Anonymous ID: 0a4d5c April 16, 2020, 9:55 a.m. No.8813209   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3385 >>3457 >>3536

>>8812857

>Silent Circle - Secure Communications

New “Surveillance-Proof” App To Secure Communications Has Governments Nervous

 

Oct 16, 2012

Silent Circle promises to make encryption easy for everyone.

 

Lately, Mike Janke has been getting what he calls the “hairy eyeball” from international government agencies. The 44-year-old former Navy SEAL commando, together with two of the world’s most renowned cryptographers, was always bound to ruffle some high-level feathers with his new project—a surveillance-resistant communications platform that makes complex encryption so simple your grandma can use it. This week, after more than two years of preparation, the finished product has hit the market. Named Silent Circle, it is in essence a series of applications that can be used on a mobile device to encrypt communications—text messages, plus voice and video calls. Currently, apps for the iPhone and iPad are available, with versions for Windows, Galaxy, Nexus, and Android in the works. An email service is also soon scheduled to launch. The encryption is peer to peer, which means that Silent Circle doesn’t centrally hold a key that can be used to decrypt people’s messages or phone calls. Each phone generates a unique key every time a call is made, then deletes it straight after the call finishes. When sending text messages or images, there is even a “burn” function, which allows you to set a time limit on anything you send to another Silent Circle user—a bit like how “this tape will self destruct” goes down in Mission: Impossible, but without the smoke or fire.

 

Silent Circle began as an idea Janke had after spending 12 years working for the U.S. military and later as a security contractor. When traveling overseas, he realized that there was no easy-to-use, trustworthy encrypted communications provider available to keep in touch with family back home. Cellphone calls, text messages, and emails sent over the likes of Hotmail and Gmail can just be “pulled right out of the air,” according to Janke, and he didn’t think the few commercial services offering encryption—like Skype and Hushmail—were secure enough. He was also made uneasy by reports about increased government snooping on communications. “It offended what I thought were my God-given rights—to be able to have a free conversation,” Janke says. “And so I began on this quest to find something to solve it.”

 

Janke assembled what he calls an “all-star team”: Phil Zimmerman, a recent inductee to the Internet’s Hall of Fame, who in 1991 invented PGP encryption, still considered the standard for email security. Jon Callas, the man behind Apple’s whole-disk encryption (which is used to secure hard drives in Macs across the world), became Silent Circle’s chief technology officer. Other employees were top engineers and ex-special-forces communications experts based in England, Latvia, and Germany. Together, they designed their own software, created a new encryption protocol called SCimp, registered their company offshore and outside U.S. jurisdiction, then built up their own network in Canada. (They eventually plan to expand to Switzerland and Hong Kong.)

 

https://slate.com/technology/2012/10/silent-circle-mike-jankes-iphone-app-makes-encryption-easy-governments-nervous.html

 

https://www.silentcircle.com/

Anonymous ID: 0a4d5c April 16, 2020, 10:10 a.m. No.8813385   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3440 >>3457 >>3536

>>8813209

Silent Circle (software)

 

Silent Circle is an encrypted communications firm based in Le Grand-Saconnex, Switzerland. Silent Circle provides multi-platform secure communication services for mobile devices and desktop. Launched October 16, 2012, the company operates under a subscription business model. The encryption part of the software used is free software/open source and peer-reviewed. For the remaining parts of Silent Phone and Silent Text, the source code is available on GitHub, but under proprietary software licenses.

 

Its current products include the following:

 

Silent Phone: Encrypted voice calls, video calls and text messages on mobile devices. Currently available for iOS, Android, and Silent Circle’s Silent OS on Blackphone. It can be used with Wi-Fi, EDGE, 3G or 4G cellular anywhere in the world.

 

Its discontinued products include the following:

 

Blackphone A smartphone designed for privacy created by Silent Circle and built by SGP Technologies, a joint venture between Silent Circle and Geeksphone. There have been no more news nor updates since 2018. PrivatOS was Discontinued June 30, 2016.

GoSilent: Personal Firewall with integrated VPN and Cloud Analytics. The product was introduced after Silent Circle acquired Maryland start-up Kesala. It was sold by Silent Circle's new owner in 2018.

Silent Text: Discontinued September 28, 2015. A stand-alone application for encrypted text messaging and secure cloud content transfer with “burn notice” feature for permanently deleting messages from devices. Its features were merged into Silent Phone.

Silent Mail: Discontinued August 9, 2013. Silent Mail used to offer encrypted email on Silent Circle’s private, secure network and compatibility with popular email client software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Circle_(software)

 

https://www.silentcircle.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/SilentCircle_Case-Studies.pdf