The secret services of China and Russia regularly spy on the phone calls that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, makes via his personal iPhone, ignoring the many requests for more caution from his advisors and from US intelligence, which strongly have them. not recommended for use. Trump's unsafe communication practices and national security risks were recounted by the New York Times in a lengthy article based on the testimony of White House and Secret Service collaborators, frustrated by Trump's carelessness with smartphones that may be easily intercepted.
Trump has three iPhones: two modified by the NSA – the government agency that deals with cyber security – to reduce the risk of wiretapping, and a personal one on which there are no particular limitations and which is therefore the main cause of concern for the US intelligence and the president's aides. The third iPhone is used by Trump because, unlike the other two, it gives the possibility to keep an address book with telephone numbers.
The two iPhones modified by the NSA are set up to use Twitter and some other applications, and to make phone calls, respectively. Their functionality is very limited, including the inability to keep a contact list, and for this Trump uses a third, personal one, with whom he basically does what he wants. Unable to stop him from using it, and having never been able to get Trump to use the White House's secure landline, his aides are now limited to hoping that the president will not disclose confidential information during calls to his friends who may be eavesdropping. , explains the New York Times.
Trump seems to almost completely ignore the risks involved in using a normal smartphone for his activities, and ignores several other rules designed to reduce the dangers. The security protocols require the president to change his smartphones every 30 days, avoiding that cell phones that may have been compromised are used for longer times. The sources consulted by the New York Times say that this practice is almost never followed, because Trump does not like the data saved on the phones being lost along the way, which cannot be transferred from one model to another due to the risk of importing. any malware in the new ones.
Limited access to direct media is a problem that the presidents of the United States, and more generally all heads of state and government, have been dealing with for some time. Barack Obama, Trump's predecessor, was only allowed to use an iPhone during his second term (previously he used a modified BlackBerry), but the smartphone was heavily limited: he couldn't make calls, he couldn't receive emails except from a particular selection of contacts, had no camera and microphone, could not be used to download applications at Obama's discretion, and had the SMS sending system disabled. Talking about the limitations of his iPhone, during a TV interview on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show in 2016, Obama said, “It's a great phone, the best on the market, but it doesn't take pictures and it doesn't text you. The phone function is off, you can't even listen to music on it. You know the toy phones for 3-year-olds? A thing like that”.
The iPhone Trump uses for Twitter does not use the cellular network and can only connect to the Internet via WiFi. The problem, however, is the way it is used by Trump: it should only connect to trusted and secure wireless networks, but there seem to have been occasions when he has used less reliable ones. To this are added forgetfulness and neglect: in 2016 Trump forgot his iPhone on a golf cart at a golf course in New Jersey, requiring a large-scale search of his phone which risked being lost forever, with the data inside. of the president of the United States.
However, the New York Times article does not explain in detail what techniques the Chinese and Russian secret services may be used to intercept Trump's phone calls, limiting itself to this description:
Calls made from the telephone are intercepted as they travel from a repeater to the cable systems to the switchboards, which make up the international telephony networks. Calls made from any mobile phone – be it iPhone, Android or older Samsung models – are vulnerable.
The description is very generic – perhaps deliberately, not to offer too many details: as a rule, articles like this never contain information that could undermine national security – or perhaps because the possibility is contemplated that more systems are used to intercept Trump. Alex Stamos, former Facebook security manager, wrote on Twitter that wiretapping could take place by exploiting an unspecified vulnerability of the “Voice over LTE” (VoLTE) system, that is, using the 4G network to make voice calls with a better audio quality. Stamos, however, recalled that to date there are no known systems to decrypt calls on LTE, although this does not exclude that there are solutions to do so and that the intelligence of some governments are aware of it.
Regardless of the systems used in practice by China and Russia, the New York Times article was greeted with concerned tones by numerous cyber and homeland security experts in the United States. To varying degrees, most governments around the world spy on each other, but each of them still follows certain precautions to mitigate the risks. Landlines in the White House, for example, offer greater safeguards and security, but Trump is not always willing to use them, especially when he wants to make personal calls with friends and characters with whom he maintains family business and whom he does not want to keep track of. .
The most intense spying on phone calls takes place by the Chinese government, writes the New York Times. Already in the past, with other presidents, China had tried to exploit their networks of acquaintances to influence their policies, in order to gain some advantage, especially on the commercial level. The ability to directly access what Trump says on the phone to friends and acquaintances amplifies these capabilities, allowing China to have more control over its influence tactics.
The objective of the Chinese government in the last period has been to avoid a continuous escalation in the so-called “trade war” between the United States and China, started by Trump himself with the decision to impose tariffs on numerous goods imported from the Chinese market. The idea is that, thanks to the interceptions and the influence of some acquaintances, the situation can be kept under control, avoiding more serious damage to the economic system. According to sources consulted by the New York Times, the Russian government instead maintains a more rudimentary control, given the good personal relations between the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Trump himself. Russia's interests are currently already sufficiently protected, making it unnecessary to influence activities such as those attempted by the Chinese government.
