you may be one of the hundred forty million mobile phone users that have the software carrier i.q. installed on your phone by your carrier or by your phone manufacturer tracking your every mobile move and all without notification or permission you won't even be able to see that it's running on your phone and nobody even knew about this software until security researcher trevor eckhart first posted these explosive findings this is a video of him finding the carrier i.q. hidden deep inside of his android. traditions that as are below. and you can see a pretty extensive list of permissions here everything's for calling phone numbers stuff that costs us money sending text messages reading text messages getting our

location recording madi yo changing our audio settings playing with bluetooth changing network connectivity all sorts of that this has. now carrier i.q. collects all the information and gives it back to your cell phone provider but that isn't even the scariest part not only does the software track literally everything that you do but you can't even find that it's running on your phone or turn it off . it's really important here is to look under system doors see it is set to automatically set up this means that this application will always run one hundred is running less than i'm going to show is trying to press the four stop button see if you are offered with a forced out which means this application must be running even though we didn't see it in the running out cations was for let's go ahead and try to stop it. and actually. you are unable to say that you are. now of course carrier i.q.

argues that all of that benign after all what's the big deal with tracking your location application deployment and tax and they also deny cards allegation that they can track individual keystrokes supposedly it's all to keep cell phone providers in the know about their customers every move so they can make business decisions and improve products but for some reason the american people weren't all that quite happy or buying that explanation i guess they didn't like the idea of their every move and potentially even their keystrokes being monitored without their knowledge or their permission they were pissed and so in the wake of the controversy the service providers actually responded sprint announced last week that it would be dropping a carrier i q apple has made a similar announcement to mobile and have yet to make such an announcement and arisan well they don't use the software now congress is also deciding to get in the mix democratic representative edward markey has released draft legislation called the mobile device privacy act which would require companies to disclose when

they've installed monitoring software what that software is and who can read it he said in a statement to the hilt consumers have the right to know and to say no to the presence of software of their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their personal and sensitive information now all of that seems pretty obvious the fact that spy software is being installed on over one hundred forty million americans phones without their knowledge or permission should make congress just as angry as it makes me which is very now of course that doesn't mean that the government is innocent congress seems to find out to excuse me seems to find the time to be outraged about almost everything except for your privacy they make time to hold committee hearings on occupy d.c. vote on every single post office name in the country but when it comes to people's privacy the outrage is pretty muted in fact they normally push legislation that does the exact opposite and are all for the government monitoring your communications but don't worry when it's the government doing it it's just to keep you safe anyway i hate to be such a cynic here but i think that we have to look at this carrier i.q. situation in a positive light if they're acting but take it with

a grain of salt i was congress with legislate this way on all issues that do concern your privacy. now on january eighteenth we saw a day of online protests that at least for now killed so and protect ip two pieces of legislation they were working their way through the house and the senate they were sold as anti-piracy measures but in fact threaten the freedom of the internet as we know it now aside from google wikipedia and other big websites taking part we also saw the reddit community play a huge role and pressuring not only businesses like go daddy to change their stance but also members of congress like paul ryan well guess what they're not stopping there the community has now come up with a proposed plan to create a piece of legislation called the free internet act and ideas are already flowing so it's just a fun experiment or might we see a piece of legislation coming up from lawmakers but from the people well joining me to discuss it is alexis ohanian co-founder of reddit alexis nice to have you back on the show tonight if you can you know let's start give us

a little bit of explanation with how this all happened somebody decided to just come up with an idea said hey let's talk about a free internet we can come up with that on our own and then the conversation just started flowing yeah yeah that's pretty much it in fact we're seeing a lot of the same self mobilization that we saw during the. protest planning the magic of reddit is that anyone can come up with an idea and have it turn into something much much bigger and so someone had this idea reddit or you know with a username that is probably it's just some silly characters and entire community now is gone behind it if it is free internet act dot reddit dot com and so you can create a separate about anything you want and it just so happens now that there's one discussing everything imaginable about legislation that the community would like to see put forward to protect our rights online just like we have a protected offline right now we see the community come up with a lot of ideas on reddit but do you think we're ever seen anything like this before specifically where they want to create their own piece of legislation no no this is

definitely a first but i'll tell you we are in uncharted territory this is a community that few years ago decided. was going to be a good idea to have the world's largest secret santa exchange and did it and entire web sites have been devoted to this and now twice a year you can exchange secret santa gifts people all across the world it just kind of works and it's this decentralized magic that has has done so much for the sopa and pipa fight thus far the i i wouldn't put anything past them now they're still a long way to go from great discussions online to actual legislation but what's really exciting is that what's come out of the backlash is that there are legislators there are senators and representatives who are actually listening i wish there were more of them but there are plenty who are listening to the experts and we have we have meetings scheduled i've got one actually at the end of this week there are plenty of people who are paying attention what writers are doing beyond just me and are actually the ones who are capable of getting these ideas turned into law now i know that a lot of us don't like the way the legislation is written because often let's face

