Pentagon Personnel Now Talking on 'NSA-Proof' Smartphones
Pentagon Personnel Now Talking on 'NSA-Proof' Smartphones
By Aliya Sternstein
March 30, 2015
The Defense Department has rolled out supersecret
smartphones for work and maybe play, made by anti-government-surveillance firm
Silent Circle, according to company officials.
Silent Circle, founded by a former Navy Seal and the
inventor of privacy-minded PGP encryption, is known for decrying federal
efforts to bug smartphones. And for its spy-resistant “blackphone.”
Apparently, troops don’t like busybodies either. As part
of limited trials, U.S. military personnel are using the device, encrypted with
secret code down to its hardware, to communicate “for both unclassified and
classified” work, Silent Circle chairman Mike Janke told Nextgov.
In 2012, Janke, who served in the Navy’s elite special
operations force, and Phil Zimmermann, creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP, in
short), started Silent Circle as a California-based secure communications firm.
The company is no longer based in the United States, ostensibly to deter U.S.
law enforcement from seeking access to user records.
But that hasn’t stopped the Pentagon, a longtime Silent
Circle apps customer, from buying the Android-based blackphone, which came out
in 2014.
The “wild thing about it is, we’re a Swiss firm,” Janke
said Monday. "Our phones aren’t produced in the U.S., but because of the
fact that [DOD] can test our phone in a lab -- they can look at the code that’s
open source -- they’ve been testing it for a year now and using it.”
The blackphone’s operating system and software options
enable customers to essentially log in to the same phone under multiple
personas, each with separate security restrictions. Specifically, a feature
called “Spaces” insulates data activity in one profile from the actions
happening in other compartments.
In effect, this means Facebook’s WhatsApp chat tool and
family photos might be accessible on your personal space, while encrypted
communications and classified maps might be available on your work space, Janke
said. To move from one user profile to another, you would swipe the phone and
put in a pin code.
DOD, not Silent Circle, configures the mobile email,
private network, Web browser and other apps. The data flows through military
servers and Silent Circle does not have access to the government’s encryption
keys for unlocking secret messages.
“Your basic calls are encrypted and they run through
device-to-device,” Janke said. “We can’t be evil. Neither can they.”
Federal authorities, particularly the FBI, have urged
communications providers to install backdoors into their technology so that
criminal activity can be monitored and stopped. The concern, they say, is that
bad actors, including terrorists and pedophiles, are using encryption tools to
mask their identities, whereabouts and illegal operations.
An undisclosed number of blackphones are “out in the
field,” Janke said. DOD receives a discount off the $629 retail device by
purchasing in bulk, just like Silent Circle’s corporate customer base, which
includes at least one major U.S. oil company, Janke said.
“We believe that encrypted and secure communications and
devices are a given right whether you are working for DOD or you’re working for
a human rights group in Botswana,” Janke said. “We speak out about governments
of the world vacuuming up, abusing the privacy rights of their citizens, but we
produce hardware and software that works for governments as well as human
rights activists equally.”
Silent Circle sells services and products to many Fortune
500 companies concerned about intellectual property theft, as well as
privacy-conscious citizens, but counts about 14 governments among its customer
base.
On Monday, Defense officials declined to comment on
specific brands that have been distributed to service members and referred to
information that Pentagon Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen recently
provided during a press briefing earlier this month.
He said Defense personnel are using unclassified
BlackBerry smartphones and a modified commercial Android-based phone configured
for secret-level work.
A spokeswoman for the Defense Information Systems Agency,
which oversees the Pentagon’s mobility program, said, “DISA’s top priority when
it comes to secure mobile technology is producing enterprise capabilities that
the entire DOD, as well as other federal agencies, can leverage.”
Another smartphone designed by veteran defense supplier
Boeing, known as "The Black," also is vying for the military’s
business. The Black looks and functions like a generic Android smartphone, but
doubles as a top secret information system. The self-destructing phone can scan
itself inside and out for signs of tampering and render itself inoperable if
anything is amiss.
On Monday, Boeing officials said The Black is in
production, but declined to comment on whether its phone is part of the program
outlined by Halvorsen. The Black is NSA-approved to protect classified data and
meets DOD's “National Information Assurance Partnership” standards, company
spokesman Andy Lee said.
“Boeing Black is currently deployed to a number of
defense and government customers,” he said.
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