Solar Storms May Affect GPS Data, Radio Transmissions

As reported by Bloomberg: Two solar storms forecast to strike Earth starting tonight may degrade global position satellite devices and radio transmissions.

The first and smaller of the two coronal mass ejections will arrive later today, Thomas Berger, director of the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center, said in a conference call with reporters. The second one should hit by midday New York time.

“Current forecasting of these events is tricky, so we cannot forecast down to the hour,” Berger said.

Although neither ejection would be considered a major event, scientists are watching closely because they came so close together from the same area, Berger said. Besides the expected effects on GPS data and radio transmissions, they may create an aurora display across the northern U.S.

The geomagnetic storms touched off by the solar action will be strongest tomorrow into this weekend, Berger said. The storms will be G2 or G3 on the center’s five-step scale for geomagnetic events, with G5 the strongest.

The coronal ejections both erupted out of a sunspot complex that also produced two flares this week, Berger said. The spots are big magnetic storms on the sun that darken its surface and can be seen from Earth.

Magnetic Field
“Essentially the sun just shot out a magnet and it is about to interact with another magnet, Earth’s magnet,” said William Murtagh, program coordinator at the center in Boulder, Colorado. Earth’s magnetic field will start fluctuating when the material from the sun arrives, according the center’s website.

Large solar events can prompt aircraft to divert from polar routes because of increased radiation, although that isn’t expected to happen this time. In addition to measuring geomagnetic storms, the space weather center classifies radiation effects of solar events on a similar five-step scale. The current radiation impacts are rated at S1. An S3 or higher is needed to divert airline traffic, Murtagh said.

Berger said U.S. electric power grid operators should be able to handle these events. There also isn’t a concern for electronics on the ground.

The storms won’t match the power of a storm recorded in 1859 by British astronomer Richard Carrington now known as the Carrington Event. It electrified telegraph lines, shocking operators, and created an aurora seen in Cuba and Hawaii, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website. Another large storm in 2012 missed Earth, Berger said.

Both the Carrington Event and the 2012 storm took about 17 hours to travel from the sun to the earth, Berger said. These two eruptions are taking 40 to 50 hours. The second eruption is more powerful and is catching up to the first, Berger said. Current models say they won’t arrive together.

Penalty for Driving While Texting in Long Island - a Disabled Cell Phone

As reported by Ars Technica: Motorists popped for texting-while-driving violations in Long Island could be mandated to temporarily disable their mobile phones the next time they take to the road.

That's according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, who says she is moving to mandate that either hardware be installed or apps be activated that disable the mobile phone while behind the wheel. The district attorney likened the texter's punishment to drunk drivers who sometimes are required to breathe into a device before turning on the ignition.

"Like ignition interlock devices, transdermal alcohol monitoring ankle bracelets, and personal breath testing instruments, DA Rice believes that available technologies must be employed in criminal sentences to change behavior and save lives. The cost of each of these devices would be borne by the offender," the prosecutor said in a press release.
She said she hasn't chosen any technology, yet:

Hardware and software solutions that block texting during driving are currently produced by various manufacturers and software developers, and are constantly under development. The DA’s office does not endorse any particular company and is in the process of reviewing specific solutions based on their features and services. Critical features include security measures to make the solutions tamper-proof, and data integrity measures to ensure accurate reporting to courts, law enforcement, parents, and guardians.

Rice's announcement came nearly a week after a Facebook-surfing driver rear-ended a car at 85 mph, killing an 89-year-old great-grandmother. The 20-year-old motorist is being charged with negligent homicide.


Newsday said Rice has already brought 82 texting-while-driving cases.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said about 20 percent of motorists text or send e-mail while driving. And Rice noted that Web surfing while driving is at least as dangerous as drunk driving.

"Research suggests that driving while texting can be as dangerous as driving while drunk, and even more pervasive, especially among young people,” Rice said. “It’s well established that the practice robs people of their lives and futures. Tackling this problem will require a concerted effort by numerous sectors of commerce and government."

Across the country, 44 states ban text messaging for drivers. At least 12 states bar drivers from using mobile phones at all.

We Need Electric Buses, Not Just Electric Cars

As reported by Slate: Forget about Tesla and its futuristic new Gigafactory. When it comes to using electricity for transportation, the real action may lie in the polar opposite of the fancy sports car.

Municipal intracity buses may be déclassé, unloved, slow, lumbering behemoths. But they’re the workhorses of America’s transit systems. Last year, according to the American Public Transportation Association, buses hauled 5.36 billion passengers. While usage has fallen in recent years, thanks in part to the growth of light rail and subway systems, buses still account for more rides each year than heavy rail, light rail, and commuter rail combined—and for about half of all public transit trips.

