Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
It's been this way at least since the Administrative Procedure Act. Solidified later with Chevron. Chevron is struck down, but in effect not too much has changed.
I have some skepticism of the administrative branch but it makes sense to have a nimble government. When they make bad decisions it is Congress prerogative to write law to guide these bureaucracies. The problem is the US Congress is broken.
Yes, that is the way federal agencies work. Details of complex systems are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest.
One alternative is that Trump can do it at will. Or, to add a few more steps, Trump can fire the FCC head at will, replace him with a lackey, and then do it at will.
> [Laws] are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest
This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function. It feels like you're describing China rather than the US.
> Trump can do it at will.
Which is also not how our constitution is supposed to work. The executive branch (which includes both the president and his appointees) is not supposed to be able to make laws, only execute on existing law.
Yes, I know this is how the system works these days. I'm just lamenting how it went so wrong...
"This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function."
There is a family of interesting theories, or perhaps if you prefer, simply a way of looking at history in which you don't consider the "United States" as a single governance structure that has existed back to 1776, but as a series of related, but distinct entities with distinct "social contracts" (a term laden with some philosophical baggage, here I just use it in a very general sense of what people expect from each other in various roles), and distinct theories of governance. While the later entities wrap themselves in the 1776 flag the current ruling structure is quite different from that era. From this point of view you can even go back and include the Continental Congress as the starting point of the "United States" and gain some insight into the way governance can fail as well.
I mention this because it may help free your mind up to consider how the systems really work today beyond the at-times jingoistic "Democracy!". There's a lot of flexibility in how you approach this because it's all opinion anyhow, but there is a strong case to be made that this is the "technocrat" era, in which the executive branch has been given a lot more power both by design and by the stresses of history to give more power to "experts" to deal with the radical changes the world has undergone. I think I can say something generally politically agreeable by pointing out that Congress doesn't seem to be particularly good at handling the world right now; how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
The de facto rules haven't really matched the de jure of the 1776 governance in a long time.
I am trying to keep this as neutral as possible. I have as many opinions as anyone else, but I'm just bringing up the general idea. I think it's probably good to initially just ponder based on one's own understanding of history and match it against your own ideas before you find other people handing you a theory on a platter. There's time enough for that.
> how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
Isn't that actually a major cause of the trouble? You expect Congress to deal with more and more complexities but limit the number of people (i.e. experts) who are members of it, causing them all to be generalists and moreover to have to spend more of their time campaigning rather than debating because the value of each seat is higher and correspondingly so is the effort someone will put in to take it from you and the proportion of your time you have to spend merely defending it.
Meanwhile people feel that their vote doesn't matter because a member of Congress now represents almost a million people and then ordinary people can neither affect the campaign nor get the ear of their own representative.
Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people. The members who are doctors would understand both medicine and medical bureaucracy. The members who are engineers would understand technology. Instead of them being lawyers whose first job is campaigning.
It doesn't matter if Congress has 5% of them who are actually engineers when 95% of the vote must inevitably come from non-engineers. Not that "engineer" is even enough. Just because I'm an "engineer" doesn't mean I can opine meaningfully on a civil engineering project any more than a civil engineer knows any more about AI than a current Congress-person.
No matter what solution you try to apply to that problem, it's not going to be solved. Try to split the legislative branch into interests so that we don't need the full branch to vote? Massive problems. Try to create a culture where Congress defers to the interest groups who know? Massive problems. A pretty solid case could be made that we've simply scaled past what a legislative approach can reasonably address.
One of the reasons I tried to write my post neutrally is that the whole situation is pretty complicated. Less neutrally, I'm fairly aware of the issues of the technocratic state and its "experts" who really aren't but get given what is basically stolen valor. On the other hand, pointing out problems is easy, trying to propose solutions is much harder. To be honest I just keep coming back to, cultures get the government they deserve. If a culture views governance as primarily about duty and obligation and honor, the structure probably doesn't matter much. If a culture doesn't view it that way, you're going to get corruption and abuse. And unfortunately, while this is a continuum it isn't balanced; to get good government requires a very positive and widespread commitment to those ideals. It doesn't take much deviation at all before you get pretty widespread corruption. It doesn't need a culture that actively values power and what it can bring you, it just takes less than massive, widespread agreement that power is more duty than privilege. If the US ever had that culture, which is debatable but possible, it really doesn't anymore.
> Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people.
I thought that's how it originally was supposed to be. You were supposed to be represented by a peer, not by a career politician.
And then of course, we have fun gerrymandering, where unelected officials will draw random lines to see how they can eke out more votes for their guy. Redistricting is important to do but I'm not convinced any redistricting committee in the US does it with the people's best interest at heart.
>What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
Why must congress do more? Most of this stuff would be state issues if not for the absurdity that is current commerce clause interpretation.
Administrative law is the (suboptimal) answer to congressional gridlock, which is the real problem. If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow. Regardless the overturning of Chevron deference makes administrative rules like this more susceptible to challenge. Assuming the telcos have the backbone to do so of course.
Congress passes plenty of laws. 95 so far just since the last election: https://www.congress.gov/public-laws/119th-congress Last congress passed 274. It's really only the controversial stuff that gets gridlocked.
The problem is that our government is now so large and complicated that it's simply no longer possible for Congress to effectively set policy for all of it. (This would be true even if they weren't so polarized.) So instead they just keep delegating more and more power to the executive branch.
The Administrative Procedures Act, Congressional Review Act, and the recent overturning of Chevron are all good checks on executive/agency power here, but I don't think any of them solves the fundamental issue that the executive branch was simply never designed to wield this kind of power. I'm not really sure what the right solution is.
Two-party politics promotes gridlock. Multi-party systems, as long as they don't have veto players, don't have as much stagnation and do a better job of citizen representation.
Do they? 79% of Australians and 73% of Germans have an unfavorable view of Israel, in Germany's case 49% of all being "very" unfavorable [0]. Don't see much representation of that in their politics. Both very much multi-party systems. Australia's system in particular has aspects that are often held up as one of the best in the world. Even on important other topics, it doesn't seem to reflect things much.
Another example, if you survey basically any multi-party European state such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and so on purely on economic policies, you'll overwhelmingly find people supporting much more progressive taxation and in general more socialist economic policies. I'm talking large majorities. Including nationalization of many institutions and so on. Yet their governments have done the direct opposite for decades. Not very representative.
The better representation you're talking about is very surface level, for everything that matters the outcome is that favored by big capital.
I fear you might be mostly right about global political outcomes favored by big capital. However, both example countries you cited have much stronger social safety nets than the United States. The research shows there is a spectrum, but that multi-party systems generally do create greater citizen representation.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin page published an article that uses data to come to this conclusion about the public's influence on American policy:
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
Iskander De Bruycker and Marcel Hanegraaff authored a recent study, focusing on the EU, in which they "demonstrate that interest groups with more economic resources are generally more influential, but only if their policy positions are congruent with a public majority." Sorry this one is paywalled. Such is the state of academic publishing. :(
> If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow.
Do we though? When there is a lack of consensus on what federal law should be, those are exactly the times the federal apparatus should be silent and leave it to the states.
So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?
This is just dodging the question of why can’t Congress do its job.
> So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?
Which of these are the things where gridlock is happening? In which administration did Lockheed go poor because no defense budget was passed in the entire term?
And Congressional stock trading is exactly the sort of thing that should be regulated by the states, since the federal members of Congress have an obvious conflict of interest. Meanwhile if California says it's illegal to trade stocks on insider information then US Senators from California who do insider trading should be in an orange jumpsuit.
The US is a large country with a large economy and a very diverse economy. It is probably not feasible for Congress to deal with the low level details of managing all that.
There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law. It's pretty normal for Congress to sketch the general outline of regulation and require the relevant bureaucracy to fill in the details.
Though in this particular case, unless this is based on a change to the law it seems like an overreach by the FCC.
> There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law.
Isn't this the argument against unelected rulemaking?
Suppose administrative agencies worked like this: They draft rules and then periodically submit them to Congress who decides whether to enact them. For uncontroversial changes this is essentially a rubber stamp, Congress defers to the experts' recommendations and passes the proposed rules. But now if the administrative agency tries to make a major policy change, it can't go through without Congressional approval, and Congress is fully within their authority to reject or amend the proposal.
What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
Realistically, in this case, you're moving decision-making from unelected bureaucrats to unelected Congressional staff. It's an invitation for corruption without really improving the process.
Congresspeople (or local legislators) do not have the expertise to evaluate the rules. Or even bandwidth. For example, the NEC is around 800 pages and is extremely technical.
That's why these minutiae are delegated to agencies. But Congress can step in at _any_ point and override the decisions of individual agencies. The rulemaking process is also _extremely_ slow on purpose, giving Congress plenty of time to act.
Congress can establish advisory bodies within the legislative branch [1] to grow and maintain technical expertise on a variety of matters. Splitting the current regulatory agencies into enforcement agencies under the executive and advisory bodies under Congress, together with expanding the number of seats in the House [2], would do a lot to improve the balance of power among the branches.
[2] Laws have to go through a committee process before going to the floor; with more bodies, the committees could handle more work. Expanding the House would also make each seat less of a prize, reducing (but not eliminating) the impulse to gerrymander. Such an expansion would probably need to be accompanied by a serious conversation with the Capitol architect.
Hold up: Parent-poster is obviously talking about federal regulations, not federal laws, and there are important differences between them... so why have you altered the quote to say [Laws]?
That's false. You've put your own words into their mouth to create a "sounds like China" strawman.
The regulations are [often] binding as law. When they change the regulations they are changing the law, under the fiction they're merely changing the interpretation of the law.
