This has a closed source baseband that was also not designed by the company producing the phone. The baseband is pretty much guaranteed to be backdoored by your favorite state security agency, so why get this over any other Android phone?
Reducing the number of possible attack vectors is not necessarily useless. That said, I wonder whether that phone's operating system is itself free software or not...
That wouldn't be a problem for me, provided that the baseband processor didn't have DMA access to all of system memory.
If I could be reasonably certain that the baseband only communicated with the rest of the phone via a limited modem(/similar) protocol at the hardware level - which should be possible - then I'd be happy provided that 100% of software running on the main CPU was Free Software, with sources available.
That means the bootloader, the kernel, all drivers - including video drivers, zero binary blobs - the display manager, and all provided apps, need to be Free Software. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the Blackphone doesn't even do that. (But I'm not 100% sure. I can't find that much info about the core OS software/drivers anywhere.)
Risk assessment is an important part of security. I'm not sure the black phone really does this very well.
Being very clear about what they can do, as well as what they can't do, would be a very good thing.
Mobile telephones are a difficult item to make secure. Getting telcos to cooperate with law enforcement doesn't seem to have posed many problems so far.
It always was an issue and still will be for a long time. Neo900 project takes another way to neutralize the modem - by sandboxing and monitoring its activity. This alone probably makes it much more secure and privacy-friendly than Blackphone.
you do realize that people like dragorn are part of the black phone project, right? someone with that kind of clout doesn't really just get pushed around by (insert state agency here)