Proterra, a South Carolina-based manufacturer with Silicon Valley ties, thinks it can lead the electric revolution. Fueled by the two forces that are transforming renewable and alternative energy in this country—venture capital and the U.S. government—the company has already put a few dozen electric buses on the road, with the promise of more to come. “Our technology could literally remove every single dirty diesel bus from cities,” said Proterra CEO Ryan Popple.

It's difficult for all-electric vehicles to compete against super-efficient hybrid gas cars like the Prius or the hybrid-model Camry, which already get very good gas mileage. “But we’re competing against the most atrociously inefficient vehicle in the planet,” said Popple, a former finance executive at Tesla. Buses present operators with the painful combination of horrid gas mileage and heavy usage. Nationwide, city buses averaged about 4.71 miles per gallon, according to the National Transit Database. Washington, D.C.’s WMATA reported in 2012 that its buses were getting 3.76 miles per gallon.

And they are driven a lot. A city bus can be driven between 40,000 and 60,000 miles per year, all while spewing unwanted emissions into the air. Swap out oil for electricity, and you reduce fuel costs sharply. Get your electricity from renewable sources, and you've cut the link between fossil fuels and vehicle transportation.

Founded about a decade ago, Proterra originally set out to make buses powered by a different eco-friendly source: fuel cells. But as the hybrid and electric car businesses grew, and the prices of battery packs and electric motors fell, making a purely electric bus became more appealing. Proterra devised a 40-foot bus made of light materials, and then developed a fast-charging docking station that would let buses fuel mid-route in 10 minutes or less.



Unlike Tesla, Proterra didn't receive any Department of Energy loans. It has raised more than $100 million in venture capital money. But the company does depend indirectly on public funding provided by the Obama administration. Its customers, which are all public agencies, have relied on stimulus funds and TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grants to purchase the vehicles.

Proterra shipped its first completed vehicle to Foothill Transit, which serves 22 cities in eastern Los Angeles County, in 2010. The agency, which has 350 buses, virtually all of them powered by natural gas (a lower-emission alternative to diesel), used stimulus funds to buy three electric buses and a docking station. In 2011, Silicon Valley venture capital aristocrats Kleiner Perkins invested in Proterra, and the company began to make further sales to small transit agencies: in Tallahassee, Florida; Reno, Nevada; and Worcester, Massachusetts.



Customers I spoke to say the buses largely work as advertised. After its initial purchase, Foothill used Transportation Department funds to buy another 12 Proterra buses. Foothill has put them into service on the 17-mile Line 291 in Pomona, one of the agency’s most trafficked routes. They stop in the middle of the route for about five to 10 minutes to recharge. “The cost of energy per mile is about half what it would be for diesel,” said Doran Barnes, executive director of Foothill Transit.

StarMetro in Tallahassee, which has a fleet of 72 diesel buses, found itself coping with budget problems when the price of diesel spiked in 2007. Fuel is typically the second-highest cost for a transit system, behind labor. StarMetro was Proterra’s third customer, ordering three buses in 2010 and two more in 2011, backed by federal funds. “We put them on our most visible route,” said Ralph Wilder, superintendent of transit maintenance. The buses can easily handle the 18-mile loop, which runs from Tallahassee Community College to the Governor’s Square Mall. On this route, all buses stop for 10 minutes in the middle, to wait for connections, so charging up the electric ones doesn’t add any time to the trips. Recharging takes about 7.5 minutes.

As is the case with electric cars, electric buses are significantly more expensive than their gas-guzzling counterparts. According to the National Transit Database, in 2012, the basic city bus cost $447,000 while hybrid diesel-electric buses cost $593,000. The base price of a Proterra has fallen to $825,000, from about $1 million a few years ago. And purchasers don’t get a tax credit or rebate for buying one. “But we don’t need grant funding to make the business case work,” said Popple. Over the 12-year lifetime of a vehicle, a diesel bus can consume between $500,000 and $600,000 of fuel, while it would consume about $80,000 worth of electricity, based on average industrial electricity rates. At its current price, in other words, the lower-emission Proterra pays for itself over time in the form of lower operating costs.

