DoD Does Irony

Loyal readers will recall that on occasions I have written about surveillance of phones, emails etc. My thanks to a Twitter chum of mine who gave me the the heads up about the following.

It seems that the USA's DoD is also concerened about such matters, and has therefore decided to issue its people with NSA proof phones (despite the fact the the FBI has called for encryption keys to be made available to law enforcement agencies- there's irony for you!).

As per the inquirer:

"THE US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE (DoD) has started rolling out Silent Circle's 'NSA-proof' Blackphone, despite FBI claims that encryption is a "huge problem" for law enforcement.

Silent Circle chairman Mike Janke revealed during an interview with NextGov that the company has been providing the DoD with a job lot of highly encrypted smartphones in a trial for soldiers and staff to use for work and play following a year of secret testing. 

The DoD was unable to confirm the move, but a spokeswoman for the Defence Information Systems Agency (DISA), which oversees the Pentagon’s mobility programme, said in a statement: "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."

The news that the Pentagon has given the Blackphone its seal of approval will come as a surprise to many, as it did to Silent Circle it seems. 

"The wild thing about it is that we’re a Swiss firm," said Janke. "Our phones aren’t produced in the US, but because the [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 move is perhaps surprising given the FBI's recent moves to dodge smartphone encryption by urging communications providers to install backdoors so that criminal activity can be monitored and stopped."

That being said, the safest way to avoid state surveillance is to stick to good old fashioned word of mouth conversations (sans mobile phones and other bugs).


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