The surveillers are building the locks

The surveillers are building the locks

Four years ago, if someone told you that the solution to government spyware would come pre-installed on your iPhone, you would have been forgiven for laughing. The same companies that built the tracking infrastructure were not going to be the ones to dismantle it. That was the conventional wisdom, and for good reason.

The spyware industry made the conventional wisdom obsolete. Pegasus could infect an iPhone through a WhatsApp call the target never answered. Paragon's Graphite spyware used a zero-click iMessage exploit to compromise recent iPhones without the target tapping anything at all. When a journalist in Barcelona can be surveilled by a European government using tools bought from an Israeli vendor, the threat is no longer theoretical and no longer confined to dissidents in authoritarian regimes. It is a mass-market product sold to democratic governments and used against journalists who cover them.

Which brings us to the present moment. Apple has offered Lockdown Mode since 2022. It is free, built into every iPhone, and according to Apple, with independent corroboration from Amnesty International's security lab and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, it has worked. Zero documented successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled device in almost four years. Google is now following with Advanced Protection Mode, shipping in Android 16 this fall.

Here is the part that requires suspended disbelief, or at least some: the surveillers are building the locks. And the locks appear to function.

Lockdown Mode works by eliminating the attack surface. When enabled, it blocks message attachments, limits web browsing to a hardened renderer, prevents FaceTime calls from unknown numbers, disables Game Center, strips location metadata from shared photos, requires the device to be unlocked before USB accessories can connect, blocks 2G and 3G networks, and prevents MDM enrollment. These are the precise vectors that commercial spyware uses to gain initial access to a device. Apple removed them.

Citizen Lab documented Lockdown Mode stopping at least one NSO Group Pegasus attack in the wild. Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, who leads Amnesty International's security lab and has investigated dozens of spyware attacks, told TechCrunch that his team had not seen evidence of a successful mercenary attack against a Lockdown Mode-enabled device. Apple confirmed it in March. The feature does exactly what it says on the tin, at least so far.

Google's Advanced Protection Mode, rolling out to Android 16 this fall, takes a similar approach. It enforces Verified Boot, enables exploit-mitigating Memory Tagging, blocks sideloading, blocks 2G-only networks, protects USB connections when the device is locked, and includes theft detection that auto-locks the phone. Google counted 75 in-the-wild zero-day exploits last year, many of them first weaponized by commercial spyware vendors and later repurposed by state hackers. Advanced Protection is Google's answer to a problem it helped create by running the world's dominant mobile operating system.

The most interesting new feature is Intrusion Logging, developed in partnership with Amnesty International. When enabled, it writes encrypted, tamper-proof forensic logs to a vault that even Google cannot access. This matters enormously for high-risk users. A journalist whose phone was compromised needs evidence they control, not evidence that lives on servers they do not. Amnesty called it a fundamental shift in the quality of forensic data available on Android.

The obvious problem is the messenger. Apple and Google are surveillance companies. Their business models depend on collecting and monetizing user data. They are now the primary vendors of defense against government-grade spyware. These facts sit uneasily together, and the discomfort is warranted.

No independent security audit of Lockdown Mode or Android Advanced Protection has been published. Apple and Google are asking high-risk users to trust them with the most sensitive layer of device security while providing no verifiable proof of their claims beyond their own statements and the corroboration of researchers who work closely with them. That is not nothing, but it is not an audit.

Both companies also control the very attack surface their defenses are meant to eliminate. Apple can update Lockdown Mode's security properties with a software update that users cannot independently verify. Google controls Android at a level that makes Advanced Protection's tamper-proof logs a matter of policy, not cryptography. For most users, that is fine. For journalists, activists, and officials who have the most to lose from a breach, it creates a dependency on companies whose interests do not always align with theirs.

There is also the structural irony that the restrictions Apple and Google now present as defensive features are also, inconveniently, the features they have spent years fighting against. Sideloading restrictions, closed ecosystems, locked bootloaders: these were presented as quality controls and security measures, and they are, but they also happen to protect Apple's App Store revenue and Google's Play Store revenue. Lockdown Mode makes a virtue of the cage. Advanced Protection does the same.

None of this changes the practical reality: these tools work, and they are free, and they are already on hundreds of millions of devices. For the specific threat model of mercenary spyware from vendors like NSO Group, Intellexa, and Paragon, Lockdown Mode has a four-year record that no commercial security product can match. The alternatives are custom ROMs, which are not available on iPhone and are impractical for most Android users, or specialized hardening that requires expertise most targets do not have.

The deeper question is whether the surveillance industry can be trusted to build its own antidote. The honest answer is: partially, and with caveats that the companies would prefer you not to examine too closely. Lockdown Mode and Advanced Protection exist because the spyware industry became so aggressive and so visible that Apple and Google had no choice but to build something. The tinfoil-hat crowd was right about the threat. Whether the locks Apple and Google have built are genuinely in the users' interest, or whether they are just cage doors with better hinges, is a question that will only be answered when one of them fails.

That day has not come yet. When it does, the story will not be about the features that worked. It will be about the ones that did not.