Stallman: Only Victims Of Tyranny Should Use Facebook

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Cellphones are surveillance tools

Stallman’s aversion to cellphones got some coverage (and ridicule) during his lecture tour. To us, he said: “Cellular telephones are an instrument of tyranny, because they are tracking and surveillance devices.”

He reminded us that that China is using geolocation on phones to track people, ostensibly to help it reduce traffic problems.

“There are cellular phone viruses which allow people with no connection to Big Brother to eavesdrop on the users,” he said, “and I strongly suspect that the phone company has software in there they can use to turn the phone on in eavesdroppong mode – then it can hear conversations in the vicinity. There is no need to speak into the phone for it to eavesdrop.”

“These are the reasons why I don’t have a phone,” he said. “Twenty years ago, if someone invited you to carry a tracking and eavesdropping device, you would have said absolutely not, and yet you have been lured into carrying one now.”

“But not me,” he concluded. “I feel it is every citizen’s duty to stick a finger in Big Brother’s eye.”

He is also against most phones on grounds of the freedom inherent in the software they run. Microsoft and Apple actually ban free (GPL-licensed) software from their app stores, he says, which “just shows how evil they are.”

But people should also push for free software on phones, he said: “If you want to live in freedom, you need not just to insist on apps that are free, but to insist on an operating system that is free”. This means not using iPhone, Windows Phone, or even Android, he said.

“The source code of Android is free as Google releases it, but they use a non-copyleft licence, except in the case of Linux,” he explained. “This doesn’t protect users from lockdown, or Google-isation, which is the practice of making a program non-free by stopping the user from installing his own version.”

Users should not trust that the versions of software on their phone are the same as Google says they are. “Aside from Linux, all the rest is under the Apache licence. and they don’t have to distribute source code changes.”

There is one free operating system for phones, he said: Replicant, a version of Android which is being built for old HTC Dream phones. “With this, you can make the system and apps entirely free, though it has a firmware program which is not.”

At this stage, it doesn’t sound as if Replicant is practical for someone who just wants to pick up a phone and use it. “I’m told there is a problem with a certain dialler library,” said Stallman – but for him, that sort of issue simply illustrates the extra effort users must go to for the goal of freedom.

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