Quick: where do you go to purchase a super secure phone? Because a high end retailer that specializes in such a market doesn't exist to the general public (and isn't yet easily available to private companies, governments, etc.), you must be extremely careful with your standard smartphone or pick the cheapest option instead: prepaid cell phones.
If you're an ordinary citizen, you'll likely have to continue with pre-paid phones, but if your profession requires digital protection, your next company phone may come specially designed from Boeing.
The aerospace company and "largest manufacturer of commercial jetliners and military aircraft combined" has spent the last three years developing a secure smartphone that's now available to "select clientele," Tech Crunch reported.
"We saw a need for our customers in a certain market space" Rebecca Yeamans, a Boeing spokeswoman, told Reuters.
"The U.S. defense and security communities demand trusted access to data to accomplish their missions," Boeing writes in its website description of the Black Phone, as it is called. "Despite the continuous innovation in commercial mobile technology, current devices are not designed from inception with the security and flexibility needed to match their evolving mission and enterprise environment."
The Black Phone is designed chiefly for security purposes. Thus, it's considered limited by typical smartphone measurables, but highly advanced in protecting its contents. Any attempt to remove the phone's backing to extract data automatically resets the phone to zero -- a useful feature if the perpetrator isn't aware of it or if the user knows in advance if his or her phone is about to be confiscated (which sounds like a more probable scenario in movies than real life).
Still, the Black Phone's other prime feature, encrypting calls, could have prevented the recently leaked, unencrypted conversation between U.S. and Ukraine diplomats in which the U.S. criticized the European Union for its handling of the Ukraine crisis, Reuters pointed out.
Other than that and the phone's dual sim card layout, Android operating system, and ability to connect with biometric sensors and satellites, Boeing, appropriately, has been tight-lipped on the phone's other features, their manufacturing partners, and their clients.
Reuters' article hints that the phone could one day be available to the public. Yet, as President Obama remarked in his recent profile in the New Yorker, operating on the assumption that any action one performs on one's cell phone will end up in the news could still be the surest form of security available.
