You can't hide those Covenant Eyes

Newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson has porn spyware on his phone. If that doesn't worry you, it should.

Mike J. and his new (non) accountability partners. Source: National Review.

In just two short weeks we've learned a heck of a lot about Congressman Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), recently elected Speaker of the House after just 2,736 votes by the GOP majority.

• He has a "black son" whom he and his wife "adopted" when the boy was 14 and he was 25. [1]

• He is 51 years old, has been a member of the US Congress for seven years [2] and a lawyer since 1998, but apparently does not have a bank account (though does somehow manage to pay two mortgages).

• His wife Kelly Johnson runs a Christian Gay Conversion Therapy business (or used to — the website mysteriously went dark the day after he got elected) called Onward Christian Counseling Services.

• He is a big fan of a spyware app he voluntarily installed on his phone to keep him from looking at porn. That app is called Covenant Eyes, and is available on the iPhone and Android app stores.

That last nugget is worth exploring in a bit more detail.

Covenant Eyes is an "accountability app," designed to help people with their porn addictions. It works by filtering all the traffic on your phone through its own VPN and blocking access to adult sites and search results on all your phone's browsers — essentially turning them all to their Safe Settings. This is not unique (parents having been using these apps for many years — think Net Nanny). The unique bits are A) the obnoxious Christian overlay and B) the fact you can designate someone (a spouse, a priest, your secret gay lover) as your "accountability partner" to get reports on all your naughty activities, including fuzzed screenshot snaps of your phone.

Don't let the cheery video lady fool you. Covenant Eyes is a porn blocker with extra helpings of shame.

Johnson's fondness for Covenant Eyes was surfaced by a (not) Twitter user named ReceiptMaven, who found an obscure video interview with Johnson at a "War on Technology" conference where he talked up the app's ability to spy on his handset activities.

"My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. [3] He's 17. So he and I get a report of all the things that are on our devices once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I'm proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate..." [4]

Kelly Johnson’s former gay conversion therapy site, since flushed down the Internet glory— err, memory hole.

There’s a new clown in town

Why is this important? Well, aside from being ringmaster of the Insane Clown Posse, Capitol Hill division, Johnson is now suddenly second in line in succession to the presidency, and a member of the Gang of Eight — the group of House and Senate leaders who are briefed on top secret national security matters.

In other words, he is the LAST person on earth (besides maybe Biden and Harris) who should have SPYWARE ON HIS PHONE. Especially spyware that tracks his naughty, possibly not-so-squeaky-clean proclivities. [5]

Covenant Eyes also offers classes on how to stop using porn for good. But apparently it’s still OK to use it for evil.

Let's say you work for a hostile nation state that would like access to our country's most vital secrets. One way you might go about getting access is to obtain compromising information about someone's not-very-Christian obsessions and blackmailing them. If you knew they were using such an app, you could ask your team of highly capable hackers to break into that app's servers and grab the goods directly.

So instead of spending untold thousands of dollars on Pegasus — extremely sophisticated spyware used by nation state intelligence agencies to tap the phones of dissidents, journalists, and other enemies of the state — they can just pay $18.99 a month to this shady Christian outfit in Owosso, Michigan, and log in.

Life in the fascist lane

In September 2022 Dhruv Mehrotra wrote a story for Wired about this genre of "shameware," of which Covenant Eyes is the market leader.

The current iteration of the Covenant Eyes app was developed by Michael Holm, a former NSA mathematician who now serves as a data scientist for the company. The system is allegedly capable of distinguishing between pornographic and non-pornographic images. The software captures everything visible on a device’s screen, analyzing the images locally before slightly blurring them and sending them to a server to be saved. “Image-based pornography detection was a huge conceptual change for Covenant Eyes,” Holm told The Christian Post, an evangelical Christian news outlet, in 2019. “While I didn’t yet know it, God had put me in that place at that time for a purpose higher than myself, just as I and others had desired and prayed for.”

So, to recap: Spyware app written by an actual spy, who is also a bit of a nutloaf, used by one of the most powerful people on the planet, who apparently keeps all of his money in a hollowed-out Gideon Bible tucked beneath the marital bed and is most definitely not in the closet.

Seems perfectly fine to me.

Did I mention it gets worse? It does. Wired deconstructed the Covenant Eyes Android app and found that it was taking advantage of accessibility features meant to help people with disabilities to spy on "almost everything someone does on their phone" — the websites they visit, the apps they use, things purchased on Amazon, Instagram accounts viewed, and so on.

After Wired contacted Google, it suspended Covenant Eyes from the Play store. It's now back, presumably no longer abusing those accessibility functions.

Phone home, DT

For the record, I downloaded and installed Covenant Eyes on my iPhone. I then assigned one of my Internet alter egos (Bob) as my "accountability partner." That involved downloading and installing a second app ("Victory") where reports on my nefarious activities would be sent.

Smells like Victory. Also, like church lady pantyhose.

The activities it recorded were pretty tame. The app did an excellent job of clogging up all of my attempts to access naughty things on my browsers, but had almost zero impact on everything else. I asked friends to send me innocent photos on various messaging apps, which Covenant Eyes did not detect. I was able to download a gay dating app (no, I'm not switching teams), also without it showing up on Victory. In other words, if I were really addicted to porn, gay or otherwise, there are countless ways I could continue to access it without ever tripping one of CE's alerts.

The good news? As anti-porn spyware goes, Covenant Eyes is crap.

On the other hand, all the Internet traffic on my phone is being routed through Covenant's VPN, which the app informs me "does not serve as a traditional VPN" (still trying to suss out what that actually means). If I were a hacker employed by, say, China or Iran or Russia, I would be breaking into that VPN right now and rerouting all its traffic to my own servers.

The people who lost their minds about Hillary keeping private servers in her garage must be going ape shit over this one, right? (Yes, it's a rhetorical question.)

To be fair: Maybe this guy really is just using this app to keep his son off porn sites. (He wouldn't be the first.) Maybe he doesn't understand the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad security implications of using such software for a person in his position. He's still a Christian Nationalist who thinks The Handmaid's Tale is a how-to book.

He's clearly hiding something, and probably not just the amount of money in his bank account. [6]

Does any of this surprise you? Express your shock and awe in the comments below.

[1] I'm using quotes because he appears to have just taken the kid in without bothering with any paperwork or telling anyone else, apparently. Totally normal behavior here, nothing to be concerned about.

[2] A job that pays $174K per year, along with one of the best benefit and perks packages on the planet. Yet Johnson told Fox News he lives "a modest, paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle." As Speaker, he gets an additional salary bump of roughly $50K. Maybe he'll finally be able to start up that Christmas Club savings account he’s had his eye on.

[3] Presumably his actual son, and not just another random teenager he plucked off the street.

[4] Who is accounting to whom, and how clean is Mr. Mike's slate? are questions a reasonable person might ask.

[5] Already there are scurrilous and completely unconfirmed rumors that Mike Johnson has a secret life that allegedly involves a male escort from New Orleans. Sing it with me: "There is a house in New Orleans, they call the Risin' Son..."

[6] For the record, I don't care if he's gayer than Pete Buttigieg. And if he wants to stay in the closet, trying on all of Momma Kelly’s dresses, more power to him. But the smug hypocrisy and strident anti-LBGTQ stuff is a bit much to swallow.