As a consumer who's cellphone and IP-based landline are effectively useless for incoming phone calls, what can I do to help report these robo calls?
We just recently purchased a landline and have told nobody our phone number, so 100% of incoming calls are spam (and we get a few every day). It's amazingly frustrating.
telecom industry here, honestly, nothing. SS7/PSTN are horribly broken.
only thing that will fix it is burning it to the ground.
fcc regulations and penalties mean nothing to shady offshore grey market scam call centers in india using suspicious/unethical voip providers and methods of getting phone traffic to the US/Canada.
shaken/stir is a joke
set up a voip based system with IVR on your incoming DIDs that asks the caller to input a short series of digits to be connected, then have that series of digits ring your real line.
Understanding that you don't know everything about or speak for the industry, the question I've had for a few years now is whether this is a deliberate tactic (I've little doubt telcos want to shed wireline service), or just a mess with no clear out?
Because the problem's not just with landline but with any direct-dialed PSTN telecoms system. I don't want a landline or mobile phone any more. The situation's well past simple cord-cutting.
It's been about three years since I stumbled across this quote which confirms that at least someone on the inside is aware that the present situation is eroding all trust in the system, and that this is an existential threat:
[S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.”
Stir-Shake may have reduced levels of spam, I've no way of knowing. But the level it's at remains intolerable and a real financial risk to individuals and businesses. I'm personally aware of several people who've been scammed of thousands of dollars within the past year.
Cut phone service and that threat disappears, along with all the attendant billing bullshit and customer service nightmares.
Is the industry aware of this and what if anything does it plan to do?
my personal opinion is that there is simply too much legacy SS7/PSTN junk out there to change the protocol/traffic exchange between carriers in any significant way that will result in anything ever being fixed.
it's a legacy of the 1950s and 1960s era of the monopoly bell system when all of the phone system trusted itself.
the whole way that traffic moves between telcos in the PSTN is built on lack of crypto authentication, total trust between two phone switches, in a way that would be absurdly terrible if run on the modern internet (imagine all your online banking as http only, for example).
I wonder if something like the strategy used for Certificate Transparency could work here? Take a legacy system, attach authentication on the side, propagate that data in a manner that allows looking it up, use it as a strong signal for "this is actually authentic", and then slowly ratchet that up until people feel comfortable saying that calls without it can go straight to voicemail without ringing.
My POV is biased by working only adjacent to ILEC/CLEC/PSTN/SS7 related stuff in telecom, my day job is much more focused on building IP based packet last mile and middle mile ISP stuff for direct internet access.
I worked in telco when STIR/SHAKEN was invented. I was in the early sessions with Comcast and AT&T and the rest when they were politely asked by tbe FCC to fix it.
Headline: they never had a chance.
Conspiracy: they didnt want to.
- First of all, the legacy telco network is still out there in huge quantities. This is the copper landline to grandma's house. It speaks SS7 and TDM which have no inherent concept of identity: the tekco switch simply inserts the calling number in the signaling, the end. There is no economic incentive to replace any of this old stuff since there is no marginal revenue to be made. It will rust in place.
- the telco network has long supported cases where the caller had a legitimate need to replace their number with another. Your doctor calling you always shows as the office front desk, never their direct line.
- this use case gets even worse when you have call centers and other high volume users. Use of VoIP makes the modern call center possible, but also trivially easy to change the calling ID, and again, perfectly legitimately for the businesses that use it.
- extra wrinkle: offshore centers. now some agent in India needs to present as if they are calling from Ohio. No problem, VoIP can do that. But the same tech that does that also means their evil twin can call you up from an area code that looks like your town to ask about your car warranty.
Sprawling networks can be upgraded with gateways and bridges where wholesale replacement isn't viable. Rural services (telephony, electricity, water, gas, sewerage, postal, ...) are often noneconomical and in the US there's a long tradition of either cooperatives or government-run (often municipally-organised) services, and/or steep subsidies.
The legacy assumptions built into PSTN seem to be getting in the way. Simple dumb terminals with no logic greater than being able to generate pulses or tones, logic in centralised switches (which should make upgrading more viable). Identity presumed to be based on the device and circuit, rather than the person at the end of the line (in the increasingly rare cases where a person is in fact at either end of the line). Stronger authentication, and different levels of authentication, are both necessary. (And some preservation for anonymous communications, within the constraints of technologically mediated telecoms platforms, is also useful --- it has its place.)