There are complications, however. The range—up to 30 miles—limits Proterra buses to certain routes, so it’s hard for an agency to go all in. Drivers have to be trained to brake and accelerate differently, and to maneuver into the docking stations. And Doran Barnes of Foothill Transit notes that some of the cost advantage of using electricity instead of diesel can dissipate. Electric cars can be charged at night, when power prices are low. But buses have no choice but to recharge in the middle of the day, when utilities often impose higher peak usage rates.

Not surprisingly for a Silicon Valley veteran, Popple has big, quasi-utopian plans. “The urban transit bus market will go entirely electric,” he proclaimed. But for now, Proterra remains a craft operation in a mass business. There are about 37 of its buses on the road. The company, which employs about 180 people, runs a single shift at its factory in Greenville, South Carolina. It is on a pace to produce about two dozen buses this year. “We’d have to make 50 per year to be profitable,” said Popple.

In other words, all it would take is one large system to embrace the buses on a significant scale. And there may be one out there. King Country Metro Transit, Seattle’s progressive transport operator, has about 1,500 buses and is based in a region that enjoys cheap hydroelectric power. Last month it announced it would use a federal grant to purchase and test two Proterra buses. The deal, Popple noted, has an option for the agency to buy up to 200 more.

An order of a couple of hundred buses doesn’t sound very exciting, especially compared with Elon Musk’s promise of $5 billion factories. But electrifying America’s fleet of transit buses would put a far larger dent in carbon emissions than putting a few hundred thousand Teslas on the road.

A Nimble-Wheeled Farm Robot Goes to Work in Minnesota

As reported by MIT Technology Review: This summer a Minnesota startup began deploying an autonomous robot that rolls between corn plants spraying crop fertilizer.

The robot applies fertilizer while the plant is rapidly growing and needs it most. This eliminates the need for using tractors, which can damage the  high stalks, and reduces the amount of fertilizer needed earlier in the season, says Kent Cavender-Bares, CEO of the company, Rowbot. Further, by reducing the fertilizer, the robot reduces the amount of nitrogen that can end up polluting waterways after rainstorms.

As the machine travels between rows, it can spray two rows of corn on either side of the machine. It uses GPS to know when it’s reached the end of the field, and LIDAR, or laser-scanning, to make sure it stays between rows of mature cornstalks without hitting them. Although such fields could also be fertilized at any time via irrigation, only about 15 percent of U.S. cornfields are irrigated.



Rowbot developed its machine under a strategic partnership with Carnegie Robotics, which grew out of research at Carnegie-Mellon University. This summer Rowbot used its machine to fertilize 50 acres of corn, at a charge of $10 per acre plus the cost of fertilizer.

Rowbot’s system is part of a technological revolution in farming that has gained momentum in recent years. GPS-guided tractors routinely apply seed and fertilizer across large areas, and new airborne drones are providing farmers with high-resolution sensing ability (see “Agricultural Drones”), although drone services can’t yet be offered commercially in the United States.

Mike Schmitt, a professor in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate at the University of Minnesota, who has no ties to the startup, says the robot is “a great additional tool to put in the nutrient management technology toolkit.” Schmitt says the ability to apply fertilizer at precise times and locations is “very critical.”


Rowbot, which is operating on $2.5 million of seed funding, is in discussions with researchers at the University of Illinois to prove the advantages of its approach. The next step is to deploy multiple Rowbots on industrial-scale farms, and to add more sensing capacity to the machines. The company is also testing using them for planting seed on cornfields for fall crops, called cover crops, while the mature corn is still standing.

Agricultural Drones

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Ryan Kunde is a winemaker whose family’s picture-perfect vineyard nestles in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco. But Kunde is not your average farmer. He’s also a drone operator—and he’s not alone. He’s part of the vanguard of farmers who are using what was once military aviation technology to grow better grapes using pictures from the air, part of a broader trend of using sensors and robotics to bring big data to precision agriculture.

What “drones” means to Kunde and the growing number of farmers like him is simply a low-cost aerial camera platform: either miniature fixed-wing airplanes or, more commonly, quadcopters and other multibladed small helicopters. These aircraft are equipped with an autopilot using GPS and a standard point-and-shoot camera controlled by the autopilot; software on the ground can stitch aerial shots into a high-­resolution mosaic map. Whereas a traditional radio-­controlled aircraft needs to be flown by a pilot on the ground, in Kunde’s drone the autopilot (made by my company, 3D Robotics) does all the flying, from auto takeoff to landing. Its software plans the flight path, aiming for maximum coverage of the vineyards, and controls the camera to optimize the images for later analysis.

