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The Spy Inside Your Smartphone
Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Known for its investigative reporting, El Faro has been referred to as "a breakthrough digital newspaper blazing an independent and ethical trail in Central America."
So when reporters at the Salvadoran news outlet noticed their cellphones acting strange all of a sudden—batteries draining, unexplained overheating—they had a weird feeling that someone was accessing their messages. They sent one reporter's phone to Citizen Lab, a watchdog group, and the analysis found something shocking: It was infected with Pegasus, a military-grade surveillance software that can copy messages, harvest photos and even control the phone's camera and microphone.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app."Okay, I'm the target right now," reporter Julia Gavarrete recalled. "But the thing was, it's obvious that it's not only me."
The watchdog checked more journalists' phones, and it quickly became clear that El Faro was under a massive surveillance campaign. But who was behind it?
In this episode, Reveal partners with the Shoot the Messenger podcast to investigate one of the biggest Pegasus hacks ever uncovered.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in September 2023.
Have Smartphones Created An Anxious Generation?
Hugh Breakey, Griffith University
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's new book The Anxious Generation delivers an urgent call for action.
Haidt argues that the evidence is in. Teenagers' widespread use of smartphones is causing a mental health crisis. Individual, collective and legislative action is required to limit their smartphone access.
Review: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane)
Haidt begins his book with an allegory. Imagine someone offered you the opportunity to have your ten-year-old child grow up on Mars, even though there is every reason to believe that radiation and low gravity could greatly disrupt healthy adolescent development, leading to long-term afflictions. Surely, given the risks, you would refuse the offer.
A decade ago, parents could not have known the threats lying within the shiny new smartphones they presented to their excited teenagers. But the evidence is mounting that the children who grew up with smartphones are struggling.
Haidt calls the period from 2010 to 2015 the "great rewiring". This was a period when adolescents had their neural systems primed for anxiety and depression by extensive daily smartphone use.
The kids aren't alright
Haidt's two central claims are that Gen Z is suffering from a major mental illness epidemic and that smartphones are largely to blame.
Readers should be wary about both these claims – not in the sense that we should resist believing them, but rather we should not be too eager to embrace them. After all, it is perilously easy to believe that the kids aren't alright. Elders routinely despair of the younger generation.
Haidt explicitly acknowledges that other experts have argued against claims of widespread teenage anxiety. In response, he cites recent evidence from a host of different sources: not just self-reports of problems, but hard data on self-harming, suicide rates, diagnosed mental disorders and mental health hospitalisations.
While Haidt focuses on the US, he observes concurrent shifts in youth mental health in many Western countries, including Australia.
But do these findings constitute an epidemic demanding society-wide responses? Here the book would have benefited from systematically drawing together the science in easily understandable terms.
Haidt's marshalled evidence consistently shows a rise, beginning around 2010 and starting with girls, in a host of adolescent mental health disorders and wellbeing concerns. Broadly speaking, the figures in the US show mental health issues that previously plagued around 5-10% of adolescents growing to afflict around twice that amount.
On the one hand, these data suggest the term "anxious generation" is somewhat misleading. A large majority of Gen Z do not have anxiety disorders – and of those who do, almost half would have done so irrespective of smartphone usage.
On the other hand, the numbers remain concerning. No parent would be comfortable handing their child any substance they knew had a one-in-ten chance of causing the child a mental disorder within a few years. There are also data suggesting that, even among those without disorders, children increasingly suffer from loneliness and other concerning outcomes.
Perhaps the most alarming part of the steep curves and precipitous falls in Haidt's many graphs is not the current figures, but the current trajectories. In almost all cases, things are getting worse. It is possible we may be in the early days of an unfolding catastrophe.
Jonathan Haidt argues smartphones pose a threat to the mental health of young people. Miller Center, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY Insert your ideological preference If we accept there is a serious problem, then the question arises as to its cause. Again, we must resist intuitively appealing answers to this question. The worry is that we will all look into a "witch's mirror", seeing what we want to see or what our preferred ideology tells us we should expect. I am old enough to remember panics about heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons.
