In the U.S you can’t buy any of these devices...
No. My Father in Law has one and they're available from Verizon, AT&T, and others.
...and one of the unofficial conditions of you getting access is that you have to have government surveillance and soon censorship on your device...
Where are you getting this disinformation from?
Okay I think I mis-handled the threading. I thought you were replying to the comment about dumb phones and those are most definitely available in the United States.
You are looking for something that runs Sailfish but that OS is meant for the Euro market so its targeted at handsets meant for use there. The entire supported device list is a measly 16 handsets and all but one of those are made by Sony! It's a crazily niche OS.
Yes, I'm aware of that. It's literally no different for European cell phones. The Jolla C2 is a rebadged Reeder S19 Pro Max S and whatever modem is buried in that thing is going to have precisely the same issues. Patents are global and at this point even the Chinese are following them, much less a small Turkish manufacturer like Reeder.
They're all like this. All of them. Even the ones in a handset running Sailfish.
The DMCA has very little to do with Software Defined Radios...which is precisely what the modem chips in these handsets are. Frankly I don't WANT people fucking with the SDR in their handsets. You can do it with lots of other SDRs (GMRS, Amateur, WiFi, etc) and people inevitably abuse the ability and fuck things ups.
The DMCA is a rotten law but isn't anywhere close to the biggest problem when it comes to SDRs and Phone Handsets.