An example that comes to mind is the prosecution of Tate Adamiak. One of his machine gun charges was for having an improperly demilled machine gun parts. The parts were demilled under pre-2001 import standards, and the parts were imported pre-2001, and legally imported and sold through a licensed FFL on gun broker. Magically at some point the rule changed and the letter of law never did, and magically the parts weren't parts but actually a machine gun... this bound as law. I think he'll be released in about 15 years.
> they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break
If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)
I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not. It's literally the same damn thing but with a different sized cartridge. Nothing in the statute would allow this, yet executive 'delegation' mumbo-jumbo and magically one is basically unregulated and the other is felonies out the ass if you start commercially selling them without a host of licensing and checks.
The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.
> I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not
Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it.
We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.
The president has a large degree of control over the agencies and their output, so in practice agency delegation granted presidents immense power. This power went largely unexercised due to norms. But that has been slowly changing, and under Trump radically changing. And if SCOTUS adopts the Unitary Executive Theory, as they seem poised to do, then we'll have something very close to a king, difficult to distinguish from 18th century Great Britain.
I don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now. Currently the primary checks are procedural limitations; but were Trump a better, more well organized leader these procedural checks wouldn't pose much of a hurdle at all.
If you want a more technocratic administrative state, the agencies would require more autonomy from the president than they have now, but things are moving in the opposite direction both as a practical matter and constitutionally.
> don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now
A modern economy has a million small emergencies every day. Given the choice between dysfunction and autocracy, humans routinely choose the latter. So every time an emergency emerges that Congress takes too long to act on, and where the President steps in, the window shifts power to the executive.
>If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail
That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.
Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.
Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
> Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures
Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction.
>Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
And the sky is purple. See, we can both make baseless assertions. You can say it all day long. Doesn't make it true. At the end of the day the executive agencies are unilaterally costing people money that's on the same order as real deal criminal fines for comparable conduct. The word "civil" doesn't change that anymore than it changes the true nature of civil asset forfieture.
>Most civil monetary penalties are for....
They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for.
You list broad categories because when people dig into the nitty gritty of it they find it unconscionable. Municipalities threatening landowners hundreds of dollars per day multiplied by years for not having the proper permit to clear vegetation on their own land. OSHA fining businesses thousands because unsupervised line employees were doing dumb shit they were told not to that only endangers themselves. And then these people have to lawyer up and defend themselves for more thousands because the fines are always way higher if you don't. All at the literal whim of an enforcement official.
All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have. The government, federal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to meaningfully punish people (even corporate people) without the consent of the people (i.e. a jury). The way civil process cuts the judiciary out entirely is worse still.
Just declaring "well it's civil" because the accused's name isn't going on a naughty list and jail isn't a potential penalty doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit to argue in front of the arbitrary kangaroo process owned by the same agency that issued the fine (of course you can sue if you want but the enforcement agencies avoid creating situations where that's practical).
> They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for
Juries don't determine sentencing, either. The Seventh Amendment has broadly been interpreted to preserve jury trials for most civil liability, including from the federal government.
> Municipalities...
Not federal!
> All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have
Not a federal issue!
...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
> doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued
> without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit
...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
This is a wild conversation. I've gone from being somewhat sympathetic to your argument to now wondering if that entire platform is baseless. (I'm increasingly convinced we need a principles of law course mandated in high school. It doesn't even need to be a full year. But our republic suffers when folks don't understand the basics.)
They do in some states but that's beside the point. Juries are people from outside the legal system who will balk if things get too unreasonable. That is one of their primary value adds to the system.
>...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
That's entirely my point, the government is imposing the same penalties (fines) on people they do for criminal matters but without any of the protections. You can drive drunk, get caught and be out substantially less money (and enjoy your rights along the way) than if you sink sonotubes for a shed too close to a stream and get caught. Heck, there's not even a statute of limitations for many civil enforcement things.
Just because government and those like you who simp for it wave around the word "civil" (or it's relative "administrative") like a magic want doesn't actually change the fact that people are being punished in the same manner they would in criminal law situations but without any of the protections.
I'm not arguing that the laws and jurisprudence haven't been twisted to enable this. I'm arguing that it's no less of an affront to everyone's rights than the civil asset forfeiture people do when they take stuff and then say "well we're actually charging the money and therefore..."
>Not federal!
The municipalities states and feds behave the exact same way and leverage most of the same legal precedents. The feds also deputize states who deputize municipalities to do their enforcing for them in many cases. Like the EPA isn't gonna shoot you're dog or whatever. Your local DEP or whatever will shoot your dog or whatever on their behalf.
I meant serious as compared to something "unserious" like a $20 parking ticket.
>...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
Do you? You can tell the police to fuck off and come back with a warrant. You can not talk to them and the burden of proof is on them. Try that with the SEC or the EPA or the FCC and see where it gets you.
Once you get into an actual court things are much, much more comparable. But criminal matters more or less go straight to court. Administrative matters you're usually forced to go rounds (and your lawyer is billing you the whole time) with some internal kangaroo pretend oversight system (much has been written about ICE's for example) before you get to say a word in front of a real judge who doesn't get his pay stub on their letterhead.
The intellectual-academic class are having an existential crisis that they've lost the reigns of the unelected bureaucratic apparatus and it is now being wielded against them. They are still confused at how to respond to this as they're certain they couldn't have been wrong about deferring (uh, 'delegate regulatory authority') the power vested in congress and elected representation to themselves. Surprise pikachu when it turns out the "apolitical, public goal oriented specialists' were useful idiots in the process of handing power from congress to the executive.
If you thought the political apparatus was willingly going to leave the reigns to "apolitical specialists" rather than ruthlessly consolidating it toward the hands of the most power hungry self-dealing monsters that can command the executive branch then obviously you have not been living in in reality. Of course by the time the blindfold has been removed, the power is already largely consolidated.
There's a whole big conversation to have about the bureaucratic state.
One of the things that appeals to voters is the argument that too many decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats. Trump has been as effective at fixing this as with "drain the damp," and our elected officials clearly haven't been great about writing policy either. But one of the grievances that gets people to vote is "look at all this shit that some guy in Washington just decided."
Open to the possibility that I’m just cynical but my faith is very low that these comment processes are anything more than a regulatory requirement for the illusion of due diligence which legitimizes the actual corporate lobbying and security state actually making the policy.
The real issue is that it's a perpetual problem -- there are NGOs that literally pull out the same one pager, an endless dance of having some 1L repeat the same points over and over and over.
(Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.)
I made a grand total of one hill visit.
I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns come back here ever again, I'll see to it if you're lucky you only lose your seat, not face a mob outside your window, and when that happens lose my fucking number because I'll be sitting by the TV with popcorn.
Exactly that happened, a few years later.
Whether you're a public interest lobbyist or just another activist, we need to be more willing to TELL congress things. Not ask. Not lobby. TELL THEM.
We need to remind them that the Soviets raced to Berlin to seize brains like ours, that we will flourish whatever regime is in power, and that you can ignore us at your but we, the hackers, will no longer grovel before narcistic neurotypicals to stop misunderstanding on purpose.
For the third time, I normally don't cry to the admins, but if you can't respond to my points but respond to my points, it's my understanding such behavior is a violation of the site rules.
You are not anonymous. Please behave accordingly if you cannot summon intrinsic motivation.
Do you have any examples of the government NOT exploiting that? It's hard to know for sure how data is being used or sold out for others to exploit it.
I'm nearly certain commenting, at least from my monitoring of commenting on ATF rulemaking, achieves the opposite of what the commenters hope.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
Great. As if telecoms can be trusted with customers' id. AT&T left my name, address, social security etc in an improperly secured database for others to have, and they tried to open accounts with it; they had retained the information after I closed my account, and they denied the information was coming from them for years before they finally admitted it and gave us all a quarter to call someone who cares and a year of credit monitoring.
I have heard very little about AT&T's actual telecom services, but my god have I heard about their billing department. I daresay the only departments in more of a shambles than their billing one is... well. A lot of Microsoft lately.
Telecom billing is seemingly designed to stochastically fail in favor of the telecom. This is not a shambles, but excellent system performance, from their perspective.
As a Russian: huh, you guys could still just buy a sim card without any kind of identification? Impressive. We had that ID requirement introduced way back in the 00s.
Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.
It seems to depend a lot. It's kind of hard in Germany - they wanted my permanent address. I didn't find France as difficult. Iceland didn't care. Italy wanted my passport. Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
Yes, that's another law they have. Can't access the internet anonymously, basically. And yes, foreign phone numbers do work.
Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...
The first and last time I was in Russia was in 2019, passing by Moscow airport, and you already required a phone number to use the public WiFi, but any foreign number was OK.
Btw you can still buy an anonymous SIM card with cash in the Netherlands in pretty much any supermarket/kiosk/whatever. And if you just need Internet, I haven't had any eSIM provider try to verify my ID so far. Although those can't easily be paid in cash.
Are there services in the EU similar to Privacy.com? They along with US arm of Revolut lets you use disposable digital cards to buy things, but I don't know if such functionality is legal in the EU.
i use revolut in the eu and disposable cards work. its legal because kyc is only between you and your bank (revolut is a bank operating out of latvia), they are not required or allowed to give your personal info to anyone other than payment processors and police.
Situation circa 2019 at least was that foreign tourists in Chile could purchase a SIM card, but it would be automatically disconnected after some amount of time without registering the phone in a way few foreign tourists would do.
Not quite, the requirement is that phones not bought locally need to be registered after 30 days, regardless if someone is a tourist or a Chilean citizen. It's a mix of deterring tax evasion, importing stolen phones, and regulatory homologation. The government delegates responsibility to various telecom companies to have portals to self-register the IMEI with ID, which can be a foreign passport.
I'm sure the cops can get that info, but its mostly to enforce the "only one free register per year". Anyone can buy a phone with cash and use a prepaid sim with zero ID needed.
