The US government built a top-secret iPod

In 2005, before the iPhone, Apple allegedly helped a US Department of Energy contractor modify a 5thiPod generation to secretly record and store data. Tthe exact reason why remains a mystery, but a former Apple engineer involved in the project believes it could have been a clandestine Geiger counter.

This crazy story is courtesy of David Shayer, a former Apple software engineer who was with the company for 18 years and has worked on devices such as iPod and Apple Watch. Shayer, who wrote the story for TidBITS, tells a “gray day at the end of 2005” when the boss of his boss, the director of iPod software, told him that he was assigned to a top secret project with two engineers from the US Department of Energy to build a “special iPod.”

In fact, the two engineers were from Bechtel, an American defense contractor for the DOE. The demand was to build a normal, functioning iPod that could also secretly record data on custom hardware. In other words, spy grade shit. At the time, the iPod was not a particularly easy device to modify. Indeed, according to Shayer, the iPod operating system was not based on any other Apple operating system. Instead, it was based on a “benchmark platform that Apple bought from a company called Portal Player” and cobbled together with code from Pixo, a company created by former Apple engineers who wrote a ” general purpose mobile phone 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.

Throughout Shayer’s story, it is evident that secrecy was paramount. Shayer basically walked Bechtel’s two engineers – Paul and Matthew – through the process, but said Apple didn’t provide any hardware or software. Likewise, while Shayer gave them the tools they needed to figure out how to build the device, he says he never saw the custom hardware Paul and Matthew added to their modified iPod. When the time came to figure out how to hide the recorded data, Shayer suggested creating a hidden partition so that if someone plugs the secret iPod into a computer, “iTunes would treat it like a normal iPod and it would look like an iPod.” normal in Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. “

At Apple, says Shayer, no record of the project has been kept, and only four people, including Shayer, knew about it. (None of the four work at Apple yet.) As for the use of the device … no one really knows. Shayer thinks it was probably some type of Geiger counter agent DOE could use to surreptitiously record radioactivity levels while appearing to be listening to music.

It’s not terribly surprising that the US government could enlist the help of a big tech company for this sort of thing. There are reasons why the executives of these companies often have government security clearance – and Steve Jobs was no exception. Although it is not clear Why Jobs received a higher security clearance, Wired notes that this may have something to do with his work at Pixar, which was hired by intelligence agencies to render reconnaissance flights and satellite information using his Pixar imaging computer.

While we may never know what this personalized iPod was used for, thanks to Shayer’s story – which is honestly a good read– we know it existed. If that’s not fodder for Apple’s conspiracy theories, I don’t know what is.