I'm also fearful that such a system will become captured by a single entity and not offer interoperability --- the long line of personal messaging systems offered by a string of Internet monopolies and would-be monopolies suggest the position has some appeal, if it's difficult to attain. MCI, AoL, Microsoft Messenger, Google's litany of extirpated chat apps, Facebook, Discord, Telegram, Signal, Protonmail, etc.
In its early years telephony was exclusive, and for much of its existence, expensive. Those cost barriers to usage meant that the worst abuses of the system were avoided (though the annoyance of telephone solicitation were still remarked on).
I'm not sure how or where volume increased, though Google Ngram shows "telemarketing" and a set of related terms taking off in the 1970s and 1980s:
> Sprawling networks can be upgraded with gateways and bridges where wholesale replacement isn't viable. Rural services (telephony, electricity, water, gas, sewerage, postal, ...) are often noneconomical and in the US there's a long tradition of either cooperatives or government-run (often municipally-organised) services, and/or steep subsidies.
this is really overly optimistic, you underestimate how moribund the traditional telco/copper POTS line/dialtone service is. the various ILECs around the USA and their patchwork of territories are putting the bare minimum into keeping some of this stuff running. nobody is going to retrofit custom gateways into their network.
they'll spend money on lobbyists and lawyers to fight back against doing anything other than maintaining the status quo instead.
Exactly. Back in the early 2000s there was a flurry of activity as telcos replaced old Nortel and Lucent TDM switches with IP ones made by CopperCom, Metaswitch, Taqua and the rest but a lot of that was funded by govt funds (eg USDA RUS) and even then those companies could not do anything about the copper access wiring leading into tbeir shiny new switches. So you had this weird situation where a sleek, all IP softswitch was talking IP to a gateway which spoke some TDM thing to an even older SLC96 with a gazillion copper loops hanging off of it.
I think that all those companies are dead or acquired now.
Is the reason for that actually technical, or is it that U.S. numbers/datasets are the most attractive targets for scams (i.e. due to the supply of victims, access/availability of data, ease of not having to worry about i18n/l10n for your scam tactics, etc.)?
also the extreme number and variety of number of weird small CLECs, foreign SS7/PSTN operators, and grey market voip operators that interface into the US phone system vs a much smaller market like the UK or Denmark or somewhere.
I want to use my old desk phone, but I want to screen all calls to basically "known" numbers. Is this something I can do fairly easily? I'd also like a traditional voicemail system with playback (does not have to be cassette)
I've been looking at this lately as I setup new phone service for my MIL who's moving to a place with unreliable power. Some phone companies have whitelist services, although if your telco is like CenturyLink of Washington state, they don't appear to want to actually be in the phone business anymore and all the useful services are grandfathered, ordering a phone line is an ordeal and pricing is crazy (OTOH, the line quality seems to be good if you can get it). If you've got a voip line, you've got way more options though; I think most providers should give you options to whitelist.
Assuming your telco won't help you with whitelisting, your options are maybe? getting a new cordless system with caller id whitelisting, it seems like maybe some of the newest panasonic dect systems can do it (that will take care of the answering machine needs as well). Or getting an external box, most likely inline with your phone.
I don't have either yet, but it seems like reasonable options include the Digitone proseries II [1], or the Sentry call blocker[2]. Both are more expensive than they should be (IMHO), but offer some amount of whitelisting and blacklisting. The Digitone has a longer history in the industry, and what looks like a clumsier interface; the Sentry has a good, but slightly messy feature for handling inbound calls from numbers that aren't 'known', for those calls, it answers and plays an outgoing greeting (customizable in the 3.x device, prerecorded in 2.x), if the caller presses 0, their number is added to the white list and they can call back; from reviews, I gather on the 2.x series pressing 0 add you to the whitelist and then hangs up on you; on the 3.x series, pressing 0 generates a fake ringback, makes the device ring (but not phones on the line) and after 9 fake rings will let the caller leave a message on the sentry device (2 message capacity, FIFO). This is like not quite right; the recommendation from reviewers is to record a message asking people to press 0 and then hangup and call back, rather than having them go through the weird ringing stuff. There's some negative comments about recording quality.
I've tried both of these devices. The Digitone (and anything similar) is useless, as it requires you to press a button every time you receive a call from a "bad" number. I did this for about a week, logging hundreds of incoming calls, and I rarely saw a duplicated number. So you'll just be pressing the button all the time - might as well just pick up the phone and hang up.
