Deutsche Telekom offers secure smartphones after NSA snooping

Michael Bartsch could barely contain his excitement over his company's newest mobile phone.

"We can't say which countries we've been contacted by," said the head of mobile security for German telecommunications firm Deutsche Telekom. "But security people from embassies have called us asking for devices to test out. In fact, we've been getting calls from everyone, even from outside the EU."

On the mahogany conference table in front of Bartsch lay a panoply of the smartphones he uses, modifies, and ultimately tries to market: an iPhone 5s, a Blackberry Z10, and what looked, to the casual observer, like last year's Samsung Galaxy S3.

But, in fact, the unassuming Galaxy was actually a Samsung device running the Korean company's secure Knox version of Android, which Telekom has modified with its own security software, called SimKo.

An earlier variant is the phone that Chancellor Angela Merkel uses. And Telekom wants to sell it to you, or your government, or your company, or to anyone looking to migrate away from American and British technology solutions in the wake of the NSA spying scandal. But critics of the initiative say that equally secure products can be had for a fraction of the cost, and that Deutsche Telekom's ties to the German government make SimKo problematic for potential foreign government buyers.

Telekom's SimKo project was born in 2004 at the behest of the German government, which owns a 32 per cent stake in Telekom. It wanted a solution that would encrypt data and eventually voice traffic on 10,000 civil servants' government-issue phones, both when they communicated with one another on the phones and when their phones were connected to the government's secure e-mail network.