Richard Stallman: Cell Phones Are 'Stalin's Dream'

jbrodkin writes "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software pioneer Richard Stallman, who refuses to own one. 'Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop.' Even the open source Android is dangerous because devices ship with proprietary executables, Stallman says in a wide-ranging interview on the state of the free software movement. Despite some progress, Stallman is still dismayed by 'The existence and use of non-free software [which] is a social problem. It's an evil. And our aim is a world without that problem.'"

Comments

Re:Gone off the deep end

[AHuxley]

the 'turned on to eavesdrop" is very real.
http://www.zdnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/150467
"functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone."
"remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."
That was a few years about past cases.

Re:Open source vs proprietary

[erroneus]

If only quality were the determining factor. It's not and rarely ever is. MS Office is a frustrating and infuriating product for my users. I have to teach them how to use it and advise them of its limitations daily. MS Office is not "the best thing" out there. In many cases, I find OO.o (and now LibreOffice) to be quite sufficient for the vast majority of tasks out there except where 100% compatibility is required and that's the catch -- only one thing is 100% compatible with MS Office... that's the exact same version and patch level of MS Office. And it's "viral" by MS's definition of the word because when one user goes to a new version, eventually they ALL have to go to a new version or else that nearly 100% compatibility gets lost.

Quality is NOT the determining factor -- in the case of MS software, it's "critical mass."

Re:This time of year already eh?

[sammyF70]

You know, he may be a fanatic, but he is quite realistic with the "tracking" part. If you understand german, check out this animation (you can still watch the animation if you don't understand german and get the overall idea though).

Basically, some politicians asked for the 6 months of basic data about his phone useage ( which towers he was near to, with whom, when and for how long he was on the phone) mobile phone providers are required to keep in germany, and journalists at Die Zeit combined those with publicly available updates from his twitter and FB account and his party's website to reconstruct where he was and what he was doing in those 6 months.

They were not only able to track him, but also to build quite a detailled profile of his everyday life and personality that way

Re:Gone off the deep end

[Kjella]

It's more than feasible to do on everyone, in fact the latest "straight out of 1984" directive from EU demand they store positions on all phone communication - which for smart phones is roughly 100% of the time - for 6-24 months.

Unfortunately, he is right.

[unity100]

a lot of you in other countries havent gone through this, but in turkey, everyone knows that they are being listened. the government refuses that they are listening to everyone's cell phones, however, always anything that is detrimental to the interests of the current government 'leaks' to pro-government newspapers from unknown sources. ironically, neither police or secret service unable to 'find' who does this. it keeps on going and going. even the judges' phones are being wiretapped, without authority. some judges started to buy jammers. despite ALL of these are in mainstream media, and everyone discusses, situation still hasnt changed. wiretapping goes on, noone is able to 'find' who is doing it. even ordinary people started to pay attention to what they are telling over the phone to each other. it was officially stated that over 60,000 people were being wiretapped at a given moment, but, naturally these are only those who went through 'due process'. everyone knows much more is being covered.

it is probably happening in usa, u.k. etc too. but, the difference is, the governments there are not so clumsy as to go on using everything they find out by leaking it to their supporter media. they are probably using those much more wisely. how do i know ? well, the entire listening equipment and infrastructure here in turkey was bought and installed by american corporations.

mass tracking

[orra]

To add to your excellent example of how Stallman is right about the dangers of cell phone tracking, I refer you to Eben Moglen's talk Freedom in the Cloud.

You have a cell phone and you have a cell phone network provider and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint then we can tell you that several million times last year, somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the realtime location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. Several million times. Just like that. We know that because Sprint admits that they have a website where anybody with a law enforcement ID can go and find the realtime location of anybody with a Sprint cellphone. We don’t know that about ATT and Verizon because they haven’t told us.