The Sentry is much better, but has some notable flaws.
The Sentry works as a whitelist, so it blocks all calls by default. After you enter your whitelist (family, friends, etc.), you'll get three types of calls:
-Good Calls: From people on your approved list. These calls ring through as normal.
-Bad Calls: From idiots (aka robocalls). The idiots aren't smart enough to press a button, so they don't, and then the Sentry hangs up the call.
-Other Calls: From humans who are (ideally) not idiots, but aren't (yet) on your list.
This third item is where the Sentry really needs improvement. Other callers hear a (horrible quality) outgoing message, so they can either hang up, or press a key to leave a message - on the Sentry, not your answering machine/voicemail. The message they leave is only 20 seconds, and you can only receive two messages. And you can't screen these calls - you don't actually hear the person leaving the message, and you can't pick up the call if it turns out it's valid. And the Sentry doesn't timestamp the message. There's a log of calls, but you have to work to figure out who actually called, especially if the caller's message was cut off.
(What I would prefer is to have callers press a button, then my phone rings like normal.)
If you don't get a lot of "new" numbers calling you, the Sentry isn't bad. But you will miss some calls, especially at first. Thankfully, there's an on/off toggle for those times when you're expecting an important call from an unknown number (delivery guy, hospital).
Please email me a review if you set one up. I'm currently waiting for the welcome packet so I can try the CenturyLink options, but I'm not holding my breath and will need to get something soon, cause junky calls are already coming in. (surprising noone)
I think Google Voice has the ability to enable/disable call screening for a group of contacts. Maybe try it out and see if it has enough options to let you achieve the effect you want?
(Assuming you don't specifically wants POTS though.)
This is probably true... but I've never had a spoofed call that pretended to be my mom, dad, wife, or family. That's basically the entire list I care about...
You can kinda do this on your mobile phone (works on both android and iOS) by automatically silencing all calls that are not in your contact list. Works a treat for me.
Are you sure that’s what you want? There’s also times when you get legitimate calls from people not on your whitelist (think, submitted info to a contractor online, they call you back later from their personal cell phone, etc.).
I'm absolutely sure that's what I want. It would make my phone more useful.
For every 300 calls I get, maybe 1 isn't spam. I probably get 5 spam calls per day and under 10 legitimate calls per year.
There are so many simple things carriers could do. The biggest would be simply deleting silent voicemails would help a lot.
I kind of wish a company that actually cares about voice phone calls would come around. Give me the highest fidelity calls possible, give me features for recording, give me the option to block all non-authenticated callers, show me the actual call data and not just the caller id, etc...
Some VoIP providers offer custom incoming call routing based on whitelists or other criteria.
For example, you could port a number to VoIP.ms, and (in their terms) set up a caller ID filtering rule based on phone book entries, with the those entries managed either through the web form or API. If you wanted known callers to reach your mobile phone instead of a VoIP phone, I imagine you could use a call forwarding rule. Unknown callers could be routed to a busy signal, voice mail, a "not in service" message, or handled in a variety of other ways.
A few years ago I programmed my phone.com VoIP lines to route any call not on my whitelist through a virtual switchboard: Dial 7 to speak with me. I haven't had a robocall since.
It's an inconvenience if a company wants to use automation to return my call. I can turn this off, temporarily. As I see it, it's stupid of any legitimate company to imitate a robocall for any reason. I don't walk up to cops carrying a fake gun; they shouldn't behave like spammers.
Those missed unknown callers still result in a missed call, a voicemail notification, and increase that red badged number, mixed in with missed calls from friends and family I actually care about. It solves the issue of spam callers immediately interrupting what I'm doing, but that's all. I still have to sort through the crap.
Trouble is, some calls go to voicemail that you really wanted - like the doctor's office with your test results or the shop telling you your car is ready.
The feature is to silence unknown callers. If you know the numbers that they're calling from, you can simply add them as contacts. As a whole, I think the feature is worth the tradeoffs.
Blocking unknown callers on my iPhone isn't an issue; I block everything. The issue is that legit callers can't get through. My uncle had a heart attack last year; I found out through an Instagram DM from a family friend; nobody in my family was answering a call from an unknown number (the hospital).
That's one of the things I miss most about moving from a Google Pixel to an iPhone. The Pixel was configured to use Google's call screening service, which would filter unknown callers and make them state the reason for the call. It would then ring my phone and give me the opportunity to answer or send them to voicemail. Neat.
