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* Silent Circle offers private international calling
* "Burn" feature disposes of communication records
* Flat-rate roaming in 79 countries (Adds details of service, competitive landscape, executivecomments)
By Eric Auchard
VIENNA, July 10 (Reuters) - Silent Circle, a company knownfor mobile apps designed to thwart government surveillance, isintroducing a fixed price, secrecy-cloaking service on Thursdaythat lets customers make and receive private phone calls.
The secure voice-and-data calling plan works on Apple iOSand Android smartphones and, eventually, on Windows Mobilesystems, the company said. Callers can reach 79 countries,including China, Russia, most of Europe and the Americas. Largeparts of the Middle East and Africa are not covered.
The service aims to challenge not just traditional phonecarriers - who still by and large charge steep roaming fees tointernational travelers - but also to newer, voice-over-Internetservices that have sprung up over the past decade.
For while Silent Circle undercuts major competitors' roamingcosts in many countries, the service's basic attraction lies inits security features.
"What Silent Circle is offering is an augmented level ofsecurity beyond what normal phones can offer," said Ben Wood, asenior analyst with mobile research firm CCS Insight. "Itcaptures the zeitgeist in terms of paranoia by answering thequestion of what more consumers can do to protect themselves."
The offering looks to appeal to international businesstravellers working with sensitive information includingexecutives, lawyers and bankers, as well as journalists oractivists aiming to fend off prying eyes and unwanted listenersin an age of growing criminal, state-sponsored, corporateespionage and Internet-wide privacy threats.
While no one is immune to such snooping, Silent Circleoffers users a means of encrypted communications that alsodisposes of records of all calls, texts, messages or documentson both senders' and receivers' devices. This "burn" featureauto-deletes sent messages and attachments at pre-set times.
"Any drug dealer, terrorist or pimp who thinks this sort ofservice will insulate them would have to be naïve," Wood said."Nothing is bullet-proof in that regard."
But some security experts see the software as one of thebest commercial options available to individuals, businesses andeven government workers, albeit one without absolute guaranteesof anonymity or the capacity to withstand targeted surveillance.
"It all depends on what your threat profile is," said theGeneva-based company's chief operations officer, Vic Hyder, aformer U.S. Navy SEAL officer. "Most people out there willunderstand that it's the best security I can have and that'sgood enough."
BUBBLE OF PRIVACY
Silent Circle was founded by security expert Mike Janke,another former Navy SEAL, along with Internet encryption creatorPhil Zimmermann and Jon Callas, inventor of Apple's whole diskencryption system.
The new calling plan starts at $12.95 a month for 100minutes of outbound calls and runs up to $39.95 for 1,000minutes of calling, comparable to premium price plans offered byInternet communications services such as Microsoft's Skype and Rakuten's Viber - but with greater security.
Customers receive a personal, 10-digit phone number from oneof 26 countries that they can use to receive calls whentravelling. Calls can be received from anywhere in the world atthe calling party's standard long-distance rates.
The plan charges outbound calls that Silent Circle membersmake to non-Circle members - anyone with a landline phone in the79 countries covered by the plan and the 42 countries wheremobile phone users are reachable.
Outbound calls provide what Hyder calls "a bubble ofencryption" that conceals the contents of a call as it istransmitted to Silent Circle servers in Canada and Switzerland,before it is then sent out to public phone networks.
In June, the company also started shipping its first mobilephones. The "Blackphone" comes loaded with a customised versionof the Android operating system known as PrivateOS along with asuite of security and privacy apps from Silent Circle.
Hyder said KPN in the Netherlands and Telcel inMexico, a unit of Carlos Slim's America Movil, were inthe early stages of testing the phones for possible mass marketretail sales starting later this year or early in 2015. (Editing by Georgina Prodhan and Tom Pfeiffer)
