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[MWC2015] Privacy defending Blackphone 2 and Blackphone tablet announced

Silent Circle, the Swiss manufacturer of the super-secret Blackphone, has announced a second in its line of secure handsets for the masses along with a seven-inch tablet running its own PrivatOS 1.1 and a suite of new apps for business.

The announcements were made at Mobile World Congress this morning, where the inventor of the PGP method of email encryption and chief scientist at Silent Circle, Bill Zimmerman, said that the firm hadn’t planned on creating business apps earlier. Rather, he says, they got “waylaid” by demand: 32 of the top 50 companies in the Fortune 500 had placed orders for their hardware, which led to a bit of a rethink.

PrivatOS uses a highly customised GNU/Linux kernel based on Android to encrypt pretty much everything you do on your handset, and the first Blackphone was announced a year ago and launched in July. To date, the company says its sold three quarters of a billion dollars worth of phones (R8.7bn). It’s no Apple, for sure, but not bad for a specialist phone vendor in its first six months.

CEO of Silent Circle (and former Navy SEAL), Mike Janke, said the reason for the first generation’s success was simple. Big headlines like stolen pictures from Hollywood stars’ phones, email databases from Sony Pictures going astray and the Edward Snowden leaks – not to mention our own Spy Cables controversy here in South Africa – have led a lot of people to become more aware of privacy and what their phones are up to. The Sony leak in particular showed employees how their personal data was being inadvertently leaked onto corporate servers in this new “Bring Your Own Device” world.

As a result, the phone designed for privacy activists with NGOs in mind has been very popular with businesses too.

“Never before have private citizens of the world been under such a barrage from governments,” Zimmerman said, “Never before have businesses been so under attack.”

Building on that success, the firm plans to launch Blackphone 2 in July of this year, priced similarly to the Blackphone 1 at around $629 (R7 300). The new phone (pictured above) is slick, and feels not unlike a Sony Xperia Z with its 5.5-inch HD screen, Snapdragon processor and Gorilla Glass front and back.

By the end of the year it will also introduce a seven-inch tablet, the Blackphone +, price to be confirmed.

It was software that dominated the firm’s press conference today, though. The new hardware will run the latest version of PrivatOS, which includes features like drag and drop video conferencing for business, and ‘Silent Spaces’. The latter is a little like Samsung Knox or BlackBerry’s Balance, in that it allows you to silo off apps and data for personal or business use. Unlike those two, however, you can create (and wipe) unlimited numbers of instances which effectively behave like entirely self contained phones with no data leakage between.

In addition, Silent Circle said that it is introducing a new, fully encrypted calling plan, Silent World. Available in South Africa already, like other parts of the Blackphone’s communications abilities, Silent World doesn’t use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for sharing keys. Zimmerman explained that it’s entirely peer-to-peer.

“No-one can threaten us to get access to you keys, we don’t have them,” he said, “We’ve seen some spectacular failures of PKI [which underpins PGP mail]. The failures we’ve seen in that kind of technology have been so catastrophic you couldn’t write fiction about them.”

PKI underpins PGP mail, which isn’t supported by Blackphone yet. Janke said that the company does plan to announce a fully encrypted email replacement later this year, after Blackphone 2 is launched. In the meantime, he says that most large enterprises rely on the kinds of instant messaging for internal communications which Blackphone does support.

Many of the Silent Circle apps are cross platform, he added, allowing employees to communicate between different operating systems without compromising security.

Zimmerman admits that there are limits to Blackphone’s capabilities, but as a lifelong privacy campaigner building products for enterprise was the right thing to do.

“We can’t protect against every threat of highly organised intelligence unit against an individual,” he said, “But we can make a really good product that does a good job in protecting large numbers of people. We can protect a lot of people against the pervasive surveillance that happens today.”

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