Indeed, it is possible that Haidt himself fell into this trap, at least in part. In a previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff argued that harmful worldviews and beliefs prevalent in US educational settings were priming young people for worrying mental health outcomes.
Haidt thinks this coddling remains a factor, but now recognises the hypothesis fails to fit the data. Specifically, he acknowledges the plummeting mental health of adolescents is evident in many countries, and across all educational levels and social classes.
Are there alternative hypotheses that fit this data? Perhaps kids today are anxious and depressed because they should be anxious and depressed? After all, they inherit a world facing runaway global warming, systemic injustices, insecure work futures and more. Yet Haidt rightly observes that past generations with dire prospects did not show similar mental health outcomes.
Ultimately, the problem is likely to stem from a mix of factors. Haidt argues the current situation was not caused exclusively by smartphone use. Recent decades have also seen the rise of "safetyism" – a term he and Lukianoff coined to describe the preferencing of individual safety ahead of other values – and helicopter parenting. These phenomena have increasingly shielded children from the vital development provided by physical play and unsupervised exploration of the real world.
Haidt argues that parents became fearful of the healthy risks posed by the outside world, even as they catastrophically opened their children up to the unhealthy dangers of the virtual world.
Developmental concernsSmartphones did not initially raise major developmental concerns for children. The problems started around 2010 when they combined with other factors like social media, high-speed internet, a backward-facing camera (encouraging selfies), addictive games, easily accessible pornography, and free apps that maximise profit by cultivating addiction and social contagion.
This toxic technological mix allowed smartphones to take over children's lives. Usage rates averaging seven hours a day gradually but profoundly rewired their maturing brains. Haidt thinks this rewiring gives rise to four "foundational concerns":
Building on these foundational concerns are ones specific to each gender. Girls proved more vulnerable to the damaging effects of social media, while boys retreated into online gaming and pornography.
Dangers to adolescent mental healthAn intriguing part of Haidt's book is its account of the way smartphones became addictive and damaging.
Teenagers, like all humans, have several basic needs and emotional drivers: for social connection and inclusion, for a sense of individual empowerment and agency, for sexual fulfillment, and so on.
Haidt explains that, normally, for almost all human history and evolution, these incentives drove teenagers to do things in person, in the real world – things like making friends, playing games together, navigating disputes, getting tasks done, developing romantic attachments and taking physical risks.
While these activities can lead to injuries, tears and frustrations, they are nevertheless important for teenagers' mental health and development. Children are antifragile: they need these types of risks and stressors to grow properly.
Smartphones – and their apps, games and social media – also provide responses to all these drivers. But they do so without prompting the above activities and the important outcomes they deliver, such as close friendships and resilience.
For example, a teenager might feel lonely and want connection, so they join Instagram or TikTok. Social media provides a type of connection and delivers a temporary dopamine hit. But it fulfils the teenager's immediate need in a way that does not involve real world connections and challenges. This only makes them lonelier and more isolated in the longer term.
Social media fulfils immediate needs, but can have long-term consequences. Tint Media/Shutterstock What can we do? Even if we accept Haidt's claims about the rise in anxiety fuelled by smartphones, it is not clear how we should respond. Perhaps radical solutions are unnecessary. In time, things might work themselves out, such as through further technological innovations.
Haidt's view is that collective action is critical. As he sees it, the problem is not only that smartphones are intrinsically useful and alluring (which is why we all wanted them in the first place); it is not only that their apps are addictive. The problem – especially in a school setting – is that if most of a teenager's peers have smartphones, then the ones who don't have one risk being social outcasts, perpetually "left out" and never "in the know".