This low-altitude view (from a few meters above the plants to around 120 meters, which is the regulatory ceiling in the United States for unmanned aircraft operating without special clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration) gives a perspective that farmers have rarely had before. Compared with satellite imagery, it’s much cheaper and offers higher resolution. Because it’s taken under the clouds, it’s unobstructed and available anytime. It’s also much cheaper than crop imaging with a manned aircraft, which can run $1,000 an hour. Farmers can buy the drones outright for less than $1,000 each.

The advent of drones this small, cheap, and easy to use is due largely to remarkable advances in technology: tiny MEMS sensors (accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, and often pressure sensors), small GPS modules, incredibly powerful processors, and a range of digital radios. All those components are now getting better and cheaper at an unprecedented rate, thanks to their use in smartphones and the extraordinary economies of scale of that industry. At the heart of a drone, the autopilot runs specialized software—often open-source programs created by communities such as DIY Drones, which I founded, rather than costly code from the aerospace industry.

Drones can provide farmers with three types of detailed views. First, seeing a crop from the air can reveal patterns that expose everything from irrigation problems to soil variation and even pest and fungal infestations that aren’t apparent at eye level. Second, airborne cameras can take multispectral images, capturing data from the infrared as well as the visual spectrum, which can be combined to create a view of the crop that highlights differences between healthy and distressed plants in a way that can’t be seen with the naked eye. Finally, a drone can survey a crop every week, every day, or even every hour. Combined to create a time-series animation, that imagery can show changes in the crop, revealing trouble spots or opportunities for better crop management.

It’s part of a trend toward increasingly data-driven agriculture. Farms today are bursting with engineering marvels, the result of years of automation and other innovations designed to grow more food with less labor. Tractors autonomously plant seeds within a few centimeters of their target locations, and GPS-guided harvesters reap the crops with equal accuracy. Extensive wireless networks backhaul data on soil hydration and environmental factors to faraway servers for analysis. But what if we could add to these capabilities the ability to more comprehensively assess the water content of soil, become more rigorous in our ability to spot irrigation and pest problems, and get a general sense of the state of the farm, every day or even every hour? The implications cannot be stressed enough. We expect 9.6 billion people to call Earth home by 2050. All of them need to be fed. Farming is an input-­output problem. If we can reduce the inputs—water and pesticides—and maintain the same output, we will be overcoming a central challenge.

Agricultural drones are becoming a tool like any other consumer device, and we’re starting to talk about what we can do with them. Ryan Kunde wants to irrigate less, use less pesticide, and ultimately produce better wine. More and better data can reduce water use and lower the chemical load in our environment and our food. Seen this way, what started as a military technology may end up better known as a green-tech tool, and our kids will grow up used to flying robots buzzing over farms like tiny crop dusters.

GM: A Cadillac That Can (Almost) Drive Itself is Coming in 2016

As reported by Engadget: We've talked a lot about autonomous driving developments like Google's self-driving car, but today in Detroit GM CEO Mary Barra is announcing her company's push to put similar technology in cars we can actually buy. Two years from now, Cadillac will launch an all-new car with its "Super Cruise" technology that not only holds your speed, but uses sensors to keep it in the middle of the lane, and can brake if necessary. We've ridden in a demo vehicle that could even steer to avoid obstacles, but what's coming is more limited (likely because of legal and insurance questions that have yet to be answered), and says it will provide comfort to "an attentive driver" -- hopefully with enough leeway for us to snap an in-traffic selfie or two.

GM's other big news is that the 2017 Cadillac CTS is the first one announced with "vehicle to vehicle" (V2V) technology to go along with its 4G LTE data connection. That means it can send and receive info from other cars or sensors mounted along the road to notify the driver of events that they might not be able to see (a car that suddenly brakes three cars ahead, or if one detects hazards like a pothole or black ice). Meanwhile, across the Metro Detroit area several highways will be equipped with cameras and sensors to collect data that's sent directly to V2V and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) cars. The Michigan Department of Transportation is working with the University of Michigan, GM and Ford to roll out the tech along 120 miles of roads (I-96 from Brighton to St. Clair Shores, I-94 from Port Huron to Ann Arbor and US-23 from Ann Arbor to I-96), with a goal of "zero deaths on the road system," according to State Transportation Director Kirk Steudle.



So how does it all work? GM says its vehicle to vehicle tech sends out information like "here I am, here's how fast I am going" 10 times per second on the 5.9GHz wireless band. The car that receives the information can then use its safety tech like active collision warning or just alert the driver to what's going on. Before it debuts though, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will need to finalize the protocol so that the different automakers are all on the same page, and a standard for security protections will need to be laid out.

