Only 4 individuals at the business knew about the task, according to former Apple application engineer David Shayer.
2 males from a defence contractor had come at Apple in 2005, on behalf of the US Department of Energy, he stated.
They’d wanted help to construct an iPod that looked as well as worked the same as a typical one but secretly recorded information using hidden more hardware inside.
Apple had helped the engineers create a customized edition of the iPod applications to accommodate the secret gadget, Mr Shayer believed.
“They were very careful to ensure I never discovered the hardware,” he had written in a long posting for Apple newsletter Tidbits.
“And I never did.”
He said the 2 engineers, from defence contractor Bechtel, had worked out of an office at Apple’s structures for a few months.
“They desired to include some customized hardware to an iPod and capture details from this particular customized hardware to the iPod’s disk in a means which could not be quickly detected,” he wrote.
“But it also had to appear and work like a typical iPod.”
The pair had been provided a text of the iPod system’s source code on DVD and purchased their personal products at stores to experiment on, Mr Shayer believed.
“This was not an effort with Bechtel with a shrink as well as payment,” he wrote.
“It was Apple performing a favour under the kitchen table for the Department of Energy.”
Nuclear power
Mr Shayer never found out precisely what the 2 engineers had been creating but suspected “something like a stealth Geiger counter” to evaluate light without becoming observed.
The Department of Energy is actually, among other features, to blame for nuclear power.
The story has been backed by some other Apple workers of the moment.
Tony Fadell, the former v-president of iPod division, tweeted the story was “absolutely spot on” in addition to “real without having a doubt”.
“Crazy fantastic cool technology the federal government was doing work on then… I can easily just imagine what’s preparing these days,” he included.
Apple has yet to react to a demand for confirmation of the story.
The company makes privacy a vital advertising point of the iPhones of its, top to disagreements with the US Department of Justice.
But the high amount of secrecy – as well as the fact the 4 individuals who had known about it’d everything since still left Apple – suggested, Mr Shayer said: “The PR folks will tell you truthfully that Apple has no history of any such project.”
