Hardware Kill Switches

There is an increasing threat of cameras and microphones being used to spy on you.1"HP’s stupid audio-driver logs every keystroke you make (and it has an API!)" — BoingBoing, May 2017 2"Google admits its new smart speaker was eavesdropping on users" — CNN, October 2017 3"Research shows how MacBook Webcams can spy on their users without warning" — The Washington Post, December 2013 4"Chrome Flaw Allows Sites to Secretly Record Audio/Video Without Indication" — The Hacker News, May 2017 5"Spying through strangers’ webcams just got easier" — CNBC, January 2016 6"How the NSA plans to infect millions of computers with malware" — The Intercept, March 2014 (see "GUMFISH", "CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE", "GROK", etc.) 7"Wikileaks: CIA has tools to snoop via TVs" — BBC, March 2017 8"Alexa, what other devices are listening to me?" — CNN, January 2017 9"Lenovo’s Superfish security snafu blows up in its face" — CNET, February 2015 (see also the Wikipedia article) 10"The Webcam Hacking Epidemic" — The Atlantic, December 2014
Leaked documents have shown plans from the NSA to infect “millions” of computers with malware called CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE (which turns a computer’s microphone into a bug) and GUMFISH (which turns your camera into a spycam). Such attacks will only become more common in the future.

We decided to stop these types of attacks entirely: with switches that physically sever the circuit to the microphone and camera. Try hacking that!

All Librem laptops and phones offer Hardware Kill Switches that physically sever the circuit at the hardware level.

The Librem 14 and Librem 15 laptops offer kill switches for:

• Wireless & Bluetooth
• Camera & Microphone

The Librem 5 phone offer kill switches for:

• Cellular Modem
• Wireless & Bluetooth
• Camera & Microphone

Curious about how it all works? You can read more about the way we designed our hardware kill switches.