The cell phone cloaking technology that protected Trump’s campaign cell phone comms from being tapped
In the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election, tensions between the campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were so high that Trump’s security detail had to be increased three-fold.
Clinton was busy staving off a political backlash brought on by the Wikileaks email scandal, which many say cost her the election. Trump and his inner-circle were dodging a dossier. Russian-U.S. relations were on the chopping block and the U.S. Constitution was being lauded by corporate interest groups as an editable, antiquated document of a bygone era. Jailing journalists, a practice common in cold-war-era Russia, was becoming the new norm in the U.S.
Edward Snowden and Julian Assange were changing the way the political game was played.
How did this loose-cannon presidential candidate, a man many thought was destined to lose, manage to pull off the greatest political heist in modern history?
He stacked the deck.
He read their faces.
He anticipated their next move.
He made sure his communications were protected by the latest and greatest.
There would be no deals.
This was war.
In a small town in Canada, a man many call The Wizard, a retired intelligence veteran who did a long stint in China, sits at his desk putting the finishing touches on yet another lucrative contract for his quantum-based cell phone cloaking system. This deal is for an Indian man he met at Tim Horton’s after they struck up a conversation about the dragon on The Wizard’s jacket. A few coffees later, the fast friends were in business together. He estimates his Indian friend will net a cool million or two by the end of the year by selling subscriptions to friends and family in Gujarat and Mumbai.
Defense Enabling and Assisting Framework, or DEAF, as The Wizard calls it, protected the cell phones of Trump, some of his family members and a couple hundred members of his inner circle from being hacked during the critical months leading up to the election, The Wizard said.
Absolutely no one could tap into the comms of Trump’s inner circle.
DEAF’s creator, a spy-turned-actor-turned-high-tech-entrepreneur, knows a few things about stacking decks. “I stayed alive by being nice,” he said with a snappy Canadian drift as he lamented on his years working in the shadows.
He flashes a photo of a younger version of himself hanging out in the background of a Kennedy Center concert. In the foreground is a dashing, baby-faced Donald and his then wife, Ivana. Donald is sporting a tux and Ivana is wearing an expensive blue formal. Her blonde locks are teased to 80’s high society perfection.
The Wizard is looking down at the floor with a smirk turned upwards at the right corner as if he knows something the Trumps don’t. It’s almost as if he’s peering through a looking glass into their future, and he sees eternity.
It was February 2017 when Ret. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn resigned as the Trump’s National Security Advisor, following news reports about his communications with a Russian ambassador. The “Pizzagate” scandal alleging high-ranking Democratic National Convention members and Clinton advisors had ties to a child trafficking ring was breaking. Trump was just inaugurated and DEAF was a well-kept secret in journalistic and political circles but was making a slow crawl from obscurity mostly because of the journalists whose cell phones it protected.
That’s when, The Wizard said, that a member of the Pelosi camp tried to steal DEAF.
As The Wizard tells it, Pelosi’s relative was trying to get DEAF in the hands of a Silicon Valley law firm that represents high-tech companies. Though the deal would have netted The Wizard a hefty payout, he said he was “uncomfortable doing business with a firm that has strong ties to the Muslim world.”
“Nancy Pelosi sent a relative to Canada to meet with me. My wife and I had dinner with the relative and my wife said that I shouldn’t touch any business with Pelosi, her family, or any of their firms,” he said. “They tried everything to get DEAF and when they couldn’t, they attacked its authenticity and me personally, ” The Wizard said has he recounted the event while tempering the sound of annoyance in his voice.
Although The Wizard won’t disclose exact details about the how and when of DEAF’s development and what he calls its “secret sauce,” he swears by its ability to protect any cell phone from hackers and the prying eyes of governments and political operatives, especially when a person is on a call. (Part-way through the cell phone portion of this interview, our call dropped three times). He says DEAF has military applications but won’t go any further on the how.
Other intelligence sources not only corroborate DEAF’s existence, they say that it does what cyber technology pros say is impossible. It detects when a phone has been hacked and someone is listening and it drops the call immediately.
DEAF received its first nod of credibility when Flynn mentioned it in an early 2017 email to U.S. Army Ret. Gen. Paul Vallely.
“It is an excellent technology, and the type of niche security capabilities we need going forward, especially for our high-value people and for other assets who we are trying to protect,” Flynn said.
The owner of a private security firm who protected several presidents during his tenure as a Secret Service agent explains why DEAF. is different than anything else on the market.
“It’s not based on any cryptography or algorithms. It’s a totally different, unique and proprietary hard- and software system that serves more as a highly evolved cloaking device than it does an encryption system, the intel source said.
He goes on to explain further.