it if the lobbyist to end up writing legislation it ends up favoring a certain industry like i guess you could say the entertainment industry was one of what we saw with sopa and pipa but i mean you know how seriously can you take this what the read of yours are putting out there they're also not legal experts i'm the majority of them i'm assuming probably have never actually written a law before so is it just to get the conversation started. yeah and you know i i am a technologist at heart i am not a lawyer i almost was a lawyer but then i went to waffle house and had an epiphany but that's that's a whole other story i think like many americans the kind of laws that we have should be understandable to non lawyers i think you oftentimes get into a lot of trouble when you have so much legal ease that any reasonable person can't quite divine what it's trying to get at and so i like the approach of starting very simply with with people in plain english who are admittedly novices coming up with the most basic rights that we deserve to have online and then also getting them to some legislators who you know know that they're beholden to voters and to lobbyists

to craft this into real language it's exciting if you had it your way and then what would this free internet look like what kind of rights that protect we need we need basic really basic free speech rights the hyperlink needs to be protected speech. we you know we've seen discussions go so far as to talk about copyright reform because it's gone much much further than the founding fathers intended because it was supposed to encourage innovation and it's come it's become this monster that actually strangles more of it than anything else so copyright reform like i said protected speech online and things like privacy there are fundamental expectations that we as americans have about our privacy in meatspace offline that we would like to see protected. now i'm curious though there is you know while sopa and pipa are dead right now ron wyden had last year introduced something called the open act

which at first didn't really go anywhere some people laughed it off but now it's helping paper dead it seems more and more like it just might be a possibility and this is something that the tech giants out there that google that facebook twitter that linked in actually support so you know what do you think of it. well and i want to be very clear sopa and pipa if we're going to use the dead metaphor then we have to think of them as as somebodies as the undead because they are not their heads have been cut off unfortunately these these bills go they've been shelved and they've certainly the representatives behind them have certainly been sort of shamed by the public but they are not dead and we still have to be very very proactive open you know which one had talked about for many many months comes at fighting this much more intelligently then. even came close to because it was written with some actual technologist at the table but we need to go a step further and actually really make sure that there are things safeguarding our rights online and as well as looking at legislation that more effectively targets

copyright theft yeah i think that you know our least what a lot of people say to you in terms of some of the reasons why maybe the big tech giants are more open to the open act is it doesn't necessarily hold them liable if you do take down some of this infringing activity within a certain amount of time then you're ok and also i guess isn't as they get brod when it comes to a site dedicated to infringing activity actually to be dedicated to it they're not i want to switch gears with you here real quick before we go which is that we've been talking about google and their new privacy policy here and how they want to streamline everything and so it just follows you all over the internet and congress has asked them about it and they ended up writing back a thirteen page letter but basically saying don't worry this is not about your privacy this is just to make your life easier what's your take. well so on the one hand i can understand the as a again as it is a business founder as the co-founder of it i can understand the desire to simplify

language you know we are actually as a member of the board on reddit we're looking into doing a similar kind of simplification of our privacy policy and user agreement because it's just way too much legal use the issue with this i think with google is that it is a reminder to a lot of people who aren't necessarily thinking about it that so much of our lives is tied up in google whether we use their g. mail whether we use their search google plus you know there are so many bits of data about us that is that are being collected even in an itemized form to provide you know for instance better advertisements for us and it's important to realize that you know there is a much broader coalition of the internet than just google and i hope that that's something that congress has come away from all this discussion with and and these internet users they're american citizens and they are very very interested in things like privacy and it just so happened that google was on the side of the american people against hollywood for sopa and pipa but this doesn't mean that they

will always be and so it's really really important for us as citizens to keep in mind that this stuff matters and you know i ship are waking up to elections i'm sorry i got to take a break but thanks so much for joining us tonight thank you for having me. that. same. people calling. for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the. past you can hear behind me loud explosions.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else to some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome is a big issue. our

guys it's time for show and tell us a nice program last time we spoke about the international copyright and counterfeiting treaty called act it was signed by the u.s. last year it's an issue that caused people in poland take to the streets to protest at the office of the e.u. parliament just last week but we want to know if you thought that there's enough opposition to get congress to weigh in on it here at home since president obama signed a last year without seeking their approval let's go to prison for treason ascending to find out what you had to say. they anti-counterfeiting trade agreement with the lumps together and i counterfeiting an anti-piracy into one was signed by the u.s.

