Some journalists who read the article or twitter thread might decide to go without. But I think the reason many journalists are willing to risk bringing their phone amount to more than just the reasons Snowden mentioned (camera, microphone, and word processor). There’s the risk of government hacking but there are also various safety benefits to having a phone while traveling in a dangerous area in a foreign country. (Having a map of the area in a compact form, being able to message someone to request help if something has gone wrong, being able to look up local businesses, call a taxi service etc.) If Snowden just told journalists “don’t carry a smartphone” I think that message would largely be ignored for this reason. That might have been the reason they went with that iPhone too… probably figured it’s best to make mass adoption easier than give advice that won’t be listened too.

You’re right that the introspection engine turned out to be “too much” for most journalists. If I ran a newspaper and wanted journalists to use the introspection engine and/or remove internal microphones to replace with external mics, I’d assign it as a task to someone from IT to set that up on the phones of all the journalists who want it. But yeah, I was watching a video by the guy who Snowden collaborated with on this project (Andrew "bunnie" Huang ). He said he found out out that journalists need something that’s super straightforward to use. Afterwards he started working on another project called Betrusted which will be more straightforward for journalists. Betrusted looks interesting but it’s not finished yet. I was actually looking into it recently and didn’t realize the same guy was behind it. I’m going to post a video which where he talks about some other reasons for why he’s working on Betrusted. (Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware).

He said Edward Snowden came to him with this problem of journalists getting killed and asked him for a solution and the introspection engine is what he came up with. I think “bunnie” fell victim to this bias when assuming this is something journalists would be happy to use if they’re just shown how. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge