The phone isn't for normies like you and I. It's targeted specifically for people in the defense industry who have a need to connect to SIPRnet and other similar defense/government networks. People commenting here think they are prospective customers who will be spied on, but the truth is you will not be permitted to buy or use this phone.
All phones should have this, just like modern laptops do (or are supposed to). All data should be encrypted, keys inside a tamper-proof chip. If anything has been changed (say, cover removed), then you need to enter the recovery key to certify the device is OK again. If tampering happens while device is active (say, it gets dropped hard enough to knock the cover off), then the device wipes RAM/powers off.
My ThinkPad nominally offers this kind of protection.
I can think of some vendors who offer source sharing agreements on their closed products for auditing purposes. I'd speculate Boeing would offer the same if the contract is valuable enough, especially if its DoD writing the check.
Unless you are given the full build chain and deploy to your own devices, there is little guarantee the software you were given is actually the one running on your devices.
It is spying. It's a defence contractor phone so probably everything done on it is recorded because governments spy on their employees. Baseband/GSM stack is likely wide open to exploitation by other governments.
"...this idea seems like a solid game plan for Blackberry? They could rename their company "Black" ala P-Diddy v just Diddy. :)" Got the name right, wrong company. Nobody is perfect.
To be violently hyperbolic; besides impressing non-tech managers who've watched too many Nicholas Cage films, what the fuck is the point of this?
If you have the money to commission a set of devices that self-destruct when tampered with, surely you can afford to have someone put together an Android build with encrypted data partitions?
Because at the military level, all encryption is assumed to be compromised. Plus, it is assumed the phone may contain data of national value, so it assumed an adversary would spend unlimited resources to crack the encryption.
For example, lets say "unlimited" is $100 million dollars. How many groups would spend $100 million to lets say, get details about the missile defense system in Taiwan? Plenty.
As other posters have stated, this is not a phone for anyone but only very specific gov't employees.
Why Boeing? Why not Motorola? It would seem to come more naturally to Moto; I mean if they built jetliners there would have been no reason to invent the phrase "jet lag".
That same Narus was who enabled the NSA to illegally spy on telecoms last decade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Would you trust a "secure" phone from people like that?