Silent Circle launches first NSA-proof smartphone

Edward Snowden's NSA revelations have made us all too aware of the extent of the governments snooping activities. Whether it's our emails, online activity or phone calls, there's a strong chance someone else could access the information we're sharing if they really wanted to.

Silent Circle has followed in the footsteps of Boeing, and has launched its own "blackphone" – a smartphone that fully encrypts any texts, voice or video calls made from it. The Android device even uses a secure VPN (virtual private network) to allow anonymous web browsing.

With a price tag of about £380, it's not cheap – but the security features it boasts are impressive and are bound to tempt the most security conscious of users. Silent Circle is incorporated in Switzerland, and hosts from Swiss data centres, meaning they are exempt from US security laws.

Perhaps the most notable feature though, is that the encryption resides on the phone itself, rather than in the data centre. The data passes through the servers, but the encryption keys required to unlock the data are kept on the handset. In a nutshell, this means that even if the company did have to succumb to a government request for information, all they could actually hand over is a load of encrypted (unreadable) data.

This isn't the first step we're seeing towards tighter security measures implemented on mobile devices; earlier this year, Boeing launched its own secure "blackphone". Boeing's device also encrypts calls, but it has the added function of remote-wiping the phone's contents if it detects the casing is being tampered with, rendering it useless.

Further to this, all of the smartphone giants (Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft) have now implemented "kill switches" onto their devices – which render the device useless if it were to get into the wrong hands.

While obviously these measures don't completely eradicate the risks of data loss (ultimately human error still tends to be the biggest culprit), they're going to go some way in protecting consumers. It'll be interesting to see if and how these security features trickle down into more affordable models in the coming months.