Shhhh. Keep your voice down. Close the blinds and turn up the music. Someone might be listening.
If you believe the government is spying on your calls, emails, and texts — or you work for the government, and are thus pretty much assured someone is spying on your calls, emails, and texts — then Silent Circle’s $799 Blackphone 2 is for you.
Designed by Phil Zimmerman (inventor of PGP encryption), ex-Apple encryption wonk Jon Callas, and former Navy SEAL Mike Janke, the Android-based Blackphone 2 is easily the world’s most secure and private smartphone. These people are not messing around.
Related: BlackBerry’s Android Slider Phone Is Called the Priv and Will Be Available This Year
Every phone call you make with the Blackphone is encrypted within Silent Circle’s private cloud-based network. So even if the spooks hiding in that black van parked down the street managed to isolate your call, they wouldn’t be able to decipher what you’re saying.
All the data stored on the phone is also automatically encrypted, so if the forces of evil got ahold of your handset, they’d have to know your password (or possibly torture it out of you) to get your private information.
You can create up to four discrete “spaces” on the phone, each with its own apps, settings, data, and passwords. So one space could belong to your employer, running its corporate apps and storing your work data; another space could be dedicated to your personal apps and information; a third could be used when you travel to known hotbeds of cyberspying, such as China or Russia, and a fourth could serve your secret life as a double agent in the employ of S.H.I.E.L.D.
If your phone falls into enemy hands, or you simply no longer need one of these spaces, you can remotely wipe that area while leaving the others untouched. You can also wipe the data from a single app — a feature Silent Circle calls “Brace for Impact.”
The company even maintains its own tiny Silent Store, featuring about a dozen curated apps — such as a private browser, a digital vault, apps for managing your Facebook posts, and so on — that pass its stringent security standards.
In short, if Edward Snowden owned a smartphone, it would probably be a Blackphone 2.
The spy who logged me
One of the things that makes the Blackphone 2 safer than, say, traditional Blackberries — the former go-to handset for people with high security needs — is that there’s no central place where the encryption keys are stored. Each time you make a voice or video call, a unique key is generated and exchanged between your handset and the recipient’s on the Silent Circle network. When the call ends, the key disappears. The same protections apply to text messages and file transfers over the network.
(For security geeks in the audience, this technology is known as the Zimmerman Real-time Transfer Protocol, or ZRTP. You can read more about it here.)
In the past, hostile governments have demanded access to the servers where the keys where kept to decrypt the calls and messages of private citizens. With the Blackphone 2, that’s impossible. No servers, no spying.
Another way the Blackphone 2 differs from other secure phones is the degree of control it gives you over the apps you use. If you use Facebook, the Blackphone 2 lets you control 16 different privacy settings, most of which are set to ‘on’ by default in other phones. For example, you can allow Facebook to always have access to your camera or location, deny it access, or tell it to ask each time. The same holds true for Gmail, Twitter, Firefox, or any other app you install.
Because the phones are managed directly by Silent Circle, not wireless carriers, they’re also likely to be better protected against threats from cyberattacks and malware. The company promises to push out critical security updates within 72 hours of a new vulnerability being discovered. And it maintains a bounty program that pays researchers to find security flaws in its Silent OS software.
Aside from all of that, it’s pretty much an ordinary Android phone running Lollipop, with a 5.5-inch HD screen, Gorilla Glass, a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front cam, 32GB of onboard storage, and a micro-SD slot for adding up to 128 GB more. It runs on an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip that was personally inspected by Phil Zimmerman to ensure no backdoors were installed by any three-letter agencies that shall remain unnamed.
The company had not named any wireless carrier partners as this story was being prepared.
The human factor
Obviously, no phone, no matter how secure, can protect you from yourself. The Blackphone 2 won’t stop you from oversharing on Facebook or using your work email for nefarious purposes. If you sign into your Google account, the data mongers in Mountain View will still know what you’re up to. You’ll just have a lot more control about the information that leaks from your phone when you’re not paying attention.
Likewise, communications are only fully encrypted when one Blackphone 2 calls another. If you use your secure phone to call an ordinary handset, your communications could still be intercepted at the point where the conversation enters the normal phone network.
Still, if security and privacy are the things you crave most in a smartphone, you’ll want to take a good hard look at the Blackphone 2, especially if you can’t wait for Blackberry’s Android-based Priv phone, due out later this year.
Your safety could well depend on it. Because they really are watching.