Different EU countries seem to heavily vary on this point. I’ve seen everything from requirements for id scans and addresses to esims that accept cryptocurrency as payment.
yeah I think in Italy this was introduced in the security push after 9/11, and in other EU countries I also had to provide an id to get a sim card, tho I'm not sure it's all of them.
In Bulgaria the ID requirement was introduced in recent years as it has been abused to run scam networks. It was big problem in Turkey, as Bulgarian scam networks were pulling the bride scam to such an extent that the scammers started scamming classes for wannabe scammers.
In the US it gets fought hard because Wall St uses it to dodge state income taxes. Everyone thinks it's drug dealer related for us, but it's actually Finance bros driving into NYC from out of state (NJ or CT) but trying to hide it.
More than that, a ban on all general purpose computing.
You can only use specific applications downloaded from walled gardens. You cannot write and execute arbitrary code.
If you are an engineer, all code must be generated via LLM and it passes through some verification through a centralized security and compliance authority on the way to you. You must be fully licensed.
As kooky as I thought he was, Stallman seems to be more prophetic each year. His essay The Right to Read seems to be a vision of how knowledge gets locked down. Every American college/university student has been trapped into renting textbooks. Elsevier and Pearson seem to have used that essay as a roadmap.
> Kill switch, as always with APT28 malware, is setting the host language to ru_RU.KOI8-R (LANG environment variable). That disables the spread mechanism.
Yeah. Looks like the future they want is complete marginalization of free computers, of free people. The machines will have to be corporation and government owned in order to network and participate in society. If we own the machine, we're excluded. Ostracized. Even the language they use is disgusting. They say we're "tampering" with the system, as though it wasn't ours to begin with. It makes me really sad that this is what we're heading towards.
Citizens creating informal horizontal networks between themselves is threatening to social harmony, and as more states around the world learn from the highly successful Chinese model, they are unlikely to permit the Wild West à la the old-school internet you are thinking about.
The thing about governments is they are just as tyrannical as the corporations. "Any network we cannot surveil and dominate is banned" is absolutely within the realm of possibility.
It is. They want to monitor every second of our lives and put it through current computer systems and salivating on what they can glean from it in future generations of AI. All the bureaucrats and politicians crave is control over everything. No privacy is valued other than their own, and they will always use "think of the children" as an excuse.
> No privacy is valued other than their own, and they will always use "think of the children" as an excuse.
Until they lose an election using "think of the children", they'll always continue to use it. In terms of political weaponry, it's currently unstoppable.
This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go on your way to the taxi or train like most other places.
Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing was with a Canadian credit card number. Whoops. This was only for a month, so I put in mine and he reimbursed me in cash. Other carriers may still let you buy one-time payment cards for cash at retail; this one didn't.
You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch !
Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip
Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...
Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
In my experience, you then need to activate it using real data from real people. I lent my data to a colombian colleague a couple of years ago, as he did not have a DNI yet.
Is it that trivial in Germany? I live in Berlin, and the rumor that I heard years ago is that some kiosks in areas known for drug dealing sell pre-activated SIM cards. I never bothered to check.
I wasn't taking blatant fraud into account. I'm sure that's possible everywhere. I'd bet you can buy cigarettes without the tax stamps in the same shop too.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sure, but if you’re a tourist in e.g. Barcelona trying to get a prepaid SIM, odds are the shopkeeper will not ask you for your ID despite being required to.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
I would think most tourists would trust a carrier-branded store over Honest Jochen's Tobacco Emporium where you may or may not get a working SIM after paying cash.
> This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go
I don't see the connection. This is also how it works in China, which means... when you grab a SIM card at an airport kiosk, they take a picture of your passport. You obviously have your passport with you, because you just arrived in China and haven't left the airport yet.
Has this changed recently? I thought I heard about this several years ago, but the last 2-3 times I've visited (in the last couple of years) I've been able to pick up a prepaid SIM from Colesworth without any ID check.
Most of time it's billed as law enforcement fighting tool. If people can't have anonymous cell phones, once you capture one criminal phone number, you can quickly look at who they call and since they can't be burners, you figure out the criminal network.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
There a significant difference between "the user can be identified fairly well if you can get access to sensitive stuff" and "the owner is always explicitly recorded in a searchable database".
The free anonymous internet was only ever a ruse to get people to use it so the CIA could spy on them. DARPA, folks, created a “free as in beer” global surveillance network and we all bought it.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
I mean. It’s the same, you just have to show your passport and fill a form. It takes 1minute to get it done, you can do it on your way to the taxi if you want. Though e-sim are more practical now
I wonder what exactly are they hoping to achieve then? Anything that can be filled out in 1 minute in a taxi can be spoofed with an extra 30 seconds on the dark net buying dark IDs. So this does less than zero for crime, actually encourages more of it, while doing what exactly? It's madness.
You do not have the right to a phone number without providing ID. If you're an American, those unwritten rights that come from other firm rights written down in laws and constitutions can always be argued, they're always being whittled down.
Rights for everyone are achieved through blood and toil, and if you truly want a right to anonymity and the digital tools necessary to achieve it, you will need blood and toil. Until then, we'll have to squeeze through fast developments that governments have yet to address.
"Law enforcement" and national security is given as the verbatim headline justification when you reference Australia's Communication and Media Authority[] for rules on ID collection.
Carriers and carriage service providers (CSPs) must help law enforcement and national security agencies.
...
You must verify a customer's identity before you activate a prepaid mobile phone service. You can do this when the customer buys the service or when they try to activate it. The Determination on identity checks for prepaid mobiles lists the ways you can check a customer's identity.
Unfortunately I can't dig up the original debate from 1997 on the Telecommunications Act when the requirement appears to have been introduced. Would be shocked if it did not include similar language from the representatives shilling the requirement, though.
It can if it's a roaming eSIM. I'm sure all the countries mentioned here e.g. Australia still handles US SIMs roaming there fine even when the US SIM dossn't have ID tied to it.
A roaming eSIM would work the same way as a roaming SIM. Just because it's easier to set up (no need to get a physical SIM) doesn't change the regulations around it.
I suppose this depends on how the law is written, but are roaming users subject to local SIM regulations for network use? I can't imagine asking for ID from tourists using their existing SIMs is going to work.
I believe some travel eSIMs are actually issued from outside the country you're going to.
Typically not. Because they don't have local phone numbers nor IP addresses, so they cannot be used for scams or fake identities domestically. In China, roaming SIMs also bypass all internet filtering, it's basically a built in VPN back to your home telecom.
And as you said, ones marketed as "China travel SIMs" are typically issued from Hong Kong. Interestingly, Hong Kong also has an ID rule (though it allows self upload of ID anyway), but it exempts these roaming-only cards. If you want the card to work in HK, and it is issued from there, you must scan your passport to activate it.
Right, but that distinction is not because it's an eSIM - it's just how it's issued. There's no technical distinction, just a practical ease of issuance.
Had to buy one of these SMS activation services from a guy in Nigeria using a memecoin because claude decided to ban my account because they didn’t like my credit card brand and Claude requires sms activation for new accounts.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
Walmart.com recently deleted my phone number from my decade+ old account and refused to let me purchase anything until I coughed one up. When I put my actual number in it told it was no good. Possibly this is because my wife has an account using the same number, which was never a problem until sudden phone numbers only belong to one person I guess? I'm trying to give these guys money.
I gave them a google voice number and apparently that satisfied them. Then lost access to the google voice number because I never used it for anything else.
An SMS activation price is about $0.13 btw, there are several sites that do this commercially with hundreds of thousands of numbers. Not going to name any since that'd be advertising for them.
Not because Claude banned my account (but they did that too), but because OpenAI one day decided I needed a phone number to login, and then proceeded to reject my real one.
We at some point will have to stop complying. Not because we are doing anything at all wrong, but because we cannot trust our govt and the corporations they are beholden to.
Having multiple needless laws is another way to control the population. Everyone will be violating at least one law. The government will then just enforce the laws on the people they don't like.
There is a book titled Three Felonies A Day that explains this. US Federal laws/regulations are so obtuse, over-reaching, arcane and complicated that the average innocent person violates 3 felonies per day. And your point about enforce the laws on the people they don't like is one that the author makes as well.
A previous job of mine was software developer for a state motor vehicle agency. I had to read far too many state & federal laws/regulations to make the boat/vehicle registration system compliant.
They will just run a PR campaign highlighting how anonymous SIMs have been used by pedos and terrorists so that majority of population will actually willingly support such laws, unfortunately.
If there’s one thing this administration has shown, it’s that they believe laws are just suggestions for other people and that ultimately nobody will stop them.
They’re essentially daring the public to resort to violence and frankly, it’s getting exhausting.
Why follow the law when the president will pardon you and the Supreme Court has said he also won’t be held accountable for basically anything.
I welcome the reasoned responses that think this administration isn’t actively flaunting our laws. How’s that war powers act coming along?
Disjoint issues really. Phone scams mostly rely on the shoddy/lack of verification of caller id info as calls transit the network where it's not verified so they are unblockable (because they just use a different fake number every time). They're actually calling from one or a pool of numbers but you can't block and report them on the receiving end because the number your phone thinks it's blocking isn't theirs. This will do nothing to fix spam/scam without patching the issues with caller id.
It is actually because you can't do anything with the source phone number being tied to an identity if the scammers are freely able to spoof the number that the end networks and users see. Even if every network in the world adopted this it wouldn't matter if caller id isn't fixed so that you can actually see the source number to go ask who it is!
From your link: "The scam-blocking service is based on modern cloud technology, and it’s scalable, and easy to deploy" - I don't think we need another SaaS parasite for this as protocol-level solution like STIR/SHAKEN is a better approach IMO. The problem is that operators are not incentivized to do anything with spam/scam.
