Signal (Redphone for iOS) has been released

https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal/

 

Featured on websites:

Your iPhone Can Finally Make Free, Encrypted Calls
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/free-encrypted-calling-finally-comes-to-the-iphone/

iPhone gets first free app for encrypting voice calls
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/iphone-gets-first-free-app-encrypting-voice-calls-247282

Signal brings painless encrypted calling to iOS
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/29/5...ted-calling-whisper-systems-moxie-marlinspike

New Signal App Brings Encrypted Calling to iPhone
http://threatpost.com/new-signal-app-brings-encrypted-calling-to-iphone

Talk Private To Me: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Voice Calls With Signal For iPhone
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/29/ta...-worldwide-encrypted-voice-calls-with-signal/

 

Very few adversaries excluding intelligence community is attempting to break the encryption of your calls. If your phone supports faster data rate than GPRS, the A5/1 encryption is not present and thus, bad guys are not going to be able to break the standard encryption. Now, quoting Jacob Appelbaum, any well funded governmental entity will be able to break into your phone. Quoting Snowden, NSA can own the phone the minute it connects to their (generally, any US-based) network. We've seen tons of leaks about iPhone backdoors and along them, both Microsoft and Google Android phones contain proprietary source code no one can verify. Additionally, the common consensus of cypherpunk mailing list is _any_ privacy enhancing software that's running on (compromised by default) smart phones, is insecure by nature and so, snake oil.

 

As long as they aren't paying millions for any backdoors found its probably backdoored or just poorly coded.

I would trust it if they were to say "we will pay 1 million $ to anyone that can break this encryption and listen to the phonecalls".
This is basically what you must be paying to be sure most backdoors/coding errors gets reported instead of used (and the sum that would make it a bit costly and risky business to add intentional backdoors).

Apple, android and alike has questionable security at best so its possible they can intercept it before it get encrypted and then save one copy unencrypted and pass one on to the software, without you noticing (also they probably has root.. does this software has that as well?).

Personally I wouldn't bother with this. It makes u look suspicious while probably adding no real security to talk about.

 

I don't have much knowledge about standard mobile phone encryption, but if governments(talking about police, not intellegence) can easily wiretap mobile phones it doesn't seem very useful to me.
I agree about smartphones, but I think it it still a nice tool to make mass surveillance more difficult, and browser versions are in the works.

I don't think it's realistic that open-source project depending on donations and grants can offer a very large monetary reward to find a backdoor. Adding backdoors to an open-source project is also very risky since they're easier to find. I don't know about the coding since the iOS version is done by different people, but the android versions are developed by Moxie Marlinspike. I doubt that he codes poorly.

Smartphones are indeed not the most trustworthy platforms, but there will be browser versions in the future as well.