Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Boeing's "Black" – The Government's New Secure Smartphone
March 6, 2014
Ars Technica published an update last week on Boeing's new "Black" phone. Not the publicly available for pre-order Blackphone I wrote of yesterday. This one is simply called "Black."
In February, Boeing submitted details about its new high-end smartphone to the FCC, along with a request that most of those details be kept secret. The Black is an Android phone with a feature for a very specific demographic: It will self-destruct if tampered with. Very "Mission Impossible."
The specs of the device may be found here.
In a letter to the FCC, Boeing’s counsel Bruce Olcott wrote, “Boeing’s Black phone will be sold primarily to government agencies and companies engaged in contractual activities with those agencies that are related to defense and homeland security. The device will be marketed and sold in a manner such that low-level technical and operational information about the product will not be provided to the general public.”
As part of the justification for requesting secrecy, Olcott added that the phone is a “sealed device” that will be sold with an end-user nondisclosure agreement. “There are no serviceable parts on Boeing’s Black phone, and any attempted servicing or replacing of parts would destroy the product,” Olcott wrote. “Any attempt to break open the casing of the device would trigger functions that would delete the data and software contained within the device and make the device inoperable.”
The Black has dual SIM cards and is capable of operating on GSM, WCDMA, and LTE networks. It also has a removable battery. It will also have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities (probably to support a smart card-reading sled for PKI logins), as well as an HDMI port.
The market for The Black is pretty high end – it may even replace the "Obamaberry", the BlackBerry 8830 World Edition with custom crypto used by the president and national leadership.
If you're not in a very exclusive club, you'll have to forgo the Black for the Blackphone I talked about yesterday – but more competition is sure to come.
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