I don't understand how this isn't the default. I get multiple calls every week, sometimes many per day, from people saying I called them. This has been going on for years... (Portugal)
The telephone system design stretches back to the days when it operated purely electro mechanically so there wasn't even the data to know who the original caller much less a way to implement validation to ensure the call was actually from that number. That plus common carrier rules (at least present here in the US) required all the networks to connect every incoming call to prevent them from blocking out competitors. CallerID is a late addition patch on a system designed to remain compatible with the old exchanges and countries have only recently (in legal and bureaucratic terms) modifying laws to allow for blocking and screening.
As finn. I can verify scam calls are non-existent lately few do occasinally popup, but its like 2000 times better than before. When i learned about this originally, i was shocked like how this is not default?
Gotta remember the phone system used to run on electromechanical relays not digital systems and the digital upgrades since then were designed to be compatible with the old systems with common carrier rules requiring networks to route calls by default so blocking and verification weren't really built into any of the systems and interfaces between carriers.
In Russia you need an ID to buy a phone number, and almost every site or app requires it to sign up. As a nice bonus, you or any scammer can buy personal data on everyone for cheap in Telegram bots, because everytime there is a PII leak, these bots update their vast databases.
We should allow privateers to go after spammers, and get the seized assets. And spammer is then tortured appropriately. Satan could run a successful single issue campaign on this in the most religious state in the US.
This was the case in Belgium a couple of years ago.
Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.
Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.
Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled.
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones
That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims.
Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.
Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.
But... what does your comment have to do with burner phones?
A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.
A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.
You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.
>>> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
>> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
> That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones
This is total nonsense. A phone farm that doesn't spoof caller ID isn't presenting false caller ID.
Wish I could recall the podcast I listened to a few years ago that was telling the history of robo-dialers and caller ID spoofing. The general gist was that AT&T was making money off it from 1-900 operators so they weren't eager to self-regulate. So even though ending spam calling is a bipartisan issue, feet were dragged on the implementation.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.
of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!
Probably not the issue isn't knowing who owns a number it's that the actual number for the call is just a data field that's not validated or required to be correct. Spam calls would be a lot less annoying if they had to come from real numbers that could be blocked instead of being able to spoof as many numbers as they want.
Spam calls are a different issue (spam is usually VOIP). Spammers also often use spoofed numbers since STIR/SHAKEN is somehow still not properly implemented.
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
Well - it's not exactly a surprise that all these non-American countries engage in un-American practices.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
A lie, or an ideal to try and live up to, depending on the context. In the context of discussing liberty-destroying privacy invasions it's an ideal, and we should not be so quick to dismiss it.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
No more anonymous driving, thanks to Flock. Soon, no more anonymous calls, thanks to the FCC.
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
They want us replaced by machines that are 100% compliant slaves, they're hoping for AI with human capabilities (or better) and no will to pushback at their tyrannical natures.
You're projecting harder than IMAX here with your conspiracy theory tropes. Remember it was the Bolsheviks who actually liquidated entire classes of people as 'useless parasites'.
right, they definitely want depopulation down to the levels their paid hacks tell them is sustainable for a compliant population, "saving the earth", and continue to lives out as gods.
How data-driven policing is sold, spoke to someone who set it up once, good odds FLock is doing it, or in the spirit of the below, Flock doesn't have to do it:
- There are networked webcams everywhere: DoT cameras, 18 wheeler fleet cameras, traffic cams, etc.
- Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
- For average jane and joe citizenry: great, no Flock in town!
- For ongoing negotiations with Flock and the PD: ok, sure, kick us out of town. But we'll just pull the 18wheeler feeds with the vendor we have an agreement with, as they roll through town. Or the DoT feeds via the State contract we have or the...
- As such, negotiations could land as does local PD at least want the control of the feeds already going through their town with each Sysco big rig delivery?
I am quite confident that there will eventually in any of those cities be some kind of major mass casualty type event that will be attributed to that rejection. I don’t hope for it and am sorry for all of humanity for what we are allowing to seemingly inevitably come about, but here we are; like cattle being herded to the feed lot. “But they’re saying they’ll feed you”, you will hear, “they don’t mean you ill. You should stop being a conspiracy theorists. This food is good.”
We’ll see how it goes, but we also have suits like this that push back on that narrative as if you’re going to say your tech protects against a certain kind of tragedy, and that tragedy actually happens and you didn’t protect against it, maybe you bear some liability.
Every step of the way enabled by useful idiots who think that because each incremental step applies more/cheaper government violence to some class of petty deviants they don't like that it is worth doing even if the overall trajectory created by the sum total of the steps is bad. Selfish jerks.
I don’t think pointing that out will get very far. People didn’t notice when “democracy” was pushed by the same people, in direct contradiction to the Constitution. “Democracy” was the lynchpin to neutralize the Constitution and usher in oligarchic control again, just like digital/programmable currency will complete the pivot of slavery into a total and global system. Why only enslave a few people when you can enslave all people with smoke and mirrors that will make them cheer on their own deception with amusement.
I get over 10 scam calls a day. I'm forced to pay a company to block them because the free methods don't work. There's no way to work around it because they refuse to enforce the law on these companies cycling through burner numbers.
And people will keep carrying their phones with them. And keep using them. And keep installing apps. Yes, ideally we'd have laws against government infringement, but the capability to not use your phone is in your hands.
More and more things require having a smartphone. Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border. Install the app to use the street parking in this city. Install the app to board the bus. Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz. I admire your spirit of rebellion, but avoiding using a smartphone in daily life in most places will result in a lifestyle contorted specifically to avoid using a smartphone, and will cut you off from activities that were previously doable without smartphones 20 years ago.
> Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
Government offices in many developed countries don't realistically answer the phone any more. You either use the official app on your phone, or you log into the official website using strong authentication that requires a phone. A luddite workaround might be a registered letter by post, but you might wait a long time for an answer.
I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines. To my knowledge there was no other way to get the required approvals.
My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone, credit card tap or with a reloadable transit card. To my knowledge, the only way to reload the card is to use their app or travel to a handful of authorized agents to have them reload your card.
I can call my government office and wait on hold for an hour, ultimately probably needing to schedule an appointment in person to handle my issue or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
>I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines
That's good to know. Me and my family will definitely never be visting the philippines. My phone doesn't have mobile data enabled at the provider level. Would have been an award search for Wifi.
>My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone,
It's baffling to me that anyone would want to link payment to their phone. This is one of the least intelligent self-owns of the last decade.
>or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
I take your point but I'd say that most people don't put much value on their freedom if they'd trade it for a couple of hours of convenience.
Could you expand on this? What happens at the national border? What happens if your phone just won't do a QR code? I'm not arguing with you or disagreeing with, I'm just curious what the process is.
But when your child is late to school but they won’t allow you in until you scan the QR code and fill in a form? Do you stand and wait hoping to be noticed? Hoping to tailgate somebody with a phone? Just head home?
The school also sends general communications only by app.
Just think about your comment if we ever see for-real 1940s-style fascism at the same time we have all these stupid tracking devices on us all the time. If we made it through to better times people have no idea how so many people could have so easily and freely given up their privacy and freedom. With no fight whatsoever. Giving it up gladly. Hoping even more freedom could be taken from them so they could be just a little bit more comfortable.
That should be brought up to the school board and parents should be up in arms about it. I don't see how it's even acceptable to require you to do paperwork every time you kid is late to school. If on the day I couldn't get a human at a school to talk to me and a phone call to the office didn't work either I absolutely would go home. People let others get away with this way too often. Sometimes you can't fight it (good luck fighting parking meters in your city that require an app once contracts are signed and the infrastructure is in place), but often you can demand reasonable accommodation if not a change of policy.
I've been thinking about it as an experiment lately. Not fully throwing my smartphone in the bin, but considering leaving it at home for a day.
If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them. Public wifi these days has almost vanished so it's difficult to connect to the internet without cellular access now.
>If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them.
I left prime running a bunch of 80s comedy films in the background as I cleaned my house on the weekend. And so much of the "situation" end of sitcom relies on people having prearranged things beforehand and just happening to arrive on time.
A couple of SMS's and every situation would be resolved.
I could get by on just an SMS/Call only device, the problem is these days everyone moved to internet based apps which require an android/ios app. In theory you could use some kind of bridge server to convert it in to a simple text protocol for a dumb device, but I'm always worried you'd get flagged as a bot and have your account deleted.
Not really. Rural America you don't need a mobile phone. I can go days without ever touching my phone. And if it wasn't for my bank, I wouldn't need it at all. Even then I could just go to the bank but I'm too lazy to do that.
Even in NYC you could get by pretty much just fine without a phone (a credit or debit card is pretty much required though). The hardest part would be losing contact since expectations of how people organize and meet up are completely mobile phone centric, and plans are almost expected to be modified in real time.
The "I can't bank" complaint is strange to me. I've never done any banking on my phone, the closest is when paypal extorted a phone number out of me for SMS verification. I still do banking through web browser at home, for several different accounts. But maybe it's different outside of the US.
I probably said it dozens of times in here, phone numbers are the link between your IRL identity and digital one, that’s why a lot of services still require a phone number to “prevent spam”, yeah right, it’s just to get to you if ever needed.
I expect the FCC to adopt this rule, and I also expect it to be challenged in court, on the basis that there are many other approaches to fighting spam calls that the FCC has not tried, but are much less intrusive.
There are two ways to challenge FCC decisions. There is the upfront approach where a business whose operations are harmed by an FCC decision sues to block the decision. Then there is the approach where said business announces their non-compliance and dares the FCC to sue them. The FCC does not have criminal charging authority, so it has to rely on courts to enforce compliance. See the Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T case that just wrapped up at the Supreme Court.
This has been the case for a long time in Switzerland. If you want a mobile phone SIM, you need to provide your ID. Of course easy if you have a national ID...
I don't see the issue here and I am surprised that this wasn't the case in the United States.