“I like to use the analogy of hiding a drop of water in the ocean. DEAF obfuscates data and voice transmissions. If you can envision a transmission of information, everything is comprised of ones and zeros. DEAF conceals information within information,” he said. “It also works at quantum speed levels, which makes information virtually impossible to capture, and even if someone was able to capture it, it would be virtually impossible to decipher.”
He went on to say that DEAF’s owners hired top-level hackers to test the system, but none have been able to penetrate it.
Although he can’t speak much about his days in China, The Wizard said he sometimes misses the people and the culture but ultimately, he doesn’t trust their business practices.
“There has been a covert war going on behind the scenes between the U.S. and her enemies who have been trying to get their hands on DEAF,” The Wizard said.
He paused as he recalled an event in early 2017 when he met a Chinese businessman who he said he later reported to U.S. federal authorities for allegedly attempting to steal information about DEAF. The man turned out to be ex-CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee, who recently pleaded guilty in federal court to spying for China.
The Wizard leaned in close and peered through the video camera as he recounted details of another headline-grabbing mystery he said is tied to DEAF.
“Do you remember that plane, the MH-370 that went missing a few years back? Well, the kids on the plane tried to steal a vital component of what would later become DEAF but they were offloaded at Diego Garcia,” he said. Then, as if it was nothing, he went back to chatting about the auditions for his latest role as Santa for a jewelry commercial. (MH-370 went missing in March, 2014 while carrying 239 passengers from Kuala Lumpur Airport to Beijing).
While Trump dukes it out with Chinese leaders in what’s being touted as a risky move that could escalate quickly into a full-on trade war to protect U.S.-based technology, the mysterious little-known story of the death of Dr. Shane Todd, the Seth Rich of the Huawei scandal, is beginning to re-emerge.
Todd was working for the Institute for Microelectronics in Singapore in 2012 when he was found dead in his apartment. Though investigators ruled the death to be suicide, Shane’s family insist it was murder.
Right before he died, Todd told his family that he was being pressured to compromise U.S. security, and he refused to do so. He was worried about his own safety because of the work he was doing with a Chinese company.
The Chinese company was later identified as Huawei, through documents found on Todd’s external Seagate hard drive, after his death. Huawei just filed a legal motion challenging a government ban on its equipment as unconstitutional. It’s the latest effort by the Chinese tech company to push back against Trump-sanctioned policies limiting its global reach.
Eddie Du, an Applied Research scientist in a recent tweet expressed dire concern about the state of U.S.-Chinese high-tech trade relations.
The tweet quoted Yan Xeutong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He said, “Huawei is a ‘symbol of the national future of China,” and that “The people know, the government knows that if Huawei cannot survive, [China] will have no hope for rejuvenation.”
In essence, if Huawei fails, the proverbial Trump card will have been played and the U.S. could win the war to protect cell phone communications from the prying eyes of Chinese spies, many of whom would like to see U.S. presidential election results veer to the left. Most of the microchips that are in U.S. cell phones and many spy satellites are manufactured in China and Huawei is one of China’s largest cell phone manufacturers. Because of Trump’s rigorous trade policies, that’s about to change.
Dr. Shane Todd was sitting in his apartment having dinner when his Skype rang. On the other line was The Wizard calling to check on how things were going while Todd was working on projects in Asia. Todd lamented that he missed home and The Wizard, a family friend, cracked a joke to help lift his spirits. A week later, Todd was found dead in his apartment and Malaysian authorities ruled his death a suicide but Todd’s family say they have reason to believe he was murdered.
Todd, an expert in MEMS switching devices (also used for spy satellites) as pioneered by scientists at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and U.S. Army Research Labs, was working on a power component that would later be incorporated into DEAF. In essence, the component allows DEAF to run infinitely without needing to be charged. For that revolutionary discovery, The Wizard said, Todd paid with his life.
DEAF’s intriguing history doesn’t stop there. Several years ago, when I first spoke to The Wizard while I was sorting out the details of an article about Benghazi and Gadaffi’s death which intel sources say was linked to a large amount of gold, The Wizard introduced himself with an alias and then in the next breath, dropped the mother of all bombs.
“We helped protect Julian Assange,” he said. “And, we helped get Snowden out and DEAF protected the cell phone communications.”
Then, he hung up.
He re-emerged again during Trump’s campaign with details about how DEAF saved the then-presidential candidate from the prying ears of his political adversaries at the Democratic National Committee.
The Wizard said he’s privatizing and opening up DEAF for a nominal subscription-based fee so U.S. citizens can have the piece of mind knowing that their conversations are safe.
“It’s what I do,” he said and then smiled with a crooked, soft grin and looked down at his desk and up again with eyes that seemed to peer into forever. “No one has the right to steal anyone else’s freedom and privacy. We are all patriots in this fight.”
By Alana Cook
Visit the Defense Enabling and Assisting Framework or DEAF website
