I have to admit that when I first heard Al Franken was running for Senate, I didn't like him, I didn't like the fact he was an actor, and I felt he was too smug whenever I heard him talk. I basically thought it was ridiculous that another actor made his way into politics.

But he seems to be the only politician that is actively involved in the issues that I care about, so I admit I was completely wrong about him, and I've done an about face and actually do support his work.

The fact that he is questioning Carrier IQ about what they're doing is just another data point to prove that I was wrong to dismiss him.

Keep in mind that his overarching idea seems to be "technology is bad, mkay?" He also supports SOPA and was calling for a "Flag Terrorist" button for all Blogger blogs.

I think it was Protect IP, not SOPA, that he's co-sponsoring. Not that that's any better, but just trying to clear up the facts.

Also, I thought it was Joe Lieberman that was calling for the "Flag terrorist" button. A quick Google for "Al Franken flag terrorist button" doesn't turn anything up for me. Do you have a source?

Protect IP is the Senate version of SOPA, which is the House version. SOPA just happens to have more onerous inclusions.

Outside of habitually bending over for Intellectual Property, he seems OK on tech. His tech policy isn't that tech is bad, S 74 was the best net neutrality proposal I've seen in this congress (I'm not entirely happy with it, but its leaps and bounds above anything else I've seen on the issue).

He says it "underscores the need for congress to act."

No, this incident underscores the need for independent security professionals to keep an eye on what our devices are really doing so we can make informed choices.

What kind of informed choice can you make when the market is run by a conspiring oligopoly?

CarrierIQ is the case in point. It may be tracking a different subset of things on different devices but it seems to be on all brands and it seems to invade your privacy surrepticiously on all of them. These are the cases where regulation is required because otherwise your only choice is to forego smartphones altogether.

One kind of government regulation would be to prohibit building tools that would, for instance, track your location. I can see how that would harmful government intrusion.

Another kind of government regulation would be, for instance, to prohibit companies from intentionally lying when describing to the public what kind of personal information their devices record with the intent to conceal it. That kind of regulation would then allow customers to make the informed choices you speak of.

Companies can already get in trouble for "intentionally lying" it's called fraud. Of course, that's assuming a user reads the TOS and actually knows what they've agreed to accept.

Question: what are your thoughts on getting rid of legislative penalties for petty theft, and instead having independent experts keep an eye on regional rates of shoplifting so that retailers can make informed choices about where to open their stores?

Don't forget, he is a co-sponsor of the Protect IP act. Do you support that one?

I didn't realize that. It makes sense that an actor would care about copyright protection.

That's too bad, but I guess not everyone's perfect. I do still think he's better than most of the other career politicians that only seem to care about completely irrelevant issues.

Why is Senator Franken still using snail mail? He could've just emailed Carrier IQ from his phone. He wouldn't even have to hit send.

Why would he ask Carrier IQ to explain itself? Why not the wireless carriers and phone companies that installed this on the phones?

Carrier IQ makes a product. Companies are choosing to use it in a scummy way. I don't think that Carrier IQ is the bad guy here.

Exactly. It's like asking Smith & Wesson to explain itself after an armed robbery.

No, not exactly.

"Exactly" would be if CarrierIQ sold a boxed piece of software that was fire & forget.

As it stands, CarrierIQ was a business partner with each of these companies in the implementation of the software, and so they are the initial point of leverage in figuring out what actually happened.

If CarrierIQ decides to roll over on the carriers and say "well, $carrier asked me to log all the SMS messages", well, then I'll take up a side business selling popcorn.

Except in this case the pistol was sold to be used explicitly for armed robberies.

Its like your example, in some world where Smith & Wesson explicitly stated that their guns can only fire blanks. And then, of course, this armed robbery resulted in a gun death.

It's an interesting comment on governmental policy to see how quickly recent events have gone from Internet meme to Congressional attention.

It's only really started being this way since Franken was elected in. He seems to be one of the few people who really care about all this shit.

Ron Wyden's been pretty good, too. He was recently declared a winner of the EFF's Pioneer Awards.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/us-senator-encryption-inn...

Excerpt: Few legislators have done more to promote and protect online speech, privacy rights and innovation than U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Most notably, he authored Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that helps make user-generated content and online services possible by protecting hosts from liability. Senator Wyden is currently the lone senator blocking passage of the PROTECT IP Act, legislation that attempts to safeguard intellectual property at the expense of free speech, technological innovation and the very foundation of the Internet. Most recently, Senator Wyden introduced legislation to create a legal framework for when and how location information derived from cell phones and other electronic devices can be accessed and used by both government agents and private entities.

I was just thinking the same thing. I see his name show up on a lot of meaningful issues that deal with consumer protections. Not Franken-specific, but I have the same general vibe in the TMO/AT&T proceedings where people who used to think they could just grease a few palms and do whatever they wanted are being confronted by a different version of reality than they're used to.

I was thinking it really started with the Obama campaign, became real when the State Department asked Twitter to avoid maintenance during the Arab Spring, and recently has been reflected with Carrier IQ, SOPA, and the FCC privacy reviews of Google/Facebook.

He cares about Protect IP -- he was even a cosponsor. Franken's top contributor is Time Warner, with GE a close second.

Remember the emails that AT&T sent out to people it suspected of tethering their phones without paying the exorbitant monthly fee (http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/18/atandt-tells-customers-us...)? Something tells me that this wonderful "diagnostic" information had something to do with it.

Why packet-sniff and risk legal issues when you can just look at your CarrierIQ analytics for people who opened a tethering app regularly?

I'll be impressed when he asks the NSA, FBI and NYPD to explain themselves.

They already do explain themselves just at classified hearings to the Senate and House Intelligence committees. Although I don't know about NYPD although they do have an intelligence community liasion that coordinates with FBI and DHS.

I wish we could clone Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren a few dozen times.

Just think of how the DMCA tries to block this kind of discovery though.