However since it is now trivial to communicate encrypted with so many other devices, I don't see the point now. This would have been a "good" thing back in the 90'.
And phone companies are enabling telecoms by manufacturing devices that don't take physical sim cards anymore. I recently migrate from pixel 8 to 10, it only supports eSim. In order to migrate my sim to an eSim I had to provide voice, image, documents and info of the phone I was installing the eSim on. One of the worse companies in Brazil, Vivo, now have everything about me. I bet they keep it in a big excel file accessible via a secret but public link
A voluntary model would be nice - what X (more or less) does currently. You can elect to be verified by X, and it will show the badge, or you can opt out and not get the badge, but you can still use it.
If phones could reliably tag an incoming call as "ID provided" or not, then people who cared could screen calls appropriately, and people who wanted to protect their identity could still have a phone.
Regardless of this, I see phone network as a legacy thing that in perfect world should already be replaced with lightweight upgradeable calling protocol over IPv6.
WiFi / pure-VOIP based calling should be able to disambiguate between the network and the messaging layers. This means that a given cellular modem wouldn't be traceable to a specific contact, or call history. The modems could be swapped amongst individuals readily.
This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.
Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.
I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.
Pretty sure that this would just encourage privacy minded folks to find a loophole.
Or if you get fed up enough you just start blasting FM transmissions without a license..... Keep the burst short enough while your mobile and don't make the transmitter obvious and you could probably get away with it for short SMS comms.
Or just use something like lora or meshtastic/meshcore
The loophole is to use a homeless person's ID for $20.
Wait. In the US don't they not even have an ID standard? The homeless person probably doesn't have any valid ID and neither do members of several other disenfranchised groups, right? So now they're not allowed to have cellphone service?
Some states allow homeless people to get IDs. Some do not. My state outlawed homelessness in last year's Crime Bill - the charge is now called "unlawful camping" and it outlawed cities from having zones where people are allowed to camp unless they basically create something like a KOA campground (and outlawed using tax money to do so).
This is already the case in most (all?) EU countries. Government-issued photo ID is required to activate a SIM card.
If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country
I was a teenager when Switzerland introduced the mandatory ID check, in 2003 or 2004 iirc.
My carrier added 10 CHF credit to my prepaid plan for the trouble.
It's still fairly easy to buy a Lycamobile SIM/number that was enabled with a fake or stolen ID. Consequently some banks and services ban entire number ranges, which is not only ineffective but also affects people who committed the sin of keeping their first phone number even after moving to a proper postpaid plan...
This is essentially already a reality in Australia. I had to email identity documents + a photo of my face holding an ID to two separate companies just to shift eSIMs to my new phone.
They have to have your residential address for "emergency reasons" which is fairly defensible at least
True for most EU countries since a while - at the premium Telcos shops.
Not true in most EU countries if you just go into one of those shady shops nearby train station and ask friendly, while the shop is empty, if he could sell you a SIM thats already verified.
This is one of those rules/laws that is worse than useless, without fixing the protocol shortcomings that make spoofing trivial the only people who will be affected by this rule are regular people.
I do not understand the outrage, law abiting users have nothing to fear (TM) and criminally minded users (or undocumented) can always pay a homeless person, a few bucks to register their burner.
This is standard in my country. Seemingly as a consequence, eSIMs require physically going to a store to be activated (on the telco side), which has always seemed insane to me.
I've got my popcorn and lawn chair out to watch the "voter id is racist" crowd to take a stand on this issue.
Context: Voter ID Laws may seem like a good idea, but they’re actually pretty terrible! On the surface, these laws appear to be a reasonable way to stop people from pretending to be someone else when they vote. But the reality is that this kind of voter fraud almost never happens!!! Instead Voter ID Laws primarily prevent the poor, the elderly, and people of color from voting. They way they’ve disenfranchised people of color is part of a very long history of voter suppression and is a classic example of structural racism.
Isn't this the exact same thing? If you don't have a valid ID to vote, now you don't have a valid ID to use a cellphone either. And if you wanted to go and get one, too bad because you probably need a cellphone to do that.
So by "Voter ID is racist" crowd you more broadly mean "people who understand that requiring identification in order to exist in society is a burden on the citizens with little benefit to them but of great value to authoritarians who wish to use these laws for nefarious means".
Which, often, does not include exclusively people who think "Voter ID is racist" as plenty of unhinged libertarians hate make great points about why you shouldn't want the government to have access to 100% of your daily data points 100% of the time.
Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
So basically people from Africa won't be allowed to use their phones in the USA by order of the government? (If they can even get into the country without ending up in an ICE camp, of course)
I had reason to pick up a couple cheap pre-paid phones at a gas station once. I wasn't asked to give an ID to anyone to buy them, but once I had them I needed to call a company to activate the phone and they were very particular about what phone number it would work from. It had to be a landline. Payphone wouldn't work. My work phone didn't work. It was difficult to track down a phone line they'd accept and even then one of the phones refused to register.
It seemed to me like they wanted to make sure they could tie the phones to an individual through activation.
I used to buy test phones for software testing at a bodega where they had a laundry basket full of phones, and they would sell prepaid SIMs no questions asked.
so instead of burnerphones, they will steal phones and keep phone awake until they have accomplished the crime they gonna do.
This is what always happens when governments enforce laws like this, victims and innoncents always suffer as result.
Its happening in finance where criminals groom dumb teengers for laundering money, or eldery's bank accounts they obtain via installing remote software.
So lets add 1 more reason for criminals to steal phone.
Edit: This is also happening in crypto world where criminals perform fake KYC. I guess with age verifications, this crime will increase in demand multiplefold and the last defense ID will be obsolete after data leaks and the fraud happening around it.
Fun fact: in India, it is a crime to connect the IP network to the telephone network in any way whatsoever that allows calls originating in IP to terminate at telephones. This is because IP network users don't have to provide ID. (It does not prohibit calling from telephones to IP networks, or IP apps calling other instances of themselves)
Straight out of China playbook. Every SIM must be registered with government issued/recognised ID. Yes combats fraud. Yes means govt can track you thru IMEI 24x7 anywhere in the world.
Having looked into the history of call tracking / blocking, it's pretty evident that major US telcos have very little interest in making marketing calls difficult. However tenuous the association between "marketing" and the actual practice of the scammers, harassers, abusers, and worse generating literally billions of such calls monthly (see: <https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/ringing-in-our-fears-2025-...>, "The monthly average of scam and telemarketing calls increased from 2.14 billion a month in 2024 to 2.56 billion a month through September, according to YouMail").
The Trump administration has been working overtime trying to build databases of people in this country. Leaving no stone unturned, legal or otherwise. I vaguely remember a time when American conservatives were against precisely this, often as a first principle. Maybe that's just an idealized memory on my part.
The American conservatives who can afford to be are effectively exempted. When they're not flying around on private jets, the ownership and metadata created by their cars, phones, etc. are obfuscated by layers of shell corporations.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
Yep, just in different flavors based on ideology. For example, forced labor requires logging & tracking of pregnancies. Anti-trans folks want gender identity on the books to gatekeep who can teach in schools or enter bathrooms. Same for preventing same-sex marriage. Folks railing against voting rights want more and more checks to prove who you are and where you live
We're already forced into the credit bureaus. Into traffic cameras. Into using credit cards and banks. The idea the state would let us actually say things online anonymously (or to each other) is completely unrealistic: we must be tagged and tracked through our lifecycle.
Payphones are rather seldom seen these days, friend.
Not to disagree with the principle, but it's somewhat opaque as to what your point is.
I've hazy memories as well of reports that payphones were being more surveilled (a camera placed nearby, for example), or tapped / monitored more than other phones, particularly if in areas with other known issues. Nothing that's turning up in DDG searches though...
Here's the link to submit a comment to the FCC:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express
Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
You can also file a comment at the Federal Register for the next 16 days -- It looks like the proposal is 2026-10407
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/26/2026-10...
This is the specific proposed rule to reference: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-seeks-comment-enhanced-know...
What I find most concerning is that this isn't a bill or law. Unelected government officials at the FCC can apparently just decide to do this.
It's been this way at least since the Administrative Procedure Act. Solidified later with Chevron. Chevron is struck down, but in effect not too much has changed.
[Loper Bright intensifies]
I have some skepticism of the administrative branch but it makes sense to have a nimble government. When they make bad decisions it is Congress prerogative to write law to guide these bureaucracies. The problem is the US Congress is broken.
The ATF does this all the time, too.
They badly need to be checked and/or balanced.
Yes, that is the way federal agencies work. Details of complex systems are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest.
One alternative is that Trump can do it at will. Or, to add a few more steps, Trump can fire the FCC head at will, replace him with a lackey, and then do it at will.
> Details of complex systems are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest
And according to the Administrative Procedures Act, which provides substantial guardrails and checks on agency authority.
> [Laws] are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest
This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function. It feels like you're describing China rather than the US.
> Trump can do it at will.
Which is also not how our constitution is supposed to work. The executive branch (which includes both the president and his appointees) is not supposed to be able to make laws, only execute on existing law.
Yes, I know this is how the system works these days. I'm just lamenting how it went so wrong...
"This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function."
There is a family of interesting theories, or perhaps if you prefer, simply a way of looking at history in which you don't consider the "United States" as a single governance structure that has existed back to 1776, but as a series of related, but distinct entities with distinct "social contracts" (a term laden with some philosophical baggage, here I just use it in a very general sense of what people expect from each other in various roles), and distinct theories of governance. While the later entities wrap themselves in the 1776 flag the current ruling structure is quite different from that era. From this point of view you can even go back and include the Continental Congress as the starting point of the "United States" and gain some insight into the way governance can fail as well.
