Kill Switch Included on All Cell Phones Made in U.S. by 2015Melissa Melton Although the Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment is a voluntary program, apparently all the major players have already happily jumped on board: Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft, along with the five biggest cellular carriers in the United States, are among those that have signed on to a voluntary program announced Tuesday by the industrys largest trade group, reported CNN. And the supposed reasoning anti-theft sounds super phony, but just like everything else, its all for your safety of course: Well, now they wont even have to physically take your phone from you, because apparently theyll be able to just push a button and remotely wipe it clean of all data. On an aside, someone tried to break into my house and it took a whole day for the cops to even bother to show uplike they really give a crap about whether or not your phone is stolen. As with every other trendy new technology advertised as making consumers lives just Jetsons-level awesome, theres an obvious flipside that can be used (abused) for quite the opposite. By the way, the 2014 CTIA Board of Directors and Officers include the higher ups (Presidents, CEOs and VPs, etc.) from most of the major communications companies including Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Blackberry, ATT, Sprint, Qualcomm, LG Electronics, Samsung, T-Mobile, Motorola, U.S. Cellular, Nokia and Apple. And remember, many of these companies are the same ones the NSA taps to track all your online communications and populate their databases with your data. In this day and age of dwindling privacy ala 1984, you would think there would be a major market for a privacy-respecting telecom, but it takes a lot of money to set up the infrastructure for that kind of thing, and its no secret that the U.S. intelligence community via sources like In-Q-Tel (the CIA.s official venture capital firm) are the ones incubating all the new technology these days: It was the U.S. military that invented the Internet in the first place, after all. Melissa Melton is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared, and a co-creator of Truthstream Media. Wake the flock up! 