MIC-LOCK. Oliver Stone’s film Snowden (2016) shows the scale of US intelligence intrusions into the private lives of people deemed suspicious — and into the lives of their friends and relatives. The operations are carried out without any authorisation from the courts. A British-made spyware tool — also in American hands — can remotely switch on a person’s phone or computer camera. That allows an intelligence officer to watch, in real time, whatever the smartphone or PC camera is seeing at that exact moment. On a mobile phone, that means both cameras: the front-facing one and the one on the back. Even if the cameras show nothing, the audio can still be captured. In other words, the headphone connection can be turned into a one-way feed, relaying to the intelligence services what the phone’s owner says — and what the people around them say. There are countermeasures against these unlawful intrusions. To prevent audio capture, for example, you can use MicLock. It is a simple plug available for both Android and Apple devices. You insert it into the port normally used to charge the device. In doing so, a journalist can stop intruders from using the phone’s microphone to listen in.