The only spam I get is from some insurance company out of Florida. For whatever reason they won't stop calling. Everybody else stopped calling because I would always pick up and always try and worm my way through the system, and once caught or bored, then start questioning their moral character and their family's opinions of their life choices, or my favorite, why they choose to scam people (they always say they don't!).
I have done the same. AFAICT it has made no difference in call volume.
I did make some vacation package scammers feel bad and hang up a couple times. Claiming that I no longer travel because I lost my legs In a car accident years back.
Family that can use the vacation package? Nope, they are all dead too. The last of them died in the same fiery crash.
Taking that to the extreme, there are bots that will engage the caller with enough noncommittal answers for long enough they will truly waste money on you.
I grunt and listen for a response (if any). It's pretty easy to distinguish a human from a robocall nowadays. There was a brief time when a woman's voice would say "hello, uh, hello? can you hear me?" which got me once, but that was it because it played whether you made noise or not and was always the same.
Would work for humans. Don't think it would work much for recorded robot calls, as the cost of the call is probably negligible compared to hiring an actual person.
One might even be "marked" as "listening the marketing material" which would end up getting more calls.
I use to do the same and then one vindictive scammer attacked me with nonstop hangup calls for weeks from random numbers. Now I'm more wary of interacting with them at all.
one of the worst things you can do with them is engage and speak as a live human, even if all you're doing is taunting them, because then your number gets permanently marked as a live human in some grey/black market spam fuck's CSV file they sell to other people.
what I've heard from multiple sources is that landlines when you provision them, by default they get marked as a published number. if you provision the line and you mark it as a non-published number, usually you're not going to get these types of spam calls everyday. I think what's going on is that there's a automated campaign that's been going on for probably over a decade or two but where people are purchasing a daily list of published numbers from the telecom providers themselves and then they're using that in their spam campaigns.
The prefix is relevant for LEC ownership and management duties. Default routing is derived/provisioned by thousands block. Not all call lookups require a lookup into the number portability database. Telephone numbers are highly regulated; usage, growth, etc are tracked by prefix and reported by carriers to NANPA on a yearly basis.
only a little bit, older prefixes like in 206-xxx and 360-xxx that are assigned to legacy copper POTS ILEC carriers (like Centurylink for big parts of the seattle area, or Ziply for the suburbs) are more likely to be fixed landline phones and not ported out somewhere else.
prefixes that are assigned to a carrier like tmobile or that were a metropcs prefix before its full integration into tmobile are highly likely to be cellphones, though people can of course port away their number to a voip service or something, but more often they would just move to verizon or att.
Availability when utility power isn't (at least theoretically), much lower latency (although everyone else has terrible latency, so kind of meh), desire to spend $60/month for $15 worth of service that the service provider doesn't really want to do anymore anyway. :P
Be aware that in some areas unless you specify a "burglar alarm" or "elevator emergency phone line" or similar, you may end up with a little powered box connected to fibre or similar.
Some have battery backup and so kind of work the same as before ... for awhile.
A large majority of the phone spam I get is about automotive extended warranties. Shouldn't we be holding that industry responsible for this? Would a campaign of "would you trust someone who spams you for insurance?", and letting the insurers compete on claims that "we'll never try to sell to you over the phone", help?
I don't think that the insurers for those extended warranties are the same as the legitimate ones that a consumer would normally go to for insurance. That's assuming there's even a product that's being sold, and not someone just calling people, pocketing the money, and running away with it.
> I don't think that the insurers for those extended warranties are the same as the legitimate ones that a consumer would normally go to for insurance.
Sure they are. It's just that the phone scammers are living off of affiliate and referral fees.
>Do any of them actually sell extended warranties? I assumed they were scammers.
Those are not mutually exclusive. From what I've heard[1], the "extended warranties" are grey market car maintenance insurance that basically exclude everything you might expect from coverage, and anything that might be covered, it's reimbursement only, they don't pay up front. The only thing it is good for is liberating people of their money.
If we're guessing that this is all fraud anyway, why would we think that a law against phone spam would be where the spammers draw the line, the crime they're not willing to commit? Won't they keep spamming, just like they're already defrauding?
Because of the amount of plausible deniability it gives to their service providers: "We didn't think it was a /scam/ just a legit telemarketing operation."
