Wireless Carrier SNAFU (Updated)

You may recall the acronym SNAFU approximates: “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up.”
Is anyone really surprised at the depth of detail in which this Carrier IQ company is logging your every touch and use of your smartphone? Pay attention to the details if such things matter to you — it’s found on many Android, Blackberry and Nokia phones. So far, no one has piped up with a similar discovery on Apple phones.
Given the current fascist bent in government and corporate cuddling, you would hardly be surprised if Eckhart is labeled a “hacker” in the pejorative sense, and perhaps even a terrorist. He’s using a cable connecting his smartphone to a computer running Ubuntu, which is able to track every hidden data transfer using what we call a “packet sniffer” — something long a standard tool on Linux and Unix, if you know how to activate it. I once used it to discover how and why the old Mozilla browser suite was refusing to run on a system I had some years ago. The browser was ignoring the networking information the operating system had established and was trying to make its own connection queries independently. I never got an answer why that was, but that behavior changed in the next release, as I recall.
Meanwhile, it seems this CIQ snooping only applies in the US, so far. It’s probably not illegal, just utterly immoral and unethical. Naturally, that means it is precisely what most wireless carriers will do because there’s money in it. I’m sure, somewhere buried in the contract, is the permission signed away to do just this sort of snooping. This will create a firestorm of protest from interested parties, and I wonder if any lawsuits will arise.
This is just a snapshot, a quick peek under the covers. Valid and ethical information gathering would be signal strength and such, but this is pervasive and detailed down to the hardware level of keycodes and the like. This information is being stored, and this is what government queries, not simply to gain an unfair advantage in prosecution, but simply in the now-normal pervasive surveillance of which we all need some awareness.
This is not a simply mistake or miscalculation; it’s wholly calculated and evil.
Update: I’m reading all the apologists and backpedaling coming out on the Net regarding this issue. More than one has said it’s all necessary and for your own good, to improve service, etc. So let’s run down the main points.
1. Consumers are not properly informed. This is not simply the matter that it’s buried in the long legalese contract, but that everyone with half a brain knows a great many users would be shocked by this if they knew and would drop the account and find another provider who didn’t pull this stunt. Sprint is currently the most egregious violator with the poorest apology, and stands to lose some serious business on this.
2. Carrier IQ is outright lying about what their software does. This isn’t simply the device paying attention to your inputs. This was caught by packet sniffing — watching the traffic as it goes out over the network and home to CIQ servers. Every useful interaction you have with that device goes directly to CIQ servers, recorded in detail with your ID and everything. It’s also sent in the clear, unencrypted, even when you are otherwise encrypting everything with another network entity. This is criminal negligence, because this defeats the whole purpose of encryption. CIQ is invading your privacy to the nth degree, recording it all on their servers, and exposing your traffic unencrypted to any fool with an ounce of technical intelligence to intercept it. Granted, it’s up to your carrier to pay for whatever portion of this data they want, but CIQ has you by the short and curly hairs.
3. You as user have no options. You aren’t permitted any access to this stuff. If you wish to use something which is now very nearly an essential utility service, necessary for normal social interaction and business with just about anyone except the local migratory bird population, then you are forced to swallow this.
Finally, I fully expect the geeks and nerds to discover, say Verizon, is lying about their complete denial of this. But that won’t matter. CIQ is the real evil culprit here, and I’m willing to bet they have ties to some covert US government agency one way or another.
Update2: I stand corrected; it is not packet sniffing we see in the video, but log sniffing. That is, our intrepid geek Eckhart is running a utility which picks up the internal chatter, echoing what CIQ is recording in its logs. So it may well be not everything is shipped out, but the mere presence of such depth leads us to wonder how it is the CIQ logs are parsed and pared down, if they are, prior to transmittal to the servers. Until CIQ comes clean, it doesn’t really change our suspicions.