Unplugged Phone Mysteries

Seth Hettena of Rolling Stone on Twitter:

Erik Prince's latest venture is the Unplugged Phone, an $850 standalone mobile device with its own suite of apps that is being developed in Israel and will allow "patriots to communicate securely".< /p>

Unplugged indicates that it is based in Cyprus.

Prince is best known for founding the mercenary force and training company Blackwater, now part of Triple Canopy. Blackwater personnel murdered fourteen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007 and injured twenty others. These entrepreneurs were scandalously pardoned in 2020, prompting condemnation from Glenn Greenwald, among many.

That should have raised some red flags when Greenwald, according to an emailed invite from a PR firm, "will be at DEF CON with Unplugged." The company says it offers private meetings with Greenwald at a hotel, according to a screenshot of the PR firm's post, which I'm not posting because the recipient deleted their public record. But it was accurately summed up in a tweet by MIT Technology Review journalist Patrick Howell O'Neill:

A PR firm sets up a DEF CON meeting with Glenn Greenwald who goes to con "with" the confidential phone maker http://unplugged.com. It's been a minute since we've had a new "government-grade" privacy phone, this one is due to launch on November 22. Anyone have any ideas on the phone?

Greenwald replied:

It's just a lie. I have nothing to do with this product. I was asked to speak at DEF CON but did not agree to do so.

But look at all the corporate journalists spreading this lie. That's what they do: once they see you as an ideological enemy, they spread lies with abandon.

Is that a lie? At least that's not O'Neill's lie. I have a copy of the invitation which, unless forged, offers exactly what O'Neill describes. There could be a number of ways this turns out to be wrong - Greenwald may not be at DEF CON, for example, or he may be at the conference but not at Unplugged's request. Likewise, Greenwald may not be associated with the product, but his tweet doesn't necessarily rule out involvement with the company.

When I reached out to the PR contact on the invite, he declined to comment, even though he worked for Unplugged. But in an emailed comment, Greenwald told me he had "no fucking idea why the PR firm is claiming this", further stating that he had "not accepted to speak to DEF CON, nor have I scheduled a meeting with these people on the phone, nor have I been paid anything and have I entered into no contract with anyone regarding this matter." He acknowledges that "the phone people asked me if I'd be willing to meet with them to hear about this phone" and was offered a talk by the company, but denies any further involvement with Unplugged or its products. /p>

It seems pretty clear to me that Greenwald is not involved. Why this PR firm says it facilitates meetings with him or treats him as an Unplugged affiliate is also a mystery to me. The best explanation I can think of - and this is entirely speculative - is that they hoped Greenwald would accept such a contract. Right now he says he hasn't.

But I've come to this, so I thought it was worth exploring the phone a bit. Zach Edwards said it looks like a Vivo phone, but when I started digging into the GSM Arena database, it looks more like a mix of the Xiaomi 11T and Realme GT Neo.

Most importantly, the phone looks like the Liberty Ghost Phone, announced in a since-deleted tweet in May - and the relationship doesn't seem to end there. Liberty promotes the Unplugged suite on its own website, and both phones run the LibertOS Android fork which sports “government-grade” security, whatever that means. The Ghost Phone's specs are nearly identical to the Unplugged; the only difference I can see is the resolution of the main rear c...