Americans are sick and tired of corporations and government officials taking advantage of them, and Carrier IQ just walked into their rage.

Carrier IQ's diagnostic software on phones is freaking people out. It isn't giving carriers much greater powers than they used to have, but it's doing so in a different America. In the age of Occupy Wall Street, fear of the powerful has gone viral, and we don't trust anyone to protect us anymore.

As Phil Nickinson, the editor of AndroidCentral.com said, "Your carrier already knows everything you do. If you ask them, they'll even print it out once a month and send it to you." That's completely true. Your carrier can read your text messages, sniff your packets, and listen in on your phone calls, IQ or no. So what's changed? Immediacy and trust.

You can't count out immediacy. While most carrier data collection goes on far away in faceless data centers, researcher Trevor Eckhart showed off Carrier IQ running on an individual phone, watching keypresses as they're made.

This hits people where they live. Phones are a very personal technology. Most people consider them to be part of their clothing, their personal effects, even an extension of their bodies. Showing Carrier IQ running on a device, rather than somewhere invisibly out in the network, feels like a home invasion rather than someone taking photos of you out in public.

But there's a much bigger issue of trust here, too. True privacy has been a myth for a few years now, since wireless networks, credit cards, and the Internet became widespread. As people's lives move online, all that's protecting them are social customs and laws. Corporations and the government can spy on us at any time. The rule of law is the only reason they wouldn't.

Yeah, sure, there are a few paranoids who live off the grid. I expect some of them will comment on this column. They're a tiny minority, though. To fully participate in modern American society, you need to give up massive amounts of personal data to corporations, whether it be the bank recording your ATM transactions or the drugstore at which you're using that coupon card. What's protecting us against all this personal data being sold, traded and resold? Only law.

Belief in the rule of law has been a major casualty of the ongoing economic crisis. That's one of the major themes behind Occupy Wall Street: the idea that the police serve only the powerful; and that laws get suspended for giant, wealthy corporations such as major advertisers and wireless carriers.

The normal rules of the free market should punish companies that treat customers poorly, as their customers would switch to competitors. But free market rules no longer seem to apply when banks and airlines are both "too big to fail," but small businesses can't get loans from banks saved by public largesse.

Meanwhile, our government, supposedly small-d democratic, exists in part to manage society and enforce laws. Is that government malicious or merely incompetent, we wonder? Think about the controversy over the which might be reasonable if we trusted the TSA to treat the data intelligently, sensitively, and with gravitas. (Let's set aside the dangerous radiation concerns.) But we don't trust the TSA any more than we trust the wireless carriers.

This brings together left and right. We don't trust corporations to do what is right for us. We don't trust the government to police the corporations, and we don't trust the government to act competently to protect people, either. There's no one to whom we can turn.

In walks Carrier IQ to this mess. From its perspective, they aren't doing anything new. The carriers have always had data on you. Carrier IQ lets them leverage it. They're all of a sudden. It's a big deal because there's no trust left in our society.

The rule of law is the glue that holds a secular, multicultural society together. Without it, we're in a war of all against all, and especially of the powerful against the powerless. Carrier IQ and its defenders see it as a mere tool. But to all those Americans sick and tired of corporations, banks and the government taking advantage of them, it looks much more like a weapon.

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