There's just too many backdoors in smart phones. That's why I choose to use standalone hardware that can work with any phone for my voice encryption project:
I don't think I see the relevance. This article isn't about spying on you, it is about disabling your phone remotely ("kill switch," etc). How does encrypting your voice before it enters your phone mitigate that?
Plus if you're paranoid enough to use that then frankly you're too paranoid to own a cellphone at all. They can still use it to track your location and to remotely turn on the microphone and eavesdrop on the background sounds.
My point is that it's too easy to create backdoor on smart phones. There're many ways to track and disable your phones, no matter whether it's a smart phone or not. For example, your carrier operator can do a lot of bad things on your phone. The difference with smart phone is that it can be hacked without accountability from the operator side.
Given than you are aware of such risks and still has the need to communicate, your next best options is to encrypt your conversations through non-smart phones, and that's where my project, JackPair, can be helpful.
And yes, I'm trying to promote the awareness of my project JackPair, and the technologies behind it. In fact, I'm running a kickstarter campaign now for JackPair (http://bit.ly/jkpair). I think its relevant here because people need to be more aware that they don't really own their smart phone these days.
The relevance, as I see it, is that the same capabilities used to spy on mobile devices (0-day vulnerabilities/backdoors, or just leverage over telcos) could be used as a de-facto "kill switch".
That said, a law that explicitly gives the state authority to shut down all cell phones in a situation "they perceive" as a risk is an order of magnitude worse.
(The "kill switch" counterpart to JackPair would be systems like mesh networks, ham radio / APRS, etc. GoTenna is one recent commercial product: http://gotenna.com/ Of course it can probably be easily jammed)
Plus if you're paranoid enough to use that then frankly you're too paranoid to own a cellphone at all. They can still use it to track your location and to remotely turn on the microphone and eavesdrop on the background sounds.