Edward Snowden performs radical surgery on a phone to make it "go black"

If you think that your phone may have been hacked so that your adversaries can watch you through the cameras and listen through the mics, one way to solve the problem is to remove the cameras and microphones, and only use the phone with a headset that you unplug when it's not in use.

In this video for Vice, Edward Snowden demonstrates how to remove the surface-mount mic and camera components from your phone's logic board to render it blind and deaf except when you connect external sensors to it.

On tomorrow's episode of Vice, the man himself shows correspondent Shane Smith how to make a smartphone go black by removing the cameras and microphones so they can't be used against you. Find out how to do it yourself in the clip above from Vice, which airs tomorrow at 11 p.m. on HBO.


Watch Edward Snowden Teach Vice How to Make a Phone 'Go Black' [Angela Watercutter/Wired]