and six other nations in two thousand and twelve and just last week the e.u. and poland signed on as well now people. in poland and france have openly protested the way that these governments have been sneaking off the negotiating in secret while the e.u. still needs to ratify it most people in the us never even notice that we entered into an international agreement without any debate from congress just as people in england are unhappy that it was never approved by parliament so do any of us believe that there's enough and to act a momentum for congress to weigh in let's take a look now what he said it's doubtful about the american people can summon up another energy to oppose after after all the exertion over the stop on privacy act in the protect ip act now girls told us there is not enough anti active momentum we need more people involved in social media to push for online coverage and then mainstream media coverage and then there's not two teachers who said as a canadian the us or structures have been great so there you have it two sides of

the active problem some people want to make sure that they have internet freedom to create while others just want to make sure they get paid it seems like an argument that's been going on for a long time argument that governments around the world seem to be frightened to talk about and settle openly but as we've seen in protests in poland and france and perhaps coming to other countries who signed the treaty an issue that probably should never be settled in secret. is always we appreciate your responses and here's our next question for you what we're going to be talking about this supposed to go in the show but we're going to be talking about the connection between outsourcing and the u.s. education system that's next it's a it's a row but we want to know what you think what if anything you think we should be doing to stop the outsourcing of american jobs to other countries so you can let us know anything on facebook twitter and you tube and who knows your response just might make it on air. well today we have an update for users of the now sees it file sharing site mega upload yesterday we reported that u.s. prosecutors sent out

a notice saying that customers of this site could have all of their data delete it copyrighted material or not by this thursday. and it was all because mega uploads accounts have been frozen since the original original seizure by the f.b.i. on january nineteenth making it impossible for the company to pay its third parties who have been storing the data of the hundred fifty million users however a tweet from defense attorney iraq and said today that carpathia and cogent the two companies storing the information agreed to first serve consumer data for at least another two weeks so mega upload can work with us on proposal now seen as reporting new information on exactly how the f.b.i. obtained lots of its data before it was raided sources say if the government may have remotely implanted cyber spying software called the recorded conversations from skype which helped them build their case against the cloud service d.o.j. claims that they obtained court approval to implant that spyware or more details on the legality are still unknown meanwhile owner kim dotcom is being detained in new

zealand and his next legal hearing is scheduled for february twenty second where we're going to learn if you will be extradited to the u.s. to face prosecution and as always we will continue to bring you all the latest on this story as it becomes available. well these days it's become increasingly difficult to find something that's truly made in america especially the gadgets we rely on every day more specifically your i phone see just the other week the new york times released an in-depth report talking to former apple employees and contractors economists manufacturing experts and the like and they concluded that it's not just low wages the drive businesses businesses to take jobs abroad but it's the convenience of the supply chain as well as a larger workforce of mid-level employees and engineers that are more skilled and more adaptable so basically it's that american manufacturing is not coming back because our workforce and our factories simply can't compete but our guest tonight says that this kind of information propels what's known as an education crisis myth and decouples human rights and wages and working conditions and economic policies

that enrich the already rich here in this country joining me to discuss it is david sirota talk radio host and author of back to our future how the one nine hundred eighty s. explain the world we live in now david thanks so much for joining us tonight and i guess first tell me you know what your beef is with this argument here that some companies are saying that we just cannot compete when it comes to manufacturing because our workers don't have the same skills. well it doesn't make any sense on the face of it i mean the united states especially in high tech is producing more science technology engineering and math graduates from our universities then the economy can employ that's just a statistical fact that there is an unemployment rate among so-called stem workers that are is not being necessarily brought down with the rest of the economy there still remains a pressing unemployment rate in that that sector now is lower than the overall employment rate but the notion that companies can't find these workers when the

data says that there are more workers and we are producing more of those workers than the economy will employ suggests there's something not being told that suggests is there's a there's an untruth being told by the executives and by the politicians who say this is just a workforce crisis what this is is a workforce crisis if you think it's a crisis that american workers won't accept for instance seventeen dollars a day working six days a week twelve hours a day that's what chinese workers are working in some of the apple plants as the new york times reported so if what companies are really saying is they can't find american workers to work at those slave levels they try to end the sentence by saying bake can't find american workers but what again they're really saying is they can't find american workers to work in slave conditions you know with low pay well i mean i i definitely agree with you in the sense that you know what we see in

