Ride the Lightning

The OFF Pocket: Stealthware for Your Cell Phone

September 5, 2013

Hat tip to Dave Ries for pointing me to this New York Times post about stealthware for your cell phone.

Adam Harvey, one of the designers interested in developing countersurveillance fashion to foil [bad pun] facial recognition, recently created a project on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site, to see if he could get enough interest to finance a cellphone accessory, the OFF Pocket. It looks like a small sheath for a mobile device and works as an electromagnetic barrier, functioning as a Faraday cage, a space where radio waves cannot pass through, preventing the penetration of signals that transmit data and audio. Among other things, this would keep your location private.

Readers may recall that Edward Snowden asked visitors in Hong Kong to refrigerate their phones while visiting him, as refrigerators with enough metal can also act as Faraday cages. The OFF Pocket replicates the same idea.

Mr. Harvey and his design partner, Johanna Bloomfield, had a goal of raising $35,000, enough to manufacture a small line of their phone protectors. The project hit its goal in seven days; it currently has close to $60,000 pledged through the site. Nearly 600 OFF Pockets have been ordered.

The OFF Pockets currently cost $85, but Mr. Harvey hopes to begin manufacturing enough of them to bring the cost down. The design, which weaves together a number of different metal and nylon materials, “works like a metal cage but is entirely flexible and made of fabric,” he said.

As Dave noted, what a great way for phone thieves to defeat remote locating and wiping tools!