For this reason, Haidt thinks actions by isolated parents are unlikely to be successful. Ironically, the same heightened parental concern for child safety Haidt has previously critiqued may prove to be a powerful force for change. At least some parents are likely to view their children's future mental health as a non-negotiable good and treat smartphones as the modern-day hypodermic needle.
For his part, Haidt argues for four new norms, to be created by parents' collective action alongside legislative and regulatory reforms:
Haidt's book leaves the reader with a further, deeper worry.
Suppose he is right that the things that lead to human flourishing involve real world physical encounters with other people: family, close friends, romantic partners, neighbours, local community groups and members.
Such encounters are often unpredictable, messy, inconvenient and frustrating. Conversely, the online world is becoming easier, cheaper and more alluring every day. Innovations and algorithms continually hone our experience, as profit-driven industries work ever more aggressively to capture and keep our attention.
In the face of all this, it may be that the real world can't compete. The mental health concerns currently plaguing Gen Z might turn out to be ones that every generation will face.
If so, Haidt's suggested reforms might mark the first foray in what will be a long battle between the human need for real-world experience and connection, and the powerful temptations of an online world that offers something we can't possibly resist: "a little bit of everything, all of the time".
Hugh Breakey, Deputy Director, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Griffith University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Apple's Ethical Sourcing Under Fire: Accused Of Using Conflict Minerals In IPhones
The computer giant is accused by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) of using "illegally exploited" minerals in its goods, which is a serious accusation. The complicated subject of conflict minerals and the moral sourcing policies of large corporations are brought to light by this accusation.
A Formal Notice and Serious Accusations:Through its Paris-based legal team, the DRC government served Apple with a formal cease and desist letter. Apple is said to have purchased minerals that are smuggled into neighboring Rwanda from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they are supposedly "laundered and integrated into the global supply chain." Tin, tungsten, and tantalum—commonly referred to as "3T minerals"—are minerals that are essential to many electrical equipment, including smartphones such as Apple's iPhones.
Additionally, according to the DRC's lawyers, Apple's reliance on these "conflict minerals" encourages violence and violations of human rights in the country's war-torn east. They claim that armed organizations frequently dominate mining activities, which results in forced labor, child exploitation, and environmental harm. Additionally, the lawyers argue that Apple's goods are "tainted by the blood of the Congolese people."
Conflict Minerals and the Global Supply Chain:For more than 20 years, the DRC's conflict mineral problem has drawn attention from throughout the world. The nation has an abundance of natural resources, but decades of instability and civil conflict have produced a situation where armed organizations take use of these riches to finance their operations.
In response, governments around the world have enacted laws such as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in the US, which mandates that businesses reveal the source of any conflict minerals used in their goods. Enforcing ethical sourcing methods throughout a complex international supply chain is still quite difficult, though.
Apple's Response and the Road Ahead:Apple has not yet responded in-depth to the DRC's allegations. However, the business keeps a webpage detailing its initiatives for ethical mineral sourcing. According to Apple, it performs due diligence on its partners and suppliers to make sure they comply by all applicable laws and regulations.
The DRC's notice has prompted demands in the ICT sector for greater accountability and transparency. Human rights organizations and consumer advocates want Apple to take more decisive action to guarantee that no conflict minerals are used in its products. This might entail more cooperation with the DRC government and outside groups, more stringent supplier audits, and independent verification of sourcing procedures.
Ethical Sourcing and Human Rights:The charges against Apple emphasize how urgently the problem of conflict minerals needs to be addressed. Governments, international organizations, and technology businesses need to collaborate to establish a more ethical and transparent sourcing environment.
It is also the responsibility of the consumer to demand greater transparency from the businesses they support. Tech companies may support the promotion of ethical business practices and the protection of human rights in areas affected by conflict by being held responsible for their sourcing methods.
It is unclear how this issue will turn out. One thing is certain, though: the tech industry as a whole may take inspiration from Apple's handling of ethical sourcing procedures when it comes to the DRC's claims.
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