As far as I'm aware, UMTS has not been hacked. You can tell the device to connect to UMTS only. Of course this doesn't stop carriers from giving government ag

As far as I'm aware, UMTS has not been hacked. You can tell the device to connect to UMTS only. Of course this doesn't stop carriers from giving government agencies direct access to communications. If secure communications is your concern then you should always encrypt your calls and data. The Neo900 modem is sandboxed at hardware-level, monitors all activity and gives the user complete control over it so you will know if something fishy is being attempted and you will be able to prevent it. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible for an adversary to take over the device. Regular Linux (by that I mean not Android) can be installed so it is far less likely to contain any backdoors. If triangulation of your location is a concern, just switch off the modem.