> How We Got Here: In 2020, the FCC granted voice service providers with 100,000 or fewer subscriber lines an extension of STIR/SHAKEN* implementation requirements, consistent with the TRACED Act. However, since then evidence emerged that a subset of these small voice service providers were originating an increasing quantity of illegal robocalls.
shocked pikachu face. Which explains why Canada didn't provide any exemptions.
Also, I love this bit from Wikipedia:
> The name was inspired by Ian Fleming's character James Bond, who famously prefers his martinis "shaken, not stirred." STIR having existed already, the creators of SHAKEN "tortured the English language until [they] came up with an acronym.
"Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs"
Is this why the number of spam texts I'm getting exploded recently? The scamming of the American public and the degradation of our infrastructure continues apace.
I've also seen a large uptick in the number of them (~1/week vs 0 before), and they're not political, they're mostly scammers pretending to know me. I haven't played along enough yet to learn what they're after, but they're from all kinds of US area codes in places I've never lived.
There is still a loophole. You get one more year if you are “facilities based”. All you need is one subscriber to whom you also provide broadband connection and you’re covered under the facilities based definition even if you have a thousand other end users over the top.
Here's the full text of the release. I don't know why they just don't just put it on the page itself... :
Media Contact:
Will Wiquist
will.wiquist@fcc.gov
For Immediate Release
FCC CLOSES ROBOCALL LOOPHOLE
FCC Robocall Response Team Has Taken Enforcement Actions, Built Nationwide Partnerships, and Proposed Innovative New Policies to Combat Scam Robocalls
--
WASHINGTON, June 30, 2022—Starting today certain small phone companies must comply with FCC rules to implement caller ID authentication tools on their networks, just as large voice service providers are required to since June 30, 2021. Today’s announcement is the latest in a series of actions by the FCC’s Robocall Response Team to cut off the flood of unwanted robocalls hitting consumers and business phone networks. These small phone companies are suspected of facilitating large numbers of illegal robocalls and, as a result, the FCC rolled back an extended caller ID authentication implementation timeline granted to them in its original 2020 rules.
“Each time I get a robocall it reminds me that we can’t stop looking for ways to stop these nuisance calls and the scams behind them,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. “Our team is working to aggressively and creatively find ways to fight back. We will use every authority we have, and we will go to Congress for more. We will not let up.”
How We Got Here: In 2020, the FCC granted voice service providers with 100,000 or fewer subscriber lines an extension of STIR/SHAKEN* implementation requirements, consistent with the TRACED Act. However, since then evidence emerged that a subset of these small voice service providers were originating an increasing quantity of illegal robocalls. As a result, in 2021, the FCC unanimously voted to shorten the extension by a year.
Recent FCC investigations and reports from the Industry Traceback Group indicate that, since STIR/SHAKEN was widely implemented across the largest providers’ networks last year, robocallers have sought to maintain anonymity and avoid enforcement and blocking tools by routing or originating their call traffic on the networks of these largely IP-based* small providers that have not yet implemented STIR/SHAKEN. This has allowed robocalls to pass from these networks to terminating provider networks without carrying forward accurate and standardized caller ID/traceback information.
What’s New: Effective today, a problematic gap in FCC robocall rules closed, requiring non-facilities based small voice service providers* to implement STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards on their networks. These providers are now required to implement STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards on the IP portion of their networks.
The Bigger Picture: Under Chairwoman Rosenworcel’s leadership, the Robocall Response Team was created to serve as an FCC staff working group that pulls together expertise from across the agency to leverage the talents of enforcers, attorneys, policy makers, engineers, economists, and outreach experts to combat the unyielding menace of illegal spoofed, scam, robocalls.
This effort has resulted in:
· record-breaking spoofing and robocall fines;
· closing gateways used by international robocallers to reach Americans’ phones;
· widespread implementation of STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards to help traceback illegal calls and improve blocking tools to protect consumers;
· the signing of robocall investigation partnerships with the large majority of state Attorneys General;
· and unprecedented policy proposals to combat the rising threat of bogus robotexts.
###
Appendix of frequently used terms:
· STIR/SHAKEN Caller ID authentication: Caller ID authentication, based on so-called STIR/SHAKEN standards, provides a common information sharing language between networks to verify caller ID information which can be used by robocall blocking tools, FCC investigators, and by consumers trying to judge if an incoming call is likely legitimate or not.