For Super Cruise, there are still more questions than answers. The demo we experienced last year (similar to Autoblog's video, embedded above) was impressive, but actually rolling it out faces a number of hurdles. For now, GM is compromising by limiting it to certain locations (closed access roads, i.e. highways, where you won't regularly encounter pedestrians, cyclists or other elements), and on what it can do. It can keep the car in the lane, driving at a preset speed while responding to changes in traffic, and it will let the driver take their hands off of the wheel and feet off of the pedals, but it's not clear for how long. Right now, that makes it work well for handling your road trip through the boonies, or when you're busy yelling at the other drivers in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam. In her speech, Barra will namecheck the "Boss" autonomous Chevy Tahoe that GM and Carnegie Mellon developed to win the DARPA Urban Challenge in '07, but says that developing a fully automated vehicle may take until the next decade.

[Image credit: Associated Press]

It will still require an attentive driver, although right now it's not clear exactly what that means. The car could use eye- or head-tracking tech to make sure the driver is paying attention, and a recent rumor from Financial Times tied the company to an Australian group, Seeing Machines, that does just that. So which car will be the one to debut Super Cruise? GM isn't giving any hints, but rumors have pointed to a new flagship full-size rear wheel drive model on the way called the LTS. It could be based on the Elmiraj coupe concept GM showed off in 2013 (above), and would be perfect to introduce the new technology. Other possibilities include crossover vehicles bigger or smaller than the current SRX, or an entry-level sedan that competes with the Audi A3 or Mercedes-Benz CLA that appeals to younger drivers.

GM CEO Mary Barra has a tough road ahead to recover from the embarrassing and dangerous ignition switch problems which recently came to light, and focusing on new tech could help do that. GM's referencing its long history of working on intelligent and connected cars, reaching back to the 1956 Firebird II concept that dreamed of a car that connected to the road with a metal strip, drove itself, and had a communication system to talk to other cars or just watch TV. This week at the ITS World Conference in Detroit we'll see demonstrations of connected and autonomous cars from a number of automakers, with GM bringing a self-driving version of its EN-V 2.0 electric car and an Opel Insignia concept that can drive itself at low speeds, through the city, or on highways.

Mysterious, Phony Cell Towers Found Throughout US

As reported by Popular Science: Like many of the ultra-secure phones that have come to market in the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks, the CryptoPhone 500, which is marketed in the U.S. by ESD America and built on top of an unassuming Samsung Galaxy SIII body, features high-powered encryption. Les Goldsmith, the CEO of ESD America, says the phone also runs a customized or "hardened" version of Android that removes 468 vulnerabilities that his engineering team team found in the stock installation of the OS.  

His mobile security team also found that the version of the Android OS that comes standard on the Samsung Galaxy SIII leaks data to parts unknown 80-90 times every hour.  That doesn't necessarily mean that the phone has been hacked, Goldmsith says, but the user can't know whether the data is beaming out from a particular app, the OS, or an illicit piece of spyware.  His clients want real security and control over their device, and have the money to pay for it.

To show what the CryptoPhone can do that less expensive competitors cannot, he points me to a map that he and his customers have created, indicating 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,” detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the month of July alone. (The map below is from August.)  Interceptors look to a typical phone like an ordinary tower.  Once the phone connects with the interceptor, a variety of “over-the-air” attacks become possible, from eavesdropping on calls and texts to pushing spyware to the device.

“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith says.  “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip.  We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”

Who is running these interceptors and what are they doing with the calls?  Goldsmith says we can’t be sure, but he has his suspicions.

“What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases.  So we begin to wonder – are some of them U.S. government interceptors?  Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?” says Goldsmith.  “Whose interceptor is it?  Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases?  Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it?  The point is: we don't really know whose they are.”

Interceptors vary widely in expense and sophistication – but in a nutshell, they are radio-equipped computers with software that can use arcane cellular network protocols and defeat the onboard encryption.  Whether your phone uses Android or iOS, it also has a second operating system that runs on a part of the phone called a baseband processor. 

The baseband processor functions as a communications middleman between the phone’s main O.S. and the cell towers.  And because chip manufacturers jealously guard details about the baseband O.S., it has been too challenging a target for garden-variety hackers.

“The baseband processor is one of the more difficult things to get into or even communicate with,” says Mathew Rowley, a senior security consultant at Matasano Security.  “[That’s] because my computer doesn't speak 4G or GSM, and also all those protocols are encrypted.  You have to buy special hardware to get in the air and pull down the waves and try to figure out what they mean.  It's just pretty unrealistic for the general community.”

