Corporate Dishonesty

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/app-installed-on-millions-of-phones-secretly-records-all-activity/

This sickens me. Seriously, how many blatantly dishonest people did it take to get this onto millions of Android, BlackBerry, and Nokia phones? From now on, anyone who tells me that they have any doubt that corporate America is utterly corrupt and evil is either too stupid to do their research, extremely gullible, or part of the corruption. To get this software onto so many phones, first a number of people had to knowingly create and market this to phone companies. Then, a fair number of people at each of those companies had to endorse the software and install it on their products. This must have required the cooperation of large numbers of corporate officials, upper management, engineers, and software developers. This attack on the American people, from within, should be treated as treason by our government.

The behavior of these companies and individuals is very close to that of revolutionaries. Historically, powerful organizations have used their influence to infiltrate and control the general populace. In the past, this was done by getting sympathizers to record and report the behavior of people around them that might be a threat to the movement, or that might be potential sympathizers themselves. These people might also record data on business transactions and other things that the organizations might be able to use to increase their power, or to gain control of people. Often this data was used to blackmail or even assassinate those who could be dangerous to the organization. It would sometimes be used to control those with sensitive information, or even as a means of collecting sensitive information, without detection. Now, we have technology that is, evidently, extremely easy to misuse for such purposes, with much smaller chances of detection.

If you are not convinced that this is dangerous enough to warrant charges of treason, consider one more thing: How many government officials use Android, BlackBerry, or Nokia phones? How many of these officials use those phones for confidential communications? Right, there are probably rules against that, but don't kid yourself. If you know anything about the ethics of our government officials, you should have no doubt that nearly all of them have, at least once, used their phones to transfer, or at least store sensitive information. While this by itself is only a potential security risk, if those phones contained this software that logs and reports key strokes to some company, this is no longer a "potential security risk." No, it is a leak. In this case, it is potentially thousands of leaks.

By putting this software on their phones, without informing their customers, these companies have created potentially one of the biggest security risks the US government has ever faced. These companies first should be given extremely heavy fines, for their crimes against their customers. Second, they should be exhaustively investigated by the US government to ensure that no sensitive data was obtained using this extremely unethical system. Third, any of these companies that has obtained sensitive data should be charged with treason, and further investigation should be done to determine who else may have obtained that data. In addition, each individual who was involved with, or knew about this and did not report it should be charged with crimes against the people who's data may have been compromised by this system, and with treason, if any of the companies involved obtained any amount of sensitive government data. None of these people should ever be allowed to work in communications jobs again.

It may seem hard to believe that this could have been intended for harmful purposes. I submit that if this were really just some innocent plan devised to learn habits of customers and how they use their phone software, it would have been advertised as a feature, not hidden from view and kept extremely secretive. This was intentional dishonesty, not some innocent plan with unexpected side effects. It should be treated as such. If we do not send a message that we will not tolerate this kind of violation, eventually some company will gain enough information to become a very serious threat to our freedom.

Lord Rybec