Earlier this year we wrote,
Adafruit cares deeply about privacy, security and human rights – our community and customers trust us with their data and it’s up to us to demonstrate the type of company we are and the type of people we are. We like to say “be excellent to each other” – those are words, and there are also actions.
You can easily turn any Android device running 4.1 or later into an instant home security system with SMS notification, recording, and more, using the recently announced Haven app.
Wired reports on release of the app,
YOUR DIGITAL SECURITY, any sufficiently paranoid person will remind you, is only as good as your physical security. The world’s most sensitive users of technology, like dissidents, activists, or journalists in repressive regimes, have to fear not just hacking and online surveillance, but the reality that police, intelligence agents, or other intruders can simply break into your home, office, or hotel room. They can tamper with your computers, steal them, or bodily detain you until you cough up passwords or other secrets.
To help combat that threat, one of the world’s most well-known activists against digital surveillance has released what’s intended to be a cheap, mobile, and flexible version of a physical security system. On Friday, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and its president, famed NSA leaker Edward Snowden, launched Haven, an app designed to transform any Android phone into a kind of all-purpose sensor for detecting intrusions.
Read more from Wired here.
The app, available for Google Play devices (the app is unavailable at this time for iOS) is described as:
Haven is for people who need a way to protect their personal spaces and possessions without compromising their own privacy. It is an Android application that leverages on-device sensors to provide monitoring and protection of physical spaces. Haven turns any Android phone into a motion, sound, vibration and light detector, watching for unexpected guests and unwanted intruders. We designed Haven for investigative journalists, human rights defenders, and people at risk of forced disappearance to create a new kind of herd immunity. By combining the array of sensors found in any smartphone, with the world’s most secure communications technologies, like Signal and Tor, Haven prevents the worst kind of people from silencing citizens without getting caught in the act.
We are announcing Haven today, as an open-source project, along a public beta release of the app. We are looking for contributors who understand that physical security is as important as digital, and who have an understanding and compassion for the kind of threats faced by the users and communities we want to support. We also think it is really cool, cutting edge, and making use of encrypted messaging and onion routing in whole new ways. We believe Haven points the way to a more sophisticated approach to securing communication within networks of things and home automation system.
The app itself is open-sourced on GitHub, as well as being built from other open-source repositories:
This project contains source code or library dependencies from the follow projects:
SecureIt project available at: https://github.com/mziccard/secureit Copyright (c) 2014 Marco Ziccardi (Modified BSD)
libsignal-service-java from Open Whisper Systems: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/libsignal-service-java (GPLv3)
signal-cli from AsamK: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli (GPLv3)
Sugar ORM from chennaione: https://github.com/chennaione/sugar/ (MIT)
Square’s Picasso: https://github.com/square/picasso (Apache 2)
JayDeep’s AudioWife: https://github.com/jaydeepw/audio-wife (MIT)
AppIntro: https://github.com/apl-devs/AppIntro (Apache 2)
Guardian Project’s NetCipher: https://guardianproject.info/code/netcipher/ (Apache 2)
NanoHttpd: https://github.com/NanoHttpd/nanohttpd (BSD)
Milosmns’ Actual Number Picker: https://github.com/milosmns/actual-number-picker (GPLv3)
Fresco Image Viewer: https://github.com/stfalcon-studio/FrescoImageViewer (Apache 2)
Facebook Fresco Image Library: https://github.com/facebook/fresco (BSD)
Audio Waveform Viewer: https://github.com/derlio/audio-waveform (Apache 2)
FireZenk’s AudioWaves: https://github.com/FireZenk/AudioWaves (MIT)
MaxYou’s SimpleWaveform: https://github.com/maxyou/SimpleWaveform (MIT)
Happy 2018 Everyone!