Big Brother Is Listening

The FCC says "....consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement." Read analysis about this scary notion here:
http://news.com.com/2061-10804_3-5884130.html?tag=nefd.aon

and right from the horse's mouth in this PDF doc:
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-05-151A1.pdf

RELATED:
Here's an example of what it takes to get the gummint to keep its nose out of your technology. Until the Carterphone case in 1968, Ma Bell (The Phone Company, or AT&T, which owned almost all of the phone switching network in the USA until the breakup by Judge Green around 1984) had the legal right to control everything that touched the phone system or even a phone itself. You could not interface your phone line with an answering machine, a PBX, a fax machine, a radio system or anything else even a shoulder rest device that attaches to the handset without their approval and, for the 1st 4 examples, without interface equipment you had to rent from them (this was a perfect monopoly as you had no other sources). Well, in the late 1940's, Ma Bell got the FCC to disallow an item called "Hush-a-Phone", which was a "cup-like device … which snaps on to a telephone instrument and makes for privacy of conversation, office quiet and a quiet telephone circuit". The FCC ruled that this product, because it caused distortion of the audio of YOUR call is 'deleterious to the telephone system and injures the service rendered by it' and The Commission's job was to ensure that this kind of thing didn't happen. Well, it wasn't like Hush-a-Phone was sending dangerous voltages into the phone network; it was doing the same thing as cupping your hand around the transmitter (which has the same deleterious effect). In other words, if you chose to reduce the quality of your call to improve its security, that was your business as long as you used your hands. Add a passive 3rd party item to the mix and you were ruining the phone system.

In this article you'll see it took an ruling by the US Court of Appeals (99 U.S. App. D.C. 190; 238 F.2d 266; 1956 U.S. App. LEXIS 4023) to confirm that this was YOUR business and the government (and Ma Bell) had no right to intervene. This is almost SILLY. And I'll bet that Ma Bell had a competing product you could rent from them that would do the same thing.

http://www.cavebear.com/ialc/hush-a-phone.htm