I mention this because it may help free your mind up to consider how the systems really work today beyond the at-times jingoistic "Democracy!". There's a lot of flexibility in how you approach this because it's all opinion anyhow, but there is a strong case to be made that this is the "technocrat" era, in which the executive branch has been given a lot more power both by design and by the stresses of history to give more power to "experts" to deal with the radical changes the world has undergone. I think I can say something generally politically agreeable by pointing out that Congress doesn't seem to be particularly good at handling the world right now; how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
The de facto rules haven't really matched the de jure of the 1776 governance in a long time.
I am trying to keep this as neutral as possible. I have as many opinions as anyone else, but I'm just bringing up the general idea. I think it's probably good to initially just ponder based on one's own understanding of history and match it against your own ideas before you find other people handing you a theory on a platter. There's time enough for that.
> how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
Isn't that actually a major cause of the trouble? You expect Congress to deal with more and more complexities but limit the number of people (i.e. experts) who are members of it, causing them all to be generalists and moreover to have to spend more of their time campaigning rather than debating because the value of each seat is higher and correspondingly so is the effort someone will put in to take it from you and the proportion of your time you have to spend merely defending it.
Meanwhile people feel that their vote doesn't matter because a member of Congress now represents almost a million people and then ordinary people can neither affect the campaign nor get the ear of their own representative.
Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people. The members who are doctors would understand both medicine and medical bureaucracy. The members who are engineers would understand technology. Instead of them being lawyers whose first job is campaigning.
It doesn't matter if Congress has 5% of them who are actually engineers when 95% of the vote must inevitably come from non-engineers. Not that "engineer" is even enough. Just because I'm an "engineer" doesn't mean I can opine meaningfully on a civil engineering project any more than a civil engineer knows any more about AI than a current Congress-person.
No matter what solution you try to apply to that problem, it's not going to be solved. Try to split the legislative branch into interests so that we don't need the full branch to vote? Massive problems. Try to create a culture where Congress defers to the interest groups who know? Massive problems. A pretty solid case could be made that we've simply scaled past what a legislative approach can reasonably address.
One of the reasons I tried to write my post neutrally is that the whole situation is pretty complicated. Less neutrally, I'm fairly aware of the issues of the technocratic state and its "experts" who really aren't but get given what is basically stolen valor. On the other hand, pointing out problems is easy, trying to propose solutions is much harder. To be honest I just keep coming back to, cultures get the government they deserve. If a culture views governance as primarily about duty and obligation and honor, the structure probably doesn't matter much. If a culture doesn't view it that way, you're going to get corruption and abuse. And unfortunately, while this is a continuum it isn't balanced; to get good government requires a very positive and widespread commitment to those ideals. It doesn't take much deviation at all before you get pretty widespread corruption. It doesn't need a culture that actively values power and what it can bring you, it just takes less than massive, widespread agreement that power is more duty than privilege. If the US ever had that culture, which is debatable but possible, it really doesn't anymore.
> Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people.
I thought that's how it originally was supposed to be. You were supposed to be represented by a peer, not by a career politician.
And then of course, we have fun gerrymandering, where unelected officials will draw random lines to see how they can eke out more votes for their guy. Redistricting is important to do but I'm not convinced any redistricting committee in the US does it with the people's best interest at heart.
There are plenty of places with non partisan districting. You don’t hear about it because it tends not to be so outrageous as to be newsworthy.
>What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
Why must congress do more? Most of this stuff would be state issues if not for the absurdity that is current commerce clause interpretation.
Making it a state issue does not answer the question of should everything be decided by laws, or should some be decided by regulations?
This sounds like what the Soviet/Chinese Congresses of People's Deputies were supposed to be.
Administrative law is the (suboptimal) answer to congressional gridlock, which is the real problem. If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow. Regardless the overturning of Chevron deference makes administrative rules like this more susceptible to challenge. Assuming the telcos have the backbone to do so of course.
Congress passes plenty of laws. 95 so far just since the last election: https://www.congress.gov/public-laws/119th-congress Last congress passed 274. It's really only the controversial stuff that gets gridlocked.
The problem is that our government is now so large and complicated that it's simply no longer possible for Congress to effectively set policy for all of it. (This would be true even if they weren't so polarized.) So instead they just keep delegating more and more power to the executive branch.
The Administrative Procedures Act, Congressional Review Act, and the recent overturning of Chevron are all good checks on executive/agency power here, but I don't think any of them solves the fundamental issue that the executive branch was simply never designed to wield this kind of power. I'm not really sure what the right solution is.
Two-party politics promotes gridlock. Multi-party systems, as long as they don't have veto players, don't have as much stagnation and do a better job of citizen representation.
Do they? 79% of Australians and 73% of Germans have an unfavorable view of Israel, in Germany's case 49% of all being "very" unfavorable [0]. Don't see much representation of that in their politics. Both very much multi-party systems. Australia's system in particular has aspects that are often held up as one of the best in the world. Even on important other topics, it doesn't seem to reflect things much.
Another example, if you survey basically any multi-party European state such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and so on purely on economic policies, you'll overwhelmingly find people supporting much more progressive taxation and in general more socialist economic policies. I'm talking large majorities. Including nationalization of many institutions and so on. Yet their governments have done the direct opposite for decades. Not very representative.
The better representation you're talking about is very surface level, for everything that matters the outcome is that favored by big capital.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/04/most-peop...
I fear you might be mostly right about global political outcomes favored by big capital. However, both example countries you cited have much stronger social safety nets than the United States. The research shows there is a spectrum, but that multi-party systems generally do create greater citizen representation.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin page published an article that uses data to come to this conclusion about the public's influence on American policy:
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
Iskander De Bruycker and Marcel Hanegraaff authored a recent study, focusing on the EU, in which they "demonstrate that interest groups with more economic resources are generally more influential, but only if their policy positions are congruent with a public majority." Sorry this one is paywalled. Such is the state of academic publishing. :(
[0] https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
[1] European Journal of Political Research , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , February 2024 , pp. 26 - 44 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12582
> If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow.
Do we though? When there is a lack of consensus on what federal law should be, those are exactly the times the federal apparatus should be silent and leave it to the states.
So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?
This is just dodging the question of why can’t Congress do its job.
> So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?
Which of these are the things where gridlock is happening? In which administration did Lockheed go poor because no defense budget was passed in the entire term?
And Congressional stock trading is exactly the sort of thing that should be regulated by the states, since the federal members of Congress have an obvious conflict of interest. Meanwhile if California says it's illegal to trade stocks on insider information then US Senators from California who do insider trading should be in an orange jumpsuit.
The US is a large country with a large economy and a very diverse economy. It is probably not feasible for Congress to deal with the low level details of managing all that.
There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law. It's pretty normal for Congress to sketch the general outline of regulation and require the relevant bureaucracy to fill in the details.
Though in this particular case, unless this is based on a change to the law it seems like an overreach by the FCC.
> There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law.
Isn't this the argument against unelected rulemaking?
Suppose administrative agencies worked like this: They draft rules and then periodically submit them to Congress who decides whether to enact them. For uncontroversial changes this is essentially a rubber stamp, Congress defers to the experts' recommendations and passes the proposed rules. But now if the administrative agency tries to make a major policy change, it can't go through without Congressional approval, and Congress is fully within their authority to reject or amend the proposal.
What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
Realistically, in this case, you're moving decision-making from unelected bureaucrats to unelected Congressional staff. It's an invitation for corruption without really improving the process.
Congresspeople (or local legislators) do not have the expertise to evaluate the rules. Or even bandwidth. For example, the NEC is around 800 pages and is extremely technical.
That's why these minutiae are delegated to agencies. But Congress can step in at _any_ point and override the decisions of individual agencies. The rulemaking process is also _extremely_ slow on purpose, giving Congress plenty of time to act.
Congress can establish advisory bodies within the legislative branch [1] to grow and maintain technical expertise on a variety of matters. Splitting the current regulatory agencies into enforcement agencies under the executive and advisory bodies under Congress, together with expanding the number of seats in the House [2], would do a lot to improve the balance of power among the branches.
[1] The Congressional Budget Office is an example. (https://www.cbo.gov/)
[2] Laws have to go through a committee process before going to the floor; with more bodies, the committees could handle more work. Expanding the House would also make each seat less of a prize, reducing (but not eliminating) the impulse to gerrymander. Such an expansion would probably need to be accompanied by a serious conversation with the Capitol architect.
Hold up: Parent-poster is obviously talking about federal regulations, not federal laws, and there are important differences between them... so why have you altered the quote to say [Laws]?
That's false. You've put your own words into their mouth to create a "sounds like China" strawman.
The regulations are [often] binding as law. When they change the regulations they are changing the law, under the fiction they're merely changing the interpretation of the law.
An example that comes to mind is the prosecution of Tate Adamiak. One of his machine gun charges was for having an improperly demilled machine gun parts. The parts were demilled under pre-2001 import standards, and the parts were imported pre-2001, and legally imported and sold through a licensed FFL on gun broker. Magically at some point the rule changed and the letter of law never did, and magically the parts weren't parts but actually a machine gun... this bound as law. I think he'll be released in about 15 years.
Ah yes I forgot, they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break. Silly me.
> they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break
If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)
I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not. It's literally the same damn thing but with a different sized cartridge. Nothing in the statute would allow this, yet executive 'delegation' mumbo-jumbo and magically one is basically unregulated and the other is felonies out the ass if you start commercially selling them without a host of licensing and checks.
The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.
> I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not
Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it.
We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.
The president has a large degree of control over the agencies and their output, so in practice agency delegation granted presidents immense power. This power went largely unexercised due to norms. But that has been slowly changing, and under Trump radically changing. And if SCOTUS adopts the Unitary Executive Theory, as they seem poised to do, then we'll have something very close to a king, difficult to distinguish from 18th century Great Britain.
