In November 2011, Mike Janke called
Phil Zimmermann with an idea for a new kind of private, secure version of
Skype. Zimmermann agreed to the project and called
Jon Callas, co-founder of
PGP Corporation and Vincent Moscaritolo. Janke brought in security expert Vic Hyder, and the founding team was established. The company was founded in the Caribbean island of
Nevis, but moved its headquarters to
Le Grand-Saconnex near Geneva, Switzerland in 2014 in search of a country with "stronger privacy laws to protect its customers' information." On August 9, 2013, through their website, Silent Circle announced that the Silent Mail service would be shut down, because the company could "see the writing on the wall" and felt it was not possible to sufficiently secure email data with the looming threat of government compulsion and precedent set by the
Lavabit shutdown the day before. In January 2015, Silent Text had a serious vulnerability that allowed an attacker to remotely take control of a Blackphone device. Blackphone and Silent Circle patched the vulnerability shortly after it had been disclosed. In March 2015 there was a controversy when
Information Security specialist and
hacker Khalil Sehnaoui identified that Silent Circle's
warrant canary had been removed from their site. In January 2017 Gregg Smith was named CEO with a renewed focus on serving the large business space as well as Government entities. At the same time Tony Cole, VP and Global Government CTO of
FireEye, was named to the Board of Directors. Shortly after Smith became CEO, the company moved back from Switzerland to the United States. ==Reception==