Are we reaching that ‘critical mass’? Jay-Z's App and Obama's Criminal Enterprise
To gauge the real impact of a historic development like "the Snowden revelations", it's sometimes useful to examine how wide it's being felt. An illustration: Jay-Z's "Magna Carta Holy Grail" Samsung cellphone app. I've a feeling some may not know what I'm talking about because, up until this past Friday, neither did I. But my May First/People Link colleague and office buddy Hilary Goldstein (who has often been the source of ideas for my writings here) sent me an email with a link to a story about the controversy and it got me thinking about how our society has succumbed to a massive crime and how this might be a kind of "critical mass".
The story starts with a Tweet by a respected Hip Hop artist named Michael "Killer Mike" Render. The Atlanta, Georgia resident issued a tweet this week displaying a graphic of the registration screen for the Magna Carta Holy Grail App with the cryptic but powerful message: "Naw...I'm cool." The app (a term used to describe small applications often used on hand-held devices) lets the user download a new album (called "Magna Carta Holy Grail"
by Hip Hop super-star Jay-Z.
The meaning of the message (a bit more dismissive than "Thanks but no thanks" is significant because over a half million people had already said "yes" to that App and had downloaded it to their phones. In the process, they gave Samsung their names, specific GPS location, approximate network location and the phone's precies id and status as well as permission to "modify or delete contents" from their USB storage, stop the phone from sleeping and get full access to their network communications.
In other words, you give them a treasure trove of information about you in exchange for downloading a "pre-release" version of this album.
Read more: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/50530