Instead, it was based on a “reference platform that Apple bought from a company called Portal Player” and cobbled together with code from Pixo, a company started by former Apple engineers who wrote a “general-purpose mobile operating system.” TL; DR – the iPod OS was complicated, and there was no easy way to figure out how it worked without Apple’s help.
In Shayer’s entire story, it is clear that secrecy was very important. Shayer basically protected the two Bechtel engineers – Paul and Matthew – through the process, but said Apple did not provide any hardware or software. Similarly, while Shayer gave her the tools they needed to figure out how to build the device, he says he never saw the custom hardware that Paul and Matthew added to their custom iPod. When it came time to figure out how to hide the recorded data, Shayer suggested that they create a hidden partition so that if someone plugged the secret iPod into a computer, “iTunes would treat it like a normal iPod and would look like a normal iPod in the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. “
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At Apple, Shayer says: no record was kept of the project, and but four people, including Shayer, did not know it at all. (None of the four still work at Apple.) What the device was used for … no one really knows. Shayer is of the opinion that it could probably use some sort of Geiger counter DOE agents to record radioactivity levels surreptitiously while appearing to be listening to music.
It is not very surprising that the US government can approach a big tech company to help with this kind of thing. There are reasons why executives at these companies often have a safety declaration from governments – and Steve Jobs was no exception. While it is not clear but why Jobs got top security clearance, Wired notes that it may have something to do with his work at Pixar, which was spotted by intelligence agencies to display reconnaissance flight and satellite information with his Pixar Image Computer.
Although we may never know where this custom iPod was used, thanks to Shayer’s story – that’s honest a great red– we know it existed. If that’s not fodder for Apple collusion theories, I do not know what is.
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