Secusmart became a household name after the scandal surrounding the US National Security Agency (NSA)'s wiretapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel's personal phone. Erdmann and co-founder Hans-Christoph Quelle developed a phone enhanced with a so-called "cryptochip" that would have prevented that eavesdropping on the chancellor's conversations.
NSA contractor-turned-privacy-whistleblower Edward Snowden has also stated recently that he is about to develop a special phone cover that would prevent intelligence agencies (and others) from tracing mobile phones by completely blocking the GPS signal.
Asked whether Secusmart is developing something similar to Snowden's phone cover, Erdmann said that his company offered the market a similar product a long time ago.
"But it very much depends on what you consider ‘security.' This cover that Mr. Snowden presented recently covers only one specific area (or demand) of security," Erdmann said, adding that the cover only blocks geolocation data transfer.
"This is the smallest of vulnerabilities that today's phones have in regard to surveillance. The easiest wiretapping methods are used when someone uses his phone for its direct purpose: making phone calls, sending SMS and emails. This is the easiest thing to wiretap and that's what we are working on for years now — to provide secure communication itself. And we do can provide it to people, journalists included."
"Everyone has the right to keep their phone free from wiretapping. It's the same basic right as protection from burglary or vehicle theft," he said.
"Many people ask me," Erdmann continued, "‘Why would I ever want it at all, if I have nothing to hide?' I usually ask in return: You do have curtains on your windows, don't you? No one wants to be watched walking naked in their home after taking shower. That's what privacy is."
Asked about the effect Secusmart products could have on terrorists and other people who do actually have things to hide, Erdmann agreed that it's a complicated question:
"There's no single answer to this. This is always a subject to discussion: privacy on one hand and the state's right or obligation to protect their citizens on the other. Phone tapping is only one method of surveillance that government agencies have. The countermeasures are dangerous, but only because these technologies can get into hands of wrong people with shady intentions. But that doesn't mean the fair people can't have them."
One key issue, Erdmann added, is public awareness.
"It is common that many of us simply don't want to know about all the stuff going on around them. Otherwise we probably just couldn't sleep at night."
"We are already always online now. We will never be able to turn the time back and deny being online all the time. We just can't live without these appliances anymore. If someone forgets his phone home, he will instinctively return to grab it."
Asked about the principles of the development of communication technologies and the place of security in this development, Erdmann explained the cycle as having three major steps:
"First comes the wave of cool new services, like WhatsApp or any other successful service. People start using them actively, without asking questions. This is how these services get embedded in our daily life. Then, comes the wave of contemplations. We ask ourselves: ‘Here I use it every day, but is it even safe?' This is usually thanks to the work of journalists who explain all the dangers connected to the innovations.
Then comes the third wave of those who make these innovations secure. It's a sort of competition, with technology leading and security trying to catch up. It rarely happens so that security is established first, and then the technology is introduced. We create unprotected space, potential weak points that we may not even think of. But, on the positive side, the security industry is quite big, too, so there's a lot of companies who are working on it."
