Journalist Ronan Farrow on keeping your devices spyware free

Investigative journalist Ronan Farrow has one tip for those worried about their devices being hacked: Turn your phone off more often.

Appearing on the Daily Show a week after the release of his new documentary feature, Surveilled, Farrow argued that the general public should be “freaking out” more about the insidious use of government sanctioned surveillance technology on citizen’s personal devices. And, as part of that awareness, more of us should be safeguarding our tech.

“Restart your phone everyday,” he advises Daily Show correspondent Desi Lydic and the show’s viewers. “That’s one practical piece of advice. A lot of forms of this kind of spyware will be foiled by a reboot… Keep everything updated, is the other thing.”

Farrow’s personal and professional dive into government-led tech surveillance is documented in the hour-long HBO Max exposé, a visual tour through the journalist’s 2022 New Yorker investigation uncovering a web of governments using the internationally-traded spyware Pegasus.

In the feature, Farrow narrows in on the work of Catalonian activists and their families, friends, and coworkers targeted by the Israeli-owned NSO Group. Farrow and his sources explain how they were able to discover and trace back their hacked devices—some journalists and activists got around the invasions using DIY aluminum foil Faraday cages. The documentary, through interviews with the tech’s anonymous buyers and sellers, as well as government officials themselves, makes the case that no one is safe from Big Brother’s eyes.

“I keep getting told, by experts in this technology, that if our government doesn’t curtail the use of thisand there’s a lot of skepticism that the incoming administration will—you won’t know if you’re on some target list,” Farrow told Lydic. “You won’t know if your phone is being hacked or how that data is being used. It’s easy to see this as a distant issue… but it can come for anyone.”