There is the walled garden is evil argument for why we need open source cell phones. The mobile carriers can control everything you see on your phone so we have no free speech over the medium of the telephone. But there is another reason we need to be very afraid of devices where we can’t see the source.
The government and mobile carriers can turn any phone, even a phone which is off, in to a bug to record your conversations. This is a serious violation of civil rights. In a world where most people carry cell phones it means that the government can listen to almost all conversations.
The carriers care about making money, they are happy to throw away our rights with our without a court order. Unconditional cooperation with the law makes economic sense.
If they can do it to the mob, just imagine what karl rove and gang are doing to their political opponents. We need to have open source phones with audited open source code like the green phone at affordable prices.
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actually, this cell phone thing is a huge agument for diy tech in general. i’d say that given this and the net neutrality moves going on, we need a serios diy tech movement now. we need to stop relying on the phone companies in general and start figuring out how to have our own large scale wireless network.
December 3rd, 2006
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