Covert Cellular: Enough Protection for Trade Secrets?

With the ever-increasing need to maintain communications with customers and your employees, mobile phones have become a requirement for business people. Spanish telecommunications company Geeksphone is targeting the business market with Blackphone, the first mobile phone that encrypts data transmissions. No one would argue against the value of increased wireless data security, but do CIA-style cellular phones really provide enough extra protection to justify the cost?

All cell phone transmissions are encoded in some way, which may be why we feel some level of comfort sending some of our most intimate personal information through mobile devices. We text our friends from Antarctica using satellite phone links, Instagram selfies from the beach, play games with people from all over the world while waiting for a flight (thank you, Alec Baldwin, for delaying a flight departure because of a “Words with Friends” obsession), purchase goods online (with our credit card numbers sailing through cyberspace) and catch up on email while driving (which may be against the law in some jurisdictions). If these modern conveniences are not continuously available from almost anywhere on the globe, some may consider that cellular service providers have somehow usurped our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression.

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