Privacy-focused mobile phone launches for high-risk individuals

Chinese hackers, cybercriminals, law enforcement agencies, and phone phreaks of yesteryear have all successfully accessed mobile phones along with the trove of data collected by the devices. But the mobile company Cape is looking to change the privacy game with a hardened phone that doesn’t keep metadata, while also adhering to the strict U.S. criminal and national security laws that run the surveillance state.

The Thursday announcement of the physical Android-based phone comes with lofty claims. The computers in our pockets are a gold mine of the most sensitive information about ourselves. Politicians, journalists, activists, and other high-risk communities are engaged in a constant cat-and-mouse, caught between the benefits of constant connection to the net and increased privacy risks.

At a time when Chinese hackers are diving into the wiretapping systems of U.S. telecommunication networks and communication protocols with known vulnerabilities required to stay on network architecture, there are not many options on the market besides going offline. And by focusing on security on both the device level and underlying network architecture compliant with U.S. surveillance laws, Cape is looking to fill the elusive gap of the legal-yet-private cell phone for those high-risk individuals.

Even so, Cape CEO John Doyle thinks his company can keep to its promise, he told CyberScoop in an interview. His company is claiming to protect against location tracking, ensure ads cannot uniquely ID the customer, and protect against SIM-swapping, all while only requiring a phone number. No name or address needed.

“All these are network threats, and so they’re very hard, if not impossible, to address from the device,” Doyle said.

The aim of the Washington, D.C.-based company from the beginning was to create a realistically secure and private cell phone. The company also has a deal with an original equipment manufacturer. Leading up to the announcement, Cape shipped the hardened phones to a few beta testers and advisers, some of which are well-known in the security space. The company also includes research partners at Virginia Tech, the University of Maryland, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. 

After serving in the Army’s special forces and graduating from Harvard Law School, Doyle spent nine years at Palantir leading the venture capital firm’s national security business. He said that’s where he was convinced that the solution was not just a new app.

“You can’t build an app to mitigate SS7 attacks or really to mitigate the insider threat of the telco,” Doyle said, referencing an attack method that abuses an insecure protocol. 

Cape has raised $61 million from notable investors — including Andreessen Horowitz, A-Star, and Costanoa Ventures, among others — after coming out from stealth last year. The company has also managed to attract beta testers and advisers of some notable national security individuals, such as Andy Makridis, former chief operations officer at the CIA, and Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of Silverado Policy Accelerator and of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. 

But it’s not only national security officials and activists fighting authoritative governments that would want untraceable phones. For years, the market for burner phones was aimed squarely at the criminal underground.

“There are companies out there whose goal is to address the criminal market, and that’s certainly not our goal,” Doyle said. “It’s spelled out pretty clearly in regulation what a telco must do in order to comply with law enforcement interests in the U.S.”

Cape is planning on selling the phone to governments and through organizations and other distribution partners, like consultants that work with high-risk people. As such, Doyle is not too worried about government requests, even though his company will answer all lawful requests of the information they keep. All telecommunication services must adhere to Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requirements, a regulation that forces the collection of certain types of identifying data.

Privacy experts have taken a close look at CALEA in recent months after Chinese hackers dove into wiretapping systems used by U.S. telecommunication networks to fill wiretapping requirements. 

“We control the way our subscribers authenticate, how they build, how their calls are routed and SMS are routed, how they connect to the internet, everything on their phone,” Doyle said. “It gives us actually a lot of flexibility to build features.”

So why is Doyle so confident? Cape operates as a mobile virtual network operator, meaning it rents networks from other telecoms, and has a deal with the mobile network carrier USCellular for wider coverage. Additionally, the underlying tech that communicates with network towers is CAPE’s own mobile core software that obfuscates identifying metadata.

Carriers are required to keep unique numbers to locate the user and the device on a mobile network, called the international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) number and the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number, respectively. Additionally, Cape rotates advertisement IDs associated with a phone. 

Doyle said Cape is fully compliant with CALEA and e911 requirements, which ensure calls connect to local emergency services.

Hank Schless, director of global campaigns at the mobile cybersecurity firm Lookout, did not look at Cape’s technology claims but noted that some of the investors are not typically associated with companies that are all “smoke and mirrors.”

While he does appreciate Cape’s mission statement, Schless said companies like it walk a gray line between providing a useful service to security-conscious people and the criminal class. 

“NSO group says they only sell to governments and we all know what Pegasus is doing, right?” Schless said.