terms of working conditions in china is not something that i think many americans would be interested in but does that necessarily mean that there isn't a problem with our education system just because we're producing people with degrees doesn't necessarily mean that their skills are better rightly so in a lot of statistics out there comparing for example you know fifteen year olds in china versus fifteen year olds in the u.s. and let's say the u.s. ranked. the month paris and thirty four a country is in math and china's shanghai exit scares me at brain behind nations and. any way we rank seventeenth in science. that's it isn't there a little bit but we're falling behind when it comes to the testing and how the students are actually performing well as let's be clear about what kind of education crisis that we have in this country we have an education crisis in this country when it comes to kids who are in poverty when you compare our schools in very wealthy areas the top ten percent of wealthy areas in america with schools

around the rest of the world we actually perform the best our students perform the best in all of those areas so if we have an education crisis in this country i certainly want to suggest that we we do have a form of a crisis manager in this country it is a crisis of poverty now the separate issue is obviously fixing our education system making our education system better is a good thing would be a good thing because i think for a lot of reasons but the notion that fixing our education system whether the systems that are serving the impoverished areas or otherwise the notion that fixing those systems will solve the jobs crisis in this country is preposterous what the new york times outlines is a manufacturing industry in the high tech world is just one example that has moved offshore not because skills are widely acquirable or available in the workforce here in the united states but because the companies have found profit margins huge

profit margins in paying workers extremely low wages in not having to follow environmental laws and not having to fire go up against legalized unions cetera et cetera in other words companies realize that in places like china china didn't have the reforms the things that we call progress in this country after the industrial revolution it's basically like putting the company into a time. and setting it's for eight hundred ninety you know in the united states in that sense david you know i mean should we kiss this entire idea of bringing manufacturing back to the united states goodbye if americans here are are going to work for lower wages if they're not going to work more hours if the entire supply chain which this new york times article also argues has already moved on to that part of the world where it's so much easier when you have factories right next to each other right to ship these materials then what should we be doing instead should we stop relying on manufacturing as something that can bring jobs back well

know the the political design of the what i call the great education myth the notion this is all a problem of our education system is to distract attention from what the real problem is the real problem is that we have trade and tax laws on the books in this country that make it a good business decision for apple to move its manufacturing workforce over to china so we are forcing americans who get paid a minimum wage of what is it sixty five dollars or so a day in the need our day to compete with workers who make seventeen dollars a day unless you go back to the policies the terror of policies for instance that would make that business decision less lucrative for apple so that when apple says oh if we go over and get a seventeen dollars a day worker but if we face a tariff sending the most of the products back into the united states it's not going to make that transaction as profitable for us then you have a chance to build up in manufacturing industry or build it back up in this country

just the way by the way that we build our manufacturing industries up in the past we have our manufacturing industries were built with those kinds of tariffs and without the tax policies that literally reward companies for moving overseas now just lastly to have a foreign go do you think that consumers might be willing to go back though right because we know that a lot of these companies have become very used to having a very beautiful cushy profit margin and you know subset to six out there will say that even to make this. i phone in the us it really would only cost maybe sixty five dollars more but you know would consumers be willing to pay that much more maybe that's just the i thought maybe other examples of mean that things would rise by hundreds of dollars in price well here's the thing this is why the apple example is so interesting apple is reporting the largest profits of any corporation in the history of corporations so the notion that it needs to go to china because it's operating on very slim profit margins is preposterous it can afford to absorb this company for instance at least some of those costs of not let's say employing

essentially slave labor so that's why the apple example is so interesting more generally yes i mean i think we need to have a discussion in this country about whether the benefits of low prices by outsourcing manufacturing the benefits of the consumers outweigh the costs i would say with unemployment at eight percent nine percent wages stagnating in this country the notion that because prices have been lower it's been a good deal for us offshore has been a good deal for us that notion has been debunked. i'd love to contain this conversation with some other point too and talk about this idea that's been floating around field of moral capitalism as well right the companies might bring the jobs back but does that necessarily mean that they've been willing to even take any kind of a cut in their profits thanks so much for joining us tonight thank you. just ahead of the show take some time to bash for being accepting of all the details. and happy hour jon huntsman's biggest donor was from his own family and i made

a cameo on jay leno's tonight show we have all that and more after the break. the same. people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the. as you can hear behind me loud explosions. in the.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

sorry guys it's time for tonight's tool time award and tonight we're giving it to crotchety old newt gingrich yet again it's one of his stops along the campaign trail in florida who decided to set his moon colony and his child labor proposals aside to talk about religion but not all religion just the one that new follows if he tried to share a very sweet tale about how he and his third wife calista attended a catholic mass and how the church was speaking out against the obama administration's stance that insurance companies should have to cover birth control for women and all steps from his attack on mitt romney yesterday when he accused the former governor of engaging in a war on religion while he was head honcho in massachusetts but then new took his accusations a step further then he explained how obama's moved.