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Shayer said he met two engineers from Bechtel, an American defense contractor, and were told they would build the iPod – all he had to do was provide the assistance. they needed Apple. IPods were to look and function like regular iPods, but would contain custom hardware that could record data and not be detected by the average user, Shayer said.
“It was not a collaboration with Bechtel with a contract and a payment,” Shayer wrote. “It was Apple doing a favor under the table for the Department of Energy.”
Apple, Bechtel and the Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the project.
The apparent collaboration with the government to add secret features to Apple products stands in stark contrast to the company’s clashes with the FBI and the Department of Justice in recent years over its refusal to create backdoors in iPhones. Apple has repeatedly repeated requests by US authorities to allow access to suspects’ iPhones during mass shootings, claiming that building such a workaround would compromise the privacy of all of its users.
Shayer said he never found out exactly what kind of hardware the two Bechtel engineers were looking to add to the secret iPod, and that they were careful to keep it from him. But he has a theory: Maybe they built a “stealth Geiger counter” to measure radioactivity.
“You can walk around a town, casually listening to your songs, while recording evidence of radioactivity – looking for smuggled or stolen uranium, for example, or evidence of a dirty bomb development program. – without the press or the public being able to get wind of what was going on, ”he wrote.
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