If you like your cellphone, you can unlock your cellphone...

Congress and Obama get one right.

Via PC World:

The right to unlock your cellphone became law on Friday as President Barack Obama signed a bill that rapidly passed both houses of the U.S. Congress.
The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act passed in the Senate on July 16 and was unanimously approved by the House of Representatives last Friday. Obama had been expected to sign it.
The law restores U.S. consumers’ rights to update the software on their phones so they can change mobile operators. That practice had been outlawed by a January 2013 decision by the Library of Congress, which ruled that consumer unlocking violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Most cellphones sold in the U.S. come with built-in software that locks the phone so it can be used on only one carrier’s network. The Library of Congress had found that changing that software violated the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, which are typically deployed against cracking of digital-rights-management technology.

Ukraine shows how cellphone metadata can be used by a government and it isn't good...

If a tool like cellphone metadata is available for a government to use, they will use it against their political enemies. It is just a matter of time.That time has arrived in the Ukraine.

Via NPR:

The protests have been mostly peaceful, but after violent clashes on Sunday that killed several protesters, something strange happened on Tuesday. A chilling text message showed up on cell phones in Ukraine earlier this week.
“Dear Subscriber,” it read, “you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” It was interpreted by those who received it as an Orwellian warning to protesters who’d clashed with riot police in Kiev.
Presumably, the recipients were identified because their cell phone data showed they’d been in the area of the protests. That same kind of data is routinely requested — and received — by U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Tweets of the Day: #handygate

In Germany, “Handy” refers to cell phone. “#Handygate” means cellphonegate.

#handygate. pic.twitter.com/ppF9Wf3gqi
— Ralf Fastner (@rfastner) October 26, 2013

Ozapft is! #merkelphone #handygate @BarackWatchingU pic.twitter.com/OcLK1bbgbY
— Timo Brückel (@timo_brueckel) October 27, 2013

Scary: Your cellphone is spying on you...

The government can track you to within 50 feet by your cellphone. What could possibly go wrong?

Big Brother has been outsourced. The police can find out where you are, where you’ve been, even where you’re going. All thanks to that handy little human tracking device in your pocket: your cellphone.

There are 331 million cellphone subscriptions—about 20 million more than there are residents—in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of adult Americans carry at least one phone. The phones communicate via a nationwide network of nearly 300,000 cell towers and 600,000 micro sites, which perform the same function as towers. When they are turned on, they ping these nodes once every seven seconds or so, registering their locations, usually within a radius of 150 feet. By 2018 new Federal Communications Commission regulations will require that cellphone location information be even more precise: within 50 feet. Newer cellphones also are equipped with GPS technology, which uses satellites to locate the user more precisely than tower signals can. Cellphone companies retain location data for at least a year. AT&T has information going all the way back to 2008.

Police have not been shy about taking advantage of these data. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), U.S. law enforcement agencies made 1.5 million requests for user data from cellphone companies in 2011. And under current interpretations of the law, you will never find out if they were targeting you.

Read it all...

Police State Alert: Miami Beach Police Ordered Videographer At Gunpoint To Hand Over Phone

Miami police shot a man to death. They claim they found a gun, but tit took them two days to locate the gun in the car. The Miami police seized and tried to destroy the cellphone cameras of all bystanders. One man had his cellphone seized while police pointed a gun at his head. police smashed his phone on the ground and took him into custody for questioning. The man managed to put the Sim card in his mouth before police smashed his phone. The video hasn't been released. Apparently, the man is trying to sell it. What kind of police state are we living in?

Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets Memorial Day.

First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer.

Then they ordered the man and his girlfriend out the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling “you want to be fucking paparazzi?”

Then they snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground before stomping on it. Then they placed the smashed phone in the videographer's back pocket as he was laying down on the ground.