I don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now. Currently the primary checks are procedural limitations; but were Trump a better, more well organized leader these procedural checks wouldn't pose much of a hurdle at all.
If you want a more technocratic administrative state, the agencies would require more autonomy from the president than they have now, but things are moving in the opposite direction both as a practical matter and constitutionally.
> don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now
A modern economy has a million small emergencies every day. Given the choice between dysfunction and autocracy, humans routinely choose the latter. So every time an emergency emerges that Congress takes too long to act on, and where the President steps in, the window shifts power to the executive.
>If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail
That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.
Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.
> That's a distinction without a difference
Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
> Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures
Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction.
[1] https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/types-of-civil-monetar...:
>Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
And the sky is purple. See, we can both make baseless assertions. You can say it all day long. Doesn't make it true. At the end of the day the executive agencies are unilaterally costing people money that's on the same order as real deal criminal fines for comparable conduct. The word "civil" doesn't change that anymore than it changes the true nature of civil asset forfieture.
>Most civil monetary penalties are for....
They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for.
You list broad categories because when people dig into the nitty gritty of it they find it unconscionable. Municipalities threatening landowners hundreds of dollars per day multiplied by years for not having the proper permit to clear vegetation on their own land. OSHA fining businesses thousands because unsupervised line employees were doing dumb shit they were told not to that only endangers themselves. And then these people have to lawyer up and defend themselves for more thousands because the fines are always way higher if you don't. All at the literal whim of an enforcement official.
All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have. The government, federal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to meaningfully punish people (even corporate people) without the consent of the people (i.e. a jury). The way civil process cuts the judiciary out entirely is worse still.
Just declaring "well it's civil" because the accused's name isn't going on a naughty list and jail isn't a potential penalty doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit to argue in front of the arbitrary kangaroo process owned by the same agency that issued the fine (of course you can sue if you want but the enforcement agencies avoid creating situations where that's practical).
> They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for
Juries don't determine sentencing, either. The Seventh Amendment has broadly been interpreted to preserve jury trials for most civil liability, including from the federal government.
> Municipalities...
Not federal!
> All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have Not a federal issue!
...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
> doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued
Straw man. Nobody argued civil penalties aren't serious.
> without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit
...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
This is a wild conversation. I've gone from being somewhat sympathetic to your argument to now wondering if that entire platform is baseless. (I'm increasingly convinced we need a principles of law course mandated in high school. It doesn't even need to be a full year. But our republic suffers when folks don't understand the basics.)
>Juries don't determine sentencing, either.
They do in some states but that's beside the point. Juries are people from outside the legal system who will balk if things get too unreasonable. That is one of their primary value adds to the system.
>...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
That's entirely my point, the government is imposing the same penalties (fines) on people they do for criminal matters but without any of the protections. You can drive drunk, get caught and be out substantially less money (and enjoy your rights along the way) than if you sink sonotubes for a shed too close to a stream and get caught. Heck, there's not even a statute of limitations for many civil enforcement things.
Just because government and those like you who simp for it wave around the word "civil" (or it's relative "administrative") like a magic want doesn't actually change the fact that people are being punished in the same manner they would in criminal law situations but without any of the protections.
I'm not arguing that the laws and jurisprudence haven't been twisted to enable this. I'm arguing that it's no less of an affront to everyone's rights than the civil asset forfeiture people do when they take stuff and then say "well we're actually charging the money and therefore..."
>Not federal!
The municipalities states and feds behave the exact same way and leverage most of the same legal precedents. The feds also deputize states who deputize municipalities to do their enforcing for them in many cases. Like the EPA isn't gonna shoot you're dog or whatever. Your local DEP or whatever will shoot your dog or whatever on their behalf.
>Straw man. Nobody argued civil penalties aren't serious.
I meant serious as compared to something "unserious" like a $20 parking ticket.
>...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
Do you? You can tell the police to fuck off and come back with a warrant. You can not talk to them and the burden of proof is on them. Try that with the SEC or the EPA or the FCC and see where it gets you.
Once you get into an actual court things are much, much more comparable. But criminal matters more or less go straight to court. Administrative matters you're usually forced to go rounds (and your lawyer is billing you the whole time) with some internal kangaroo pretend oversight system (much has been written about ICE's for example) before you get to say a word in front of a real judge who doesn't get his pay stub on their letterhead.
The intellectual-academic class are having an existential crisis that they've lost the reigns of the unelected bureaucratic apparatus and it is now being wielded against them. They are still confused at how to respond to this as they're certain they couldn't have been wrong about deferring (uh, 'delegate regulatory authority') the power vested in congress and elected representation to themselves. Surprise pikachu when it turns out the "apolitical, public goal oriented specialists' were useful idiots in the process of handing power from congress to the executive.
If you thought the political apparatus was willingly going to leave the reigns to "apolitical specialists" rather than ruthlessly consolidating it toward the hands of the most power hungry self-dealing monsters that can command the executive branch then obviously you have not been living in in reality. Of course by the time the blindfold has been removed, the power is already largely consolidated.
> unelected bureaucratic apparatus
Unelected—often unappointed—bureaucrats have never had more power in the U.S. government than they have today.
You want to have to vote for every single decision maker in the government?
Being able to is different from being obligated.
I mean I feel obligated. I'd feel bad if I skipped voting in an election where I found out after the fact that one of the candidates kicked puppies.
... and won by 1 vote
There's a whole big conversation to have about the bureaucratic state.
One of the things that appeals to voters is the argument that too many decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats. Trump has been as effective at fixing this as with "drain the damp," and our elected officials clearly haven't been great about writing policy either. But one of the grievances that gets people to vote is "look at all this shit that some guy in Washington just decided."
[dead]
Use the docket-id from that link.
Open to the possibility that I’m just cynical but my faith is very low that these comment processes are anything more than a regulatory requirement for the illusion of due diligence which legitimizes the actual corporate lobbying and security state actually making the policy.
You’re wrong. Even if the regulator ignores them, they allow third parties to bring a suit under the APA.
The real issue is that it's a perpetual problem -- there are NGOs that literally pull out the same one pager, an endless dance of having some 1L repeat the same points over and over and over.
(Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.)
I made a grand total of one hill visit.
I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns come back here ever again, I'll see to it if you're lucky you only lose your seat, not face a mob outside your window, and when that happens lose my fucking number because I'll be sitting by the TV with popcorn.
Exactly that happened, a few years later.
Whether you're a public interest lobbyist or just another activist, we need to be more willing to TELL congress things. Not ask. Not lobby. TELL THEM.
We need to remind them that the Soviets raced to Berlin to seize brains like ours, that we will flourish whatever regime is in power, and that you can ignore us at your but we, the hackers, will no longer grovel before narcistic neurotypicals to stop misunderstanding on purpose.
Politics is like poker -- soft play is unethical.
Play to win.
Because the pushback works, for a spell.
[flagged]
For the third time, I normally don't cry to the admins, but if you can't respond to my points but respond to my points, it's my understanding such behavior is a violation of the site rules.
You are not anonymous. Please behave accordingly if you cannot summon intrinsic motivation.
They require your name and address, so they will have a nice database of anyone who dares voice an objection.
Do you have any examples of the government exploiting that?
Do you have any examples of the government NOT exploiting that? It's hard to know for sure how data is being used or sold out for others to exploit it.
I'm nearly certain commenting, at least from my monitoring of commenting on ATF rulemaking, achieves the opposite of what the commenters hope.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
I'm pretty sure they don't need comments on the federal site for that. They could get the same from reddit or here for that matter.
It lets politicians see how unpopular something is and how many votes they will lose.
Exactly. Often they're not even real https://www.kcra.com/article/more-sacramento-victims-discove...
The companies paid to flood the FCC with fake comments get to do it as long as they're willing to give the government a cut of the action (https://www.engadget.com/new-york-ag-fines-companies-that-sp...)
It'll only stop when the people hiring those companies to spam the FCC end up behind bars.
I think the filing number is 17-59.
Thank you
Great. As if telecoms can be trusted with customers' id. AT&T left my name, address, social security etc in an improperly secured database for others to have, and they tried to open accounts with it; they had retained the information after I closed my account, and they denied the information was coming from them for years before they finally admitted it and gave us all a quarter to call someone who cares and a year of credit monitoring.
I have heard very little about AT&T's actual telecom services, but my god have I heard about their billing department. I daresay the only departments in more of a shambles than their billing one is... well. A lot of Microsoft lately.
Telecom billing is seemingly designed to stochastically fail in favor of the telecom. This is not a shambles, but excellent system performance, from their perspective.
T-Mobile also has had numerous breaches. And Verizon sells your location data as I recall.
The incentives to become a career criminal get bigger every day.
And your pin is 1234
Same as their, Samsonite I was way off, luggage.
As a Russian: huh, you guys could still just buy a sim card without any kind of identification? Impressive. We had that ID requirement introduced way back in the 00s.
Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.
It seems to depend a lot. It's kind of hard in Germany - they wanted my permanent address. I didn't find France as difficult. Iceland didn't care. Italy wanted my passport. Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
But of course, the public Wifi also requires authentication. With, you guessed it, a phone number.
Yes, that's another law they have. Can't access the internet anonymously, basically. And yes, foreign phone numbers do work.
Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...
The first and last time I was in Russia was in 2019, passing by Moscow airport, and you already required a phone number to use the public WiFi, but any foreign number was OK.
Foreigners must provide their biometric data to buy a local SIM card. They better just use a tourist SIM card.
Btw you can still buy an anonymous SIM card with cash in the Netherlands in pretty much any supermarket/kiosk/whatever. And if you just need Internet, I haven't had any eSIM provider try to verify my ID so far. Although those can't easily be paid in cash.
That will likely change too if it becomes the last bastion of anonymous SIM cards.
