Appreciate you sticking in here and answering the hard questions.
How does the company handle the split between your defense and consumer products? Do you see there being conflicting interests here?
How does the company handle the split between your defense and consumer products? Do you see there being conflicting interests here?
A helpful thing to keep in mind is that everyone has basically 2 use cases for their cell phones:
1. Send and receive calls and SMS 2. Connect to the internet
Whether you're a national security professional, an investigative journalist, or an average consumer who values privacy, that's what you do with your phone. So if we can build features that make you more secure and more private across those two use cases, we have a product that can help both government and consumer users.
Sometimes when people ask the "conflict" question they mean some version of "but doesn't the government then ask you for a backdoor to get all the data?" All we can really do here is stand by our privacy policy. We store the minimum amount of data possible, we promise not to sell your data to anyone, we notify our users if we receive legal process on their account that is not subject to a gag order, and we pledge to push back on any law enforcement request we receive that is not well formed and narrowly tailored as required by law.
The backdoor/honeypot fears are often related to the Anom story that came out a few years ago. It's not a perfect rebuttal, but the reporter that broke that story has written about Cape a couple of times. You can read those articles here:
https://www.404media.co/privacy-telecom-cape-introduces-disa...
https://www.404media.co/i-dont-own-a-cellphone-can-this-priv...