Unstable & Unreliable Comms
Ever since the inception of Silent Circle, Ive been waiting for them to crack this nut! Dependable encrypted communication is obviously a challenge but one Signal (Open Whisper Systems) has handled considerably better than Silent Circle (Silent Phone is the older product on iOS by the way). Silent Phone comms are fidgety, its app constantly going offline, text messages not being delivered, attachments not downloading or taking excessive time to process, call drops on Silent World are frequent. In addition the past few months have seen accounts experiencing technical trouble resulting in payments not being processed or Silent World minutes not being credited to accounts for extended blackout periods.
Pros;
- Peer to Peer (Content) Privacy
- Encrypted Video calling
- Silent World offers a unique calling facility with a phone number that can connect to and from regular phone lines (partly unencrypted)
Cons;
- Unreliable system which frequently fails to connect parties.
- This includes text messaging which frequently fails to deliver or attach files in a timely, error free fashion (Granted, its come some distance from its early ghost messaging syndrome but still fails to meet the cut for a dependable system).
- Backend Support quality is erratic. Mostly poor with no response for days or weeks or even longer. Also, SC now forces customers to communicate with them over virtual post cards i.e email, rather than over their own secure client or via their web portal. Quite a lapse for a company focussed on privacy minded users.
Grey Area of Operation
Silent Circle has made a marked shift from a consumer facing company to one focussed on the Enterprise. As it has done so, its privacy approach has taken a shift to a grey area of operation.
- Ronin/ prepaid codes allowed users to buy/gift prepaid subscriptions with anonymity. As time progressed, the degree of anonymity shifted and now finally the codes are no longer available to purchase from their website. No communication whatsoever from the company on its shifting policy.
- Meta Data Leakage in the app suggests Silent Circle is not so interested in preventing the identification of parties communicating with one another
- Phil Zimmerman (key founder) said as much recently when he explained his vision silent phone is not for anonymous communications between parties but was focussed primarily on preventing eavesdropping on the content of conversations.
- This distinction should alarm users who may believe they are partially protected from pattern analysis when communicating on Silent Phone eg journalists communicating with their confidential sources should understand preventing the identification of parties is NOT a Silent Circle mission statement rather protecting the content of the communication is their stated mission.
- Their updated requirement for a valid credit card held on file (with the association it brings to the account) further adds to this glaring privacy nightmare.
Conclusion
Phil Zimmerman and Jon Callas years back pitched Silent Circle as a means for anyone on the planet to "whisper in the ear of another party across the face of the planet" ; they just didnt say that involved announcing whos whispering secrets to whom, where and when- all of which reveals a tremendous amount of information in itself.
It would not be an exaggeration to say the individual users who backed and placed their faith in SCs early days have been relegated to second tier status. The resulting privacy back peddling has been unexplained, just left to be picked up like a trail of breadcrumbs stretching from National Harbor to their new Swiss HQ.
Alternatives
Signal (text and calling) from Open Whisper systems is both open source and considerably more reliable comms.
Wickr (messaging only) reliability is high but is not open source.
What youll miss
Nothing much if your goal is to have dependable comms but Silent World is a useful additional to their package of services. Also, their peer to peer encrypted video calling has few competitors.
Endeavor1907 about Silent Phone