· Non-facilities-based voice service providers: A voice service provider is non-facilities based if it offers voice service to end users using connections that are not sold by the provider or its affiliates. Instead, their voice service is transmitted over another provider’s transmission service.
· IP-based telephony: IP telephony is shorthand for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which is a technology that allows a user to make voice calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular (or analog) phone line.
This is an unofficial announcement of Commission action. Release of the full text of a Commission order constitutes official action. See MCI v. FCC, 515 F.2d 385 (D.C. Cir. 1974).
I'm not too familiar with what the Supreme Court did with TCPA, but as a developer, we were hit by patent-troll equivalents who leveraged the law to shake down companies.
In our case, someone's sister invited him to join their account. The text message was initiated by the sister but our system sent the SMS via our backend. We were sued because we allegedly sent an unsolicited text message and were considered an autodialer under TCPA guidelines.
We were able to win the suit, but it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The law needed a tune up, and if the court decision stopped this type of troll suit some good came of it.
I am not defending robocallers. I hope they die. I just highlight that sometimes these laws do need to be tightened up to stop abuse the other way.
> If you work in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) space, you are certainly aware of the landmark unanimous decision by the United States Supreme Court in Facebook v Duguid, in which the Court narrowed the definition of an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) to equipment that has the capacity to either store or produce numbers using a random or sequential number generator.
> ...
> On June 10, 2021, the District Court for the District of South Carolina held that the Aspect predictive dialer did not qualify as an ATDS because the evidence proved that the system could neither randomly nor sequentially store or produce numbers to be dialed
---
So, if you're working from a list of numbers, it's not an ATDS. It is only an ATDS if you're dialing random numbers or sequential numbers.
> The Supreme Court's ruling was seen to be favorable to the telemarketing industry, since the decision narrowed the definition of an automatic dialing system of which are regulated under the TCPA. As few actual automated dialers in use at the time of the decision incorporate the random or sequential number generator, telemarketers would be able to use other automatic dialing systems that do not meet this definition to engage in their business, according to the National Consumer Law Center. The National Consumer Law Center as well as Consumer Reports expressed concern that there would be a significant increase in unwanted telemarketing calls due to this decision.
> Senator Ed Markey, one of the authors of the TCPA, along with Representative Anna Eshoo, called the ruling "disastrous", as the Congressional intent of the TCPA was "to ban dialing from a database", and announced the same day of the decision that they would be looking to introduce amended legislation to address the Court's decision.
As described here, it seems like Congress has every opportunity to clarify the definition of ATDS. Surely they deserve as much blame as the Court, then.
> (1) The term “automatic telephone dialing system” means equipment which has the capacity—
(A) to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator; and
(B) to dial such numbers.
Congress has been purposefully broken by Republican's new requirement that all legislation must receive supermajority approval in the senate.
It's part of a coordinated plan to "drown the federal government in a bathtub": the courts read legislation as narrowly as possible while congress is unable to legislate.
I disagree. The Supreme Court declined to void the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. They concluded that the government can’t mandate purchase of a private product under the commerce clause, but that this was really a tax which is an enumerated power. So while they could have gutted the law and pointed back to a Congress to pass a solution they found a way to not do so.
Schoolhouse Rock should be updated to include the 60 vote Senate rule. Also the inevitable lawsuits as a fourth step following House, Senate, and Presidential approval.
I'm not sure a wider reading of the TCPA is possible for the definition of an automatic dialing system. Is there any other way the courts could read the definition provided in https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/227 ?
Thanks for looking that up. Yeah, from what's quoted here, it's perfectly transparent.
(1) The term “automatic telephone dialing system” means equipment which has the capacity—
(A) to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator; and
(B) to dial such numbers.
Anybody who's claiming the Court is playing games here clearly has an agenda of their own. Congress dropped the ball.
Look up Edelson, they are the troll firm that sued us. They have had significant success taking much wider interpretations of the law. Just like patent trolls they also assume most people will just settle - we did not but it was a gamble.
In the current legislative session [1], just counting the first page of Senate (I think you're referring to the Senate) votes listed because I'm lazy, out of the 100 votes, I see only 10 that failed. And of those passing, I didn't actually count, but a very large proportion are passing with less than 60 yeas.
Although we see a lot of political crap going on, the Congress still manages to do a lot of business.
No. The parent comment claimed "Congress has been purposefully broken by Republican's new requirement that all legislation must receive supermajority approval in the senate." If you follow the link you'll see that lots of things passed with fewer than 60 votes. That claim is false on its face.
