Will We Even Know if We Enter a Full-Surveillance Society?

If you’re not following the Carrier IQ story, it’s the flip side of the User Agreement Trust Economy. It’s the modern tale: Who Secretly Owns Your Data and What Do They Do With It? For background of the story to date, here’s a fairly good timeline. Carrier IQ gathers diagnostic information on some phones; it may or may not actually keylog what you type on your phone; it may or may not sometimes or always gather the passwords you enter on your phone; and, according to the FBI’s refusal to release information, it may or may not have actually turned over information to law enforcement. (Carrier IQ denies all of this.) Sprint has now disabled it on some or all of their phones. Most interesting is that Carrier IQ came in hot and legal immediately, trying to shut down the fellow who first started posting about the keylogging; then someone wrangled some sense into them about not appearing totally evil. Super-geeks will enjoy reading their recently released report that explains their product. Unfortunately, that document explains that their product sometimes “accidentally” records text messages. To be fair, if our stealth drones had this, we wouldn’t have to ask for them back from other countries probably.