Silent Circle

Secure app maker Silent Circle has denied ever being served a secret demand for user data, amid concerns over the weekend suggesting the contrary.

In an email, general counsel Matt Neiderman confirmed the company has not received a warrant "of any type" to date.

The maker of encrypted phone and messaging products was caught in a mini-storm Saturday when reports suggested its warrant canary, a tool designed to alert the receipt of a warrant that comes with a gag order, was missing an explicit declaration that it had not been compromised by a government data demand.

Encrypted communications provider Silent Circle has raised approximately $50 million in a funding round aimed at pushing the company forward in the enterprise market.

Announced on Thursday, Silent Circle said "strong demand" from enterprise customers seeking to keep communication private through the Blackphone product range led the firm to launch a private, common equity round in order to grow and cater for new clients.

IF there’s a symbol for the idea that privacy is on people’s minds, it’s the Blackphone.

The Blackphone, which went on sale this week for $629, is billed as the first smartphone built solely with privacy and security in mind. It is definitely more secure than your average phone, but comes with trade-offs that most consumers might not need or enjoy. It’s probably best for reporters, dissidents and companies concerned with corporate security.

Based on some recent experience, I'm of the opinion that smartphones are about as private as a gas station bathroom. They're full of leaks, prone to surveillance, and what security they do have comes from using really awkward keys. While there are tools available to help improve the security and privacy of smartphones, they're generally intended for enterprise customers. No one has had a real one-stop solution: a smartphone pre-configured for privacy that anyone can use without being a cypherpunk.

Blackphone, the Swiss start-up that’s launching a smartphone with encrypted communications, is planning a series of devices around the same idea, one of the company’s co-founders said on Monday.

“It’s not the only device we will ever do,” said Jon Callas during an interview at the Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona. “There’ll be other security and privacy-enhanced mobile devices.”

At Wednesday's Inbox Love conference held at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, the founders of Lavabit and Silent Circle announced that they want to change the world of e-mail completely by putting privacy and security at its core.

The U.S. National Security Agency's reported efforts to weaken encryption standards have prompted an encrypted communications company to move away from cryptographic algorithms sanctioned by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Silent Circle, a provider of encrypted mobile Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and text messaging apps and services, will stop using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher and Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2) hash functions as default cryptographic algorithms in its products.

"We knew USG would come after us”. That’s why Silent Circle CEO Michael Janke tells TechCrunch his company shut down its Silent Mail encrypted email service. It hadn’t been told to provide data to the government, but after Lavabit shut down today rather than be “complicit” with NSA spying, Silent Circle told customers it has killed off Silent Mail rather than risk their privacy.