But for governments or other entities able to afford a price tag of “less than $100,000,” says Goldsmith, high-quality interceptors are quite realistic.  Some interceptors are limited, only able to passively listen to either outgoing or incoming calls.  But full-featured devices like the VME Dominator, available only to government agencies, can not only capture calls and texts, but even actively control the phone, sending out spoof texts, for example.  Edward Snowden revealed that the N.S.A. is capable of an over-the-air attack that tells the phone to fake a shut-down while leaving the microphone running, turning the seemingly deactivated phone into a bug.  And various ethical hackers have demonstrated DIY interceptor projects, using a software programmable radio and the open-source base station software package OpenBTS – this creates a basic interceptor for less than $3,000.  On August 11, the F.C.C. announced an investigation into the use of interceptors against Americans by foreign intelligence services and criminal gangs.

An “Over-the-Air” Attack Feels Like Nothing

Whenever he wants to test out his company’s ultra-secure smart phone against an interceptor, Goldsmith drives past a certain government facility in the Nevada desert.  (To avoid the attention of the gun-toting counter-intelligence agents in black SUVs who patrol the surrounding roads, he won't identify the facility to Popular Science).  He knows that someone at the facility is running an interceptor, which gives him a good way to test out the exotic “baseband firewall” on his phone.  Though the baseband OS is a “black box” on other phones, inaccessible to manufacturers and app developers, patent-pending software allows the GSMK CryptoPhone 500 to monitor the baseband processor for suspicious activity.  

So when Goldsmith and his team drove by the government facility in July, he also took a standard Samsung Galaxy S4 and an iPhone to serve as a control group for his own device.

”As we drove by, the iPhone showed no difference whatsoever.  The Samsung Galaxy S4, the call went from 4G to 3G and back to 4G.  The CryptoPhone lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Though the standard Apple and Android phones showed nothing wrong, the baseband firewall on the Cryptophone set off alerts showing that the phone’s encryption had been turned off, and that the cell tower had no name – a telltale sign of a rogue base station.   Standard towers, run by say, Verizon or T-Mobile, will have a name, whereas interceptors often do not.

And the interceptor also forced the CryptoPhone from 4G down to 2G, a much older protocol that is easier to de-crypt in real-time.  But the standard smart phones didn’t even show they’d experienced the same attack.  

“If you've been intercepted, in some cases it might show at the top that you've been forced from 4G down to 2G.  But a decent interceptor won't show that,” says Goldsmith.  “It'll be set up to show you [falsely] that you're still on 4G.  You'll think that you're on 4G, but you're actually being forced back to 2G.”

So Do I Need One?

Though Goldsmith won’t disclose sales figures or even a retail price for the GSMK CryptoPhone 500, he doesn’t dispute an MIT Technology Review article from this past spring reporting that he produces about 400 phones per week for $3,500 each.  So should ordinary Americans skip some car payments to be able to afford to follow suit?

It depends on what level of security you expect, and who you might reasonably expect to be trying to listen in, says Oliver Day, who runs Securing Change, an organization that provides security services to non-profits.

“There's this thing in our industry called “threat modeling,” says Day.  “One of the things you learn is that you have to have a realistic sense of your adversary. Who is my enemy?  What skills does he have?  What are my goals in terms of security?”

If  you’re not realistically of interest to the U.S. government and you never leave the country, then the CryptoPhone is probably more protection than you need. Goldsmith says he sells a lot of phones to executives who do business in Asia.  The aggressive, sophisticated hacking teams working for the People’s Liberation Army have targeted American trade secrets, as well as political dissidents.

Day, who has written a paper about undermining censorship software used by the Chinese government, recommends people in hostile communications environments watch what they say over the phone and buy disposable “burner” phones that can be used briefly and then discarded.

“I'm not bringing anything into China that I'm not willing to throw away on my return trip,” says Day.

Goldsmith warns that a “burner phone” strategy can be dangerous.  If Day were to call another person on the Chinese government’s watch list, his burner phone’s number would be added to the watch list, and then the government would watch to see who else he called.  The CryptoPhone 500, in addition to alerting the user whenever it’s under attack, can “hide in plain sight” when making phone calls.  Though it does not use standard voice-over-IP or virtual private network security tools, the CryptoPhone can make calls using just a WI-FI connection -- it does not need an identifiable SIM card.  When calling over the Internet, the phone appears to eavesdroppers as if it is just browsing the Internet.