WASHINGTON (AP) â€" A comparison executive during a technology company that creates monitoring program personally commissioned on 141 million cellphones pronounced Thursday that a FBI approached a association about regulating a record though was rebuffed. The avowal came one day after FBI Director Robert Mueller positive Congress that agents "neither sought nor achieved any information" from a company, Carrier IQ.
The company's matter will approaching irritate guess about a monitoring apparatus and a utility to a U.S. government.
Andrew Coward, clamp boss of selling for Carrier IQ of Mountain View, Calif., told The Associated Press that a FBI is a usually law coercion agency that has contacted a company. Coward would not contend when, because or how mostly a FBI has reached out to Carrier IQ, though he pronounced a association is not operative with a bureau. "There is no attribute between us and a FBI," Coward said.
During an slip conference Wednesday, Mueller told a Senate Judiciary Committee that a FBI "neither sought nor achieved any information from Carrier IQ in any one of a investigations." Mueller was responding to a doubt by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., authority of a committee's remoteness and record panel, who has pronounced collecting personal information from people's cellphones could violate sovereign law.
FBI orator Michael Kortan pronounced in an emailed matter that a bureau's technical staff "communicates customarily with many record companies, including Carrier IQ, relations to new and rising technologies and capabilities."
The company's record is designed as a evidence apparatus that gives mobile write companies a ability to accumulate and investigate information that helps them urge a opening of inclination that work on their networks, Carrier IQ said. The program is typically commissioned by a phone association or a manufacturer of a handset.
Most cellphone users were unknowingly a association or a program existed until final month when a confidence researcher, Trevor Eckhart, posted online a video he done display how keystrokes and messages from his smartphone were logged by a Carrier IQ software.
Eckhart pronounced a program is tough to detect and formidable to spin off. Other researchers who subsequently complicated Carrier IQ's program pronounced it does not seem to broadcast a essence of emails or content messages though captures minute information about recipients or destinations of messages, a earthy plcae from where messages were sent or perceived and sum such as a phone's battery level.
Even before Thursday's avowal by Carrier IQ about a FBI contacting a company, a FBI had fueled questions about either it sought to use a monitoring software in sovereign investigations or even either it was questioning Carrier IQ. The FBI denied a ask a AP done on Dec. 2 for inner papers about a interactions with Carrier IQ, citing a sustenance in a Freedom of Information Act that excludes from avowal any papers applicable to a "pending or impending law coercion proceeding." The FBI also told a AP that releasing a annals that it sought could "reasonably be approaching to meddle with a coercion proceedings."
The AP had asked for copies of association from FBI officials requesting entrance to information stored on Carrier IQ's servers or seeking questions about such information. The AP also requested copies of annals indicating visits by FBI officials to Carrier IQ's offices and a formula of any contrast achieved by a FBI on Carrier IQ's technology.
Eckhart's online video sparked concerns among remoteness advocates about that information Carrier IQ's program is recording and who can perspective it. In late November, Franken wrote to Carrier IQ's boss and asked him to answer a array of questions by Dec. 14 about a kind of information that a program can collect, how prolonged a information is stored and either any of this information is common with third parties.
"These actions might violate sovereign remoteness laws, including a Electronic Communications Privacy Act and a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," Franken wrote. "This is potentially a really critical matter."
A few days later, Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, co-chairman of a Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, asked a Federal Trade Commission either it was questioning "the designation of program that personally marks and reports behind a activities of cellphone users."
Earlier this week, Carrier IQ sought to enclose a repairs by organizing meetings with officials during a FTC, a Federal Communications Commission and several Senate offices, including Franken's, to explain what a program is dictated to do. The association pronounced it is not wakeful of an central review into a products or practices.
"Our information is not designed for law coercion agencies and to a believe has never been used by law coercion agencies," a association pronounced in a statement. "Carrier IQ have no rights to a information collected and have not upheld information to third parties. Should a law coercion group ask information from us, we would impute them to a network operators. To date and to a believe we have perceived no such requests."
The association posted a 19-page matter on a website that explains what a program does. It pronounced a usually information collected is to assistance solve common problems, such as batteries that empty too fast or calls that destroy to connect.
The software, called IQ Agent, typically transmits 200 kilobytes of evidence information â€" a homogeneous of 50 typed pages â€" once any day when a phone is not being used, a association said, though decisions about what information to collect and how it is analyzed is dynamic by a phone companies and a agreements they have with their customers.
___
Online:
Carrier IQ: http://www.carrieriq.com/
News referensi http://news.yahoo.com/fbi-contacted-phone-monitoring-firm-software-221510721.html
0 comments:
Post a Comment