Journalists are not paid enough to buy disposable iPhones frequently.
If I were Apple, I'd give journalists all the "disposable" iPhones they need to swap them frequently for free.
My only condition would be to periodically inspect them for hacking activity, or have them specially instrumented to detect it. It would be a good way to ferret out state-actor zero days (or increase the security of the platform by making state-actors horde exploits even more jealously).
Apple could do it practically for free too, if it was something like "Any accredited journalist can trade their iPhone for a refurb at any Apple store at any time. We'd appreciate, but not require, some information about the general areas of stories you cover and any threats you're suspicious might be focused on you."
Also, this comment isn't intended to touch the question of Apple's trustworthiness so please don't wave downvote over that, I am merely stating that such a system would _really_ motivate three-letters to put an immense amount of pressure into compromising such a system (whether they did so with or without Apple's co-operation can remain untouched).
EDIT: What's to stop Mr. Greenwald from sending a buddy from an old job to swap a new device on his behalf?
I misread the original proposal a bit and had assumed it'd be a mail-in-service, but with even determination the three-letter folks could probably leave spiked devices in the stores glenn would be likely to walk into. This is more reasonable but I still have reservations.
On the other hand - you've now identified the phones for remote exploit. Also identifying which journalists are significant enough to be beneficiaries of this program is probably hard.
It's not like _any_ journalist would trust this service at an Apple Store in Saudi Arabia, and probably not the UAE, Oman, or Qatar either. (Or may other countries.)
Being "not a perfect and universal solution" doesn't make it worthless. Snowden isn't about to stroll into Apple Store Moscow to take advantage of a refurbed iPhone. I suspect things would be different if Omar Abdulaziz could have dropped into Apple Store Toronto and swapped his Pegasus-infected phone over...
As far as I can tell, "journalist accreditation" has no objective meaning and is determined on an organization-by-organization basis using subjective standards. Here is the list of criteria the UN uses: https://www.un.org/en/media/accreditation/request.shtml
At first glance, Greenwald would seem to qualify by that standard, provided whoever was judging him were reasonable (by my personal standards) in judging criteria such as whether The Intercept is a "recognized media organization." However I also notice that some of the criteria listed on the page seem very restrictive and could quite possibly disqualify a lot of investigative journalists (requiring six publications per year, when that investigative journalist may be working on serious stories that take more time than that...)
I wonder if Jamal Khashoggi and Omar Abdulaziz would evaluate (or "have evaluated", in the case of Jamal) the risk of "TLA's who have the power to coerce Apple" vs "Saudi Security and Royal Family"?
You are right, in that this is adding an extra organisation you need to trust (although if you're carrying an iPhone you've already surrendered a significant amount of trust to Apple and their ability to resist TLAs).
A possible workaround might be to make the bar of "accredited journalists" super low (perhaps "anyone who's ever had a published byline in anything accepted as an original source by Wikipedia", and push it super publicly, so pretty much every journalist from cutting edge human rights activist/journalists down to the cub reporter on University newspapers is swapping their phone for refurbs every 3 months...
Not saying it’s super practical but definitely a failure point.
Not necessarily, the journalist could go to a random store and the process could be setup as an exception to a normal purchase flow, so the journalist only needs to identify themselves after the phone has been removed from stock (and any effort to swap it would be super suspicious).
You missed a key point.
Having a turned employee is only helpful if the person you're targeting goes to that person, but the whole point of the process I outlined was to make it too difficult to predict or control which employee the targeted person would interact with, which makes turning employees impractical (since you'd have to turn so many to have a reasonable chance of success that you'd probably just reveal your attack instead).