Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, second in line to the presidency and the most powerful elected Republican in the United States government, says he installed third-party monitoring software on all his electronic devices, including cell phone and laptop, raising questions about possible national security implications.
Last year, Johnson bragged to an audience that he and his 17-year old teenaged son use a software service they have installed on all their devices to hold each other accountable to not access pornography.
“So, Covenant Eyes is the software that we’ve been using a long time in our household,” Johnson said in video (below) unearthed last week by social media user Receipt Maven, and reported on Sunday by Rolling Stone.
Johnson explained he had first learned about Covenant Eyes at “a Promise Keepers event in the early 2000s.” Promise Keepers is an evangelical Christian men’s group that has been accused of being anti-LGBTQ, and promoting patriarchal male superiority over women.
Calling it “accountability software,” Johnson said, “men’s Bible study groups will do it. That’s how it’s presented in Promise Keepers but they also mentioned, ‘Hey, when your kids become teenagers, especially if you have boys, dads, they’re talking to the guys at this event. You might want to think about doing this with your sons.'”
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He explained the software “scans every, all the activity on your phone or your devices, your laptop, tablet, what have you. We do all of it.”
“It’ll pick up almost anything, it looks for keywords, search terms and also images and it will send your accountability partner a blurred picture of the image,” which he notes can also be “unblurred.”
“Convicted reality TV star Josh Duggar and Lakers player Lamar Odom have also used the software,” Insider adds.
Rolling Stone’s report focused on what it called the “creepy Big Brother-ness of it all,” but Receipt Maven asked the key question which seems to have gotten lost in most of the reporting on the video.
“A US Congressman is allowing a 3rd Party tech company to scan ALL of his electronic devices daily and then uploading reports to his son about what he’s watching or not watching….” Receipt Maven wrote. “I mean, who else is accessing that data?”
Johnson said he installed the software, which scans all devices approximately once every 60 seconds, on all his devices.
Presumably he uses those devices for his work as a U.S. Congressman and now Speaker of the House.
Are there possible national security implications surrounding Johnson’s use of the software?
Back in June, WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra reported: “The Covenant Eyes app was developed by Michael Holm, a former National Security Agency mathematician who now works as a data scientist for the company. It captures everything visible on a device’s screen, taking at least one screenshot per minute. It then analyzes the screenshots locally before slightly blurring them and saving them on a server. Images the system marks as possibly ‘explicit’ are flagged for further review.”
WIRED’s Mehrotra described the extent of the access the Covenant Eyes app has to a user’s data and actions.
“While the images in the Covenant Eyes reports that WIRED reviewed are partially blurred, it is sometimes possible to discern sensitive information from them. For instance, one Covenant Eyes report shows a screenshot of [a user’s] device while a phone call was in progress. The report clearly shows the name of the person being contacted. Another shows screenshots of [that user’s] mother-in-law’s bank statements and her Gmail inbox, although the sensitive details in both are unreadable.”
The WIRED article focused on the legal and constitutional issues when the app is used “in a criminal- legal setting” to track behavior of people charged with certain crimes, but it also reaffirms another concerning aspect of the use of the software: “by indiscriminately surveilling whatever the phone is displaying, the app could collect sensitive data…”
Covenant Eyes, Mehrotra adds, does not only collect screenshots: “the app monitors every single thing a user does on their devices, then sends the data it collects, including screenshots, to an ‘ally’ or ‘accountability partner,’ who can review the user’s online activities.”
On its website (in a bulleted list altered here for ease of reading) Covenant Eyes says:
“The Covenant Eyes app captures a screenshot on your device at least once per minute. Our artificial intelligence (AI) program looks for explicit content in the screenshot. Next, the software shrinks the screenshot on your device, blurs it, and modifies it to protect your private information. We transfer the blurred screenshot to our database via HTTPS (a secure transfer protocol). We store the image on secure servers that use AES 256-bit encryption (the same encryption your bank uses). We don’t keep screenshots for more than 30 days. We then permanently and irretrievably delete them from our databases.”
Watch Johnson in the video above or at this link.