Further, for your criticism of my methodology to hold water, it would be necessary to see the total number of votes decreasing over time. That's not what the record shows. Using the same resource, I looked at each of the last few years, and then took a few steps back in 4-year steps thinking that maybe there's something corresponding to the point in the presidential election cycle. Either way, I don't see it going down at all. Quite the opposite.
2021....528
2020....292 (not hard to explain the drop in this year, I think)
2019....428
2018....274
...
2014....366
...
2010....299
...
2006....279
The number of votes per year is clearly growing. And in the current session, at least, there's still a high proportion of votes passing, and of them many have a "yeas" count below 60.
> If you follow the link you'll see that lots of things passed with fewer than 60 votes.
Yes, I very specifically mentioned that; that means some Senators voted for cloture, but not for the bill. Not unusual. It still needed 60 Senators to get to a vote, but only 50 to pass that vote.
> The number of votes per year is clearly growing.
Votes per year isn't the whole story. More votes on smaller-scope, less meaningful legislation isn't an improvement. You're not going to get any program like Obamacare, Social Security, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, etc. through this sort of Senate. Obama couldn't even get a SCOTUS nominee past McConnell.
If that’s their interpretation of an obvious law to stop something 99% of people hate, I’m sure glad the Supreme Court doesn’t get to interpret the Constitution.
> (1) The term “automatic telephone dialing system” means equipment which has the capacity—
(A) to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator; and
(B) to dial such numbers.
I think it is one of those things that would theoretically have been billions of dollars (hundreds of millions of invites have gone out and the statutory damages were on a per infraction basis), but practically speaking something very similar to a patent troll, so maybe in the $5-10m range? I'm just guessing. We are a later stage company.
I didn't know the damages were statutory - I guess I should look that up myself. In your case, was it a class action suit? If not, I wonder how they had standing to sue on behalf of thousands/millions of other users.
The intent of the TCPA was absolutely not to disallow text messages being sent for app invites. We did not spam any contacts. A user invited their sister to join them on their account by manually selecting them from their contact list. We just sent the text message via Twilio vs having the user send it themselves.
And regardless of whether you like this or not, this was not the use case the law was implemented for, which is to stop robocallers.
I wasn't up on this, so looked it up. Apparently they narrowed the definition of what "counts as an autodialer" to effectively open a large exemption for devices that you or I would consider an autodialer. As long as the autodialer doesn't store numbers sequentially or generate them randomly it is exempt. e.g. if you have a list of non-sequential phone numbers, you can autodial to your heart's content.
Is there anything preventing Congress from clarifying the definition? Assuming not, don't they deserve as much of the blame for the mess as folks here are heaping on the Court?
> June 30, 2022—Starting today certain small phone companies must comply with FCC rules to implement caller ID authentication tools on their networks, just as large voice service providers are required to since June 30, 2021.
Seems like it's very new for small phone companies, but yeah I agree today seems to be a deadline.
My understanding is that enforcement will start tomorrow. But I'm not especially familiar with the Telco environment. My understanding is also that there is still a remaining loophole for international telcos, which will close in another year's time.
Why is this a thing in the US? Feels like a unique american thing. I’m in Europe and I don’t think I got more than 2 or 3 spam SMS or robocall in the last 20 years.
Calling and SMS to the US is super cheap, under a penny per minute or per text at bulk rates. Calling or texting a mobile phone in Europe is usually ten cents or more per minute/text at bulk rates.
There's also a lot fewer languages to deal with in the US, most random recipients can be scammed in English, and if you can also scam en Espanol, that probably brings you to 80%+ of a market with a lot of ability to pay over the phone. A good target market for many things.
Is yours a mobile phone? Call termination to European mobile numbers is often much more expensive than to any US number. I imagine those costs would add up quickly for bulk callers.
Too many courts to court. It's why I advocate the US return to the ratio of representatives originally defined in the constitution; harder to bribe ~13,000 representatives than 435.
>harder to bribe ~13,000 representatives than 435
If you're a multibillionaire, not really. And you really just need certain committees and committee heads.
I think they're pointing out XX,000 representatives still doesn't matter if only X00 have functional control over $trillions of budget allocations.
Probably need such a broad dispersion and decentralization that you approach a rough high-level facsimile of a UBI before you really blunt the influence your parent post was pointing out.
