US government built secret iPod with Apple?s help, former engineer says

An Apple engineer who helped launch the iPod said he helped the US government build a secret version of the device that could covertly collect data.David Shayer, the second software engineer hired for the iPod project in 2001, said he first learned of the project in 2005, when he received an office visit from his boss’s boss.“He cut to the chase,” Shayer recounts in a post published on Monday. Among other things, Shayer helped the men find their way around the Windows-based developer tools Apple used at the time to build software for ARM chips.Shayer said that Apple didn’t allow the engineers access to its source code server directly, but instead the company provided a copy of the source code on a DVD with the agreement it was never to leave the building. They had added special hardware to the iPod, which generated data they wanted to record secretly. He knew that the engineers were combining the modified OS with some sort of hardware added to a fifth-generation iPod. The objective was to create a device that could record ambient data and write it to the device disk—all in a way that couldn’t be easily detected.Based on the Department of Energy’s oversight of nuclear weapons and programs, he speculates that the secret iPod was to include a Geiger counter that could covertly sniff out stolen uranium, evidence of a dirty bomb development program, or similar things.Apple didn’t respond to multiple emails sent over two days seeking comment for this post.