Blackphone 2: The Smartphone Built for Spies (and the People They Spy On)

Shhhh. Keep your voice down. Close the blinds and turn up the music. Someone might be listening.

If you believe the government is spying on your calls, emails, and texts — or you work for the government, and are thus pretty much assured someone is spying on your calls, emails, and texts — then Silent Circle’s $799 Blackphone 2 is for you.

Designed by Phil Zimmerman (inventor of PGP encryption), ex-Apple encryption wonk Jon Callas, and former Navy SEAL Mike Janke, the Android-based Blackphone 2 is easily the world’s most secure and private smartphone. These people are not messing around.

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Every phone call you make with the Blackphone is encrypted within Silent Circle’s private cloud-based network. So even if the spooks hiding in that black van parked down the street managed to isolate your call, they wouldn’t be able to decipher what you’re saying.

All the data stored on the phone is also automatically encrypted, so if the forces of evil got ahold of your handset, they’d have to know your password (or possibly torture it out of you) to get your private information.

You can create up to four discrete “spaces” on the phone, each with its own apps, settings, data, and passwords. So one space could belong to your employer, running its corporate apps and storing your work data; another space could be dedicated to your personal apps and information; a third could be used when you travel to known hotbeds of cyberspying, such as China or Russia, and a fourth could serve your secret life as a double agent in the employ of S.H.I.E.L.D.

If your phone falls into enemy hands, or you simply no longer need one of these spaces, you can remotely wipe that area while leaving the others untouched. You can also wipe the data from a single app — a feature Silent Circle calls “Brace for Impact.”

The company even maintains its own tiny Silent Store, featuring about a dozen curated apps — such as a private browser, a digital vault, apps for managing your Facebook posts, and so on — that pass its stringent security standards.

In short, if Edward Snowden owned a smartphone, it would probably be a Blackphone 2.