Because in the US privacy doesn't seem to be a high priority for federal politicians (of either party if you ask me).
Such things have been regulated by national and European law for ages over here, and the GDPR was the latest brick in that wall.
I recall that in particular Americans were very surprised when it passed, while for most Europeans it was simply the harmonization and continuation of very similar earlier laws.
While the GDPR (and predecessors and co-laws) is certainly not perfect, sometimes it works very well.
> When people can't trust that callers are who they claim to be, they stop answering even legitimate calls.
Yeah, my phone has been defaulted to silent for all callers that are not in my contact list for a dozen years no. I'll never go back to answering calls from people I don't know.
On very rare occasions I'll miss a call from someone I did business with that's not in my contact list, but they typically leave messages that I can respond to.
This did absolutely nothing. Carriers like Bandwidth, Commio, Telnyx don’t enforce this and just complete their customers calls as if nothing ever happened.
Do you have a list of other carriers who will not comply? I'll call my senator about these 3. I suggest others do the same.
As mentioned, there is concern about if the FCC can enforce these rules. But Robospam is bi-partisan. This is one issue I think even our dysfunctional government can agree on.
Do you really think they will make a publish statement about this? Call them and see for yourself. There is absolutely no Stir Shaken verification of any kind other than a look up in the robocall mitigation database where each VoIP business self attests to complying with inquiries and other fcc robocall regulations. Takes 5 minutes to create such an entry for your VoIP company and nobody checks it
I have a very successful VoIP business, why would I blow the whistle? A couple months away from finalizing our Stir Shaken certification, no need to mess things up ahead of time :)
"Nothing's going to change" could mean "nothing's going to change for you" or "it doesn't apply to us yet for reason x", or "we've been compliant long before today". Wording matters, and I find it fairly hard to believe a large VoIP provider is going to openly go "oh yeah we're looking to intentionally get smacked down by the FCC".
Coming soon - supreme court declares that federal government can’t regulate phone calls because constitution doesn’t give a right to no annoying calls. “It’s up for the states to decide” says majority opinion.
Inter-state phone calls are clearly subject to the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, and therefore within the regulatory purview of the US Congress. Even Clarence Thomas would agree.
Heh you joke but look up laws related to door-to-door sales. Despite the fact there isn't a homeowner in the country that wants people to physically come on their property, interrupt their day and spam them to their face - it is impossible to get a law passed preventing it.
You say "there isn't a homeowner in the country that wants people to..." as if that should have some bearing on how the Court determines cases.
The job of the Court is not to determine what's good or bad policy, or to react based on people's wishes. The Court's job is to interpret the laws through the lens of the Constitution. If the Constitution doesn't give Congress the authority to do something (as it certainly wouldn't in your example, see Article I Section 8 [1]), it's the job of the Court to strike down the law no matter how many people would like the law.
If your interpretation of the role of the federal government is true, there are thousands of laws - such that we’re looking at a meltdown of civil society in america if they’re all overturned. But a theocratic and biased court is now using that interpretation to strike down the specific laws they were appointed to break. Not all the laws that fall outside that interpretation, just the ones they don’t like.
You can’t have it both ways. Either you have a civil society with things like an FDA and an EPA, or you have none of that and a deeply dysfunctional country.
So if we're not to use the Constitution to determine what are the proper legal powers of the federal government, how can we decide what the rules are to be? It seems like you're advocating just tossing out the Constitution since it's inconvenient.
Well the system we had before the american taliban took over the court was working pretty well - inferring rights, and responsibilities from an agreed upon intent of the constitution - i.e. freedom, separation of church and state, federal oversight of cross-state issues, etc.
that might be the "Court's job", but that doesn't mean they will be doing their job without extreme personal/political bias that allows them to bend the lens to their liking.
They are 100% reacting to people's wishes, even if CWuestefeld thinks they are not.
Have you heard of these things called trespassing laws? And stand your ground laws? Don't need a "no soliciting" law if you got those. All you have to do is say you felt threatened by the salesperson and thought they were going for a gun. /s
> This bill establishes rules and requirements to deter criminal robocall violations.
> Specifically, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must [do stuff related to caller ID]. The bill also implements a forfeiture penalty for violations (with or without intent) of the prohibitions on certain robocalls.
We just recently purchased a landline and have told nobody our phone number, so 100% of incoming calls are spam (and we get a few every day). It's amazingly frustrating.