60 Minutes Hacks Congressman Ted Lieu’s Lent iPhone

The other night, CBS News’s 60 Minutes did a segment on cell phone security (or the lack thereof), titled “Hacking Your Phone”:

“We wanted to see whether Nohl’s group could actually do what they claimed — so we sent an off-the-shelf iPhone from 60 Minutes in New York to Representative Ted Lieu, a [Taiwanese American] congressman from California. He has a computer science degree from Stanford [’91] and is a member of the House committee that oversees information technology. He agreed to use our phone to talk to his staff knowing they would be hacked and they were. All we gave Nohl, was the number of the 60 Minutes iPhone that we lent the congressman.”

60_Minutes_Congressman_Ted_Lieu_Hacking_Your_Phone

I’ve blogged about Congressman Lieu in the past and have met him a few times. Lieu has both a computer science and law degree, and thus often interviewed during the whole Apple vs. FBI iPhone encryption legal battle. Congressman Liu has been a strong defendant on privacy and encryption for individual and against any “backdoors.”

A group of professional hackers demonstrate how they can access Lieu’s phone calls, location and even turn on the phone’s camera and view remotely. Pretty frightening…

You can watch the entire 60 Minutes segment below:

Make you kind of think who is listening to you on your phone or watching you via your phone’s camera … pretty scary.

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About John

I'm a Taiwanese-American and was born & raised in Western Massachusetts, went to college in upstate New York, worked in Connecticut, went to grad school in North Carolina and then moved out to the Bay Area in 1999 and have been living here ever since - love the weather and almost everything about the area (except the high cost of housing...)
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