To: steve harris who wrote (780769 ) 4/20/2014 2:51:01 PM From: joseffy Respond to ‘Kill Switch’ Included on All Cell Phones Made in U.S. by 2015 (guess the Arab Spring taught US government that people can rally protest support using their smart phones - so a nice handy "kill switch" will cut them off at the pass -- but it's there to protect you from thieves, right?) According to a program launched yesterday by CTIA - The Wireless Association®, an international nonprofit that has represented the wireless communication industry since 1984, all phones manufactured in the U.S. after July 2015 will be required to contain a “kill switch” system that can remotely disable and wipe any cell phone’s data. Although the “ Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment ” is a voluntary program, apparently all the major players have already happily jumped on board: “Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft, along with the five biggest cellular carriers in the United States, are among those that have signed on to a voluntary program announced Tuesday by the industry’s largest trade group,” reported CNN . And the supposed reasoning — anti-theft — sounds super phony, but just like everything else, it’s all for your safety of course: source )Yeah, because law enforcement really cares quite a bit about whether or not your smartphone is stolen…unless it’s law enforcement stealing your phone from you in the first place because you’ve used the camera on it to protect yourself from police state activity by taking incriminating photos and videos of said law enforcement. Well, now they won’t even have to physically take your phone from you, because apparently they’ll be able to just push a button and remotely wipe it clean of all data. On an aside, someone tried to break into my house and it took a whole day for the cops to even bother to show up…like they really give a crap about whether or not your phone is stolen. As with every other trendy new technology advertised as making consumer’s lives just Jetsons-level awesome, there’s an obvious flipside that can be used (abused) for quite the opposite. In this day and age of dwindling privacy ala 1984, you would think there would be a major market for a privacy-respecting telecom, but it takes a lot of money to set up the infrastructure for that kind of thing, and it’s no secret that the U.S. intelligence community via sources like In-Q-Tel (the CIA.’s official venture capital firm) are the ones incubating all the new technology these days: source )It was the U.S. military that invented the Internet in the first place, after all. Melissa Melton is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple , where this first appeared , and a co-creator of Truthstream Media . Wake the flock up!