Are there services in the EU similar to Privacy.com? They along with US arm of Revolut lets you use disposable digital cards to buy things, but I don't know if such functionality is legal in the EU.
i use revolut in the eu and disposable cards work. its legal because kyc is only between you and your bank (revolut is a bank operating out of latvia), they are not required or allowed to give your personal info to anyone other than payment processors and police.
In Japan you need to ID as a resident to get a phone number that can make calls, but anyone can get an anonymous data-only SIM
South Korea is also hard
FWIW I bought my Chilean SIM without any problems whatsoever.
Situation circa 2019 at least was that foreign tourists in Chile could purchase a SIM card, but it would be automatically disconnected after some amount of time without registering the phone in a way few foreign tourists would do.
Not quite, the requirement is that phones not bought locally need to be registered after 30 days, regardless if someone is a tourist or a Chilean citizen. It's a mix of deterring tax evasion, importing stolen phones, and regulatory homologation. The government delegates responsibility to various telecom companies to have portals to self-register the IMEI with ID, which can be a foreign passport.
I'm sure the cops can get that info, but its mostly to enforce the "only one free register per year". Anyone can buy a phone with cash and use a prepaid sim with zero ID needed.
I got mine in 2024. Maybe the shop clerk activated it for me, I don't remember.
Different EU countries seem to heavily vary on this point. I’ve seen everything from requirements for id scans and addresses to esims that accept cryptocurrency as payment.
yeah I think in Italy this was introduced in the security push after 9/11, and in other EU countries I also had to provide an id to get a sim card, tho I'm not sure it's all of them.
In Bulgaria the ID requirement was introduced in recent years as it has been abused to run scam networks. It was big problem in Turkey, as Bulgarian scam networks were pulling the bride scam to such an extent that the scammers started scamming classes for wannabe scammers.
if you've ever watched the wire (season 1 2002) you will know that burner phones were very much a thing.
In the US it gets fought hard because Wall St uses it to dodge state income taxes. Everyone thinks it's drug dealer related for us, but it's actually Finance bros driving into NYC from out of state (NJ or CT) but trying to hide it.
This is probably part of the larger scope of the system wanting to require ID to even boot a computer let alone connect to the internet.
More than that, a ban on all general purpose computing.
You can only use specific applications downloaded from walled gardens. You cannot write and execute arbitrary code.
If you are an engineer, all code must be generated via LLM and it passes through some verification through a centralized security and compliance authority on the way to you. You must be fully licensed.
This will be, the end of malware.
As kooky as I thought he was, Stallman seems to be more prophetic each year. His essay The Right to Read seems to be a vision of how knowledge gets locked down. Every American college/university student has been trapped into renting textbooks. Elsevier and Pearson seem to have used that essay as a roadmap.
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/st...
I think he's wrong that DRM violates the 4th Amendment, I contend that it is - first and foremost - a violation of the 3rd Amendment.
There are zero days in every piece of software, but malware is already mostly a state-actor-only thing.
This is a hilarious take
The latest Miasma/Shai-Hulud worm will not run if your development system has KOI8-R (Russian) as the primary language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI8-R
> Kill switch, as always with APT28 malware, is setting the host language to ru_RU.KOI8-R (LANG environment variable). That disables the spread mechanism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48460507
Note: KOI8-U is Ukrainian and would still trigger the worm/trojan/malware.
So? If I were a US based malware dev that’s what I’d do to avoid detection…
Yeah. Looks like the future they want is complete marginalization of free computers, of free people. The machines will have to be corporation and government owned in order to network and participate in society. If we own the machine, we're excluded. Ostracized. Even the language they use is disgusting. They say we're "tampering" with the system, as though it wasn't ours to begin with. It makes me really sad that this is what we're heading towards.
The thing about networks is that we can create our own.
Citizens creating informal horizontal networks between themselves is threatening to social harmony, and as more states around the world learn from the highly successful Chinese model, they are unlikely to permit the Wild West à la the old-school internet you are thinking about.
The thing about governments is they are just as tyrannical as the corporations. "Any network we cannot surveil and dominate is banned" is absolutely within the realm of possibility.
Then the government would be banning the gathering of people. At that point we're pretty fucked.
The Mark of the Beast
It is. They want to monitor every second of our lives and put it through current computer systems and salivating on what they can glean from it in future generations of AI. All the bureaucrats and politicians crave is control over everything. No privacy is valued other than their own, and they will always use "think of the children" as an excuse.
> No privacy is valued other than their own, and they will always use "think of the children" as an excuse.
Until they lose an election using "think of the children", they'll always continue to use it. In terms of political weaponry, it's currently unstoppable.
This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go on your way to the taxi or train like most other places.
Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing was with a Canadian credit card number. Whoops. This was only for a month, so I put in mine and he reimbursed me in cash. Other carriers may still let you buy one-time payment cards for cash at retail; this one didn't.
I think this is where Airalo shines. I've used it while travelling and I think eSIMs, as annoying as they are, are the way.
these "travel sims" are pricey !
You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch ! Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip
Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...
Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person
I just tried a GigSky eSim on my Samsung Galaxy and it was an epic fail of an experience.
Having a friend who lends you their credit card so that you pay it off at the end of your trip is such a premium !
Canada isn't the only country in which foreign cards don't work everywhere, and it seems like it's rarely tested
> like most other places
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
Argentina doesn't also, you can just buy a SIM card off the newsstand.
In my experience, you then need to activate it using real data from real people. I lent my data to a colombian colleague a couple of years ago, as he did not have a DNI yet.
Huh? At least in Germany, Spain and France all of the smaller shops fill in fake info without even asking.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
Is it that trivial in Germany? I live in Berlin, and the rumor that I heard years ago is that some kiosks in areas known for drug dealing sell pre-activated SIM cards. I never bothered to check.
I wasn't taking blatant fraud into account. I'm sure that's possible everywhere. I'd bet you can buy cigarettes without the tax stamps in the same shop too.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sure, but if you’re a tourist in e.g. Barcelona trying to get a prepaid SIM, odds are the shopkeeper will not ask you for your ID despite being required to.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
Not a good example. In Spain they notoriously demand id/passport and make photo or copy of it, they do it "for the police".
That’s the legal requirement yes, I’ve never seen a shop insist on it. Most of them have autofill scripts for the KYC forms.
Isn't the main topic of discussion here a legal requirement?
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
I’m just pointing out that in Europe the equivalent legal requirement is widely ignored, the same won’t necessarily repeat in the US, but it might.
I would think most tourists would trust a carrier-branded store over Honest Jochen's Tobacco Emporium where you may or may not get a working SIM after paying cash.
Trust? Sure. They’re still more likely to buy their prepaid SIM from the shop that also sells bongs, they are on every corner after all.
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No one implied it was.
> This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go
I don't see the connection. This is also how it works in China, which means... when you grab a SIM card at an airport kiosk, they take a picture of your passport. You obviously have your passport with you, because you just arrived in China and haven't left the airport yet.
What part of that isn't also true of Australia?
Has this changed recently? I thought I heard about this several years ago, but the last 2-3 times I've visited (in the last couple of years) I've been able to pick up a prepaid SIM from Colesworth without any ID check.
It has been like that for at least 8 years, and probably longer. There are still stalls at airports, but you must provide ID.
Interesting. Seems like this isn't very consistently enforced, then.
You may have bought the sim card but never activated it. It's not the device itself that is restricted, just using it.
The current ID verification requirements for phones were introduced to Australia in 1997
It's been like this since at least the late 90s, I remember having to fill out the paperwork manually when working at Target
It used to be that you did the ID check when you bought the SIM, but now you have to do the ID check when you activate it.
You can buy the SIM but can’t activate it without going through ID checks.
What problem were they hoping to solve with that legislation?
Most of time it's billed as law enforcement fighting tool. If people can't have anonymous cell phones, once you capture one criminal phone number, you can quickly look at who they call and since they can't be burners, you figure out the criminal network.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
The problem of citizens having anonymous internet connectivity.
That's an illusion. Two days of location data and you can pin down the owner pretty well.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
There a significant difference between "the user can be identified fairly well if you can get access to sensitive stuff" and "the owner is always explicitly recorded in a searchable database".
My burner would only be powered on for the duration of the call and the time to spin up gsm connectivity.
The free anonymous internet was only ever a ruse to get people to use it so the CIA could spy on them. DARPA, folks, created a “free as in beer” global surveillance network and we all bought it.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
Huh? DARPA created something to help retain communication and coordination capabilities for our government in event of nuclear attack.
Indeed they did, at great expense and gave it away for free!
Any situation you can imagine wanting a burner phone for, that's what the government wants to crack down on.
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I mean. It’s the same, you just have to show your passport and fill a form. It takes 1minute to get it done, you can do it on your way to the taxi if you want. Though e-sim are more practical now
I wonder what exactly are they hoping to achieve then? Anything that can be filled out in 1 minute in a taxi can be spoofed with an extra 30 seconds on the dark net buying dark IDs. So this does less than zero for crime, actually encourages more of it, while doing what exactly? It's madness.
Who says anything about crime? the goal is just so they can associate phone numbers with id cards in some fashion right?
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
Like so many laws, nothing to do with stopping crime, but an obvious push to strip the populace of its rights.
You do not have the right to a phone number without providing ID. If you're an American, those unwritten rights that come from other firm rights written down in laws and constitutions can always be argued, they're always being whittled down.
Rights for everyone are achieved through blood and toil, and if you truly want a right to anonymity and the digital tools necessary to achieve it, you will need blood and toil. Until then, we'll have to squeeze through fast developments that governments have yet to address.
"Law enforcement" and national security is given as the verbatim headline justification when you reference Australia's Communication and Media Authority[] for rules on ID collection.
Unfortunately I can't dig up the original debate from 1997 on the Telecommunications Act when the requirement appears to have been introduced. Would be shocked if it did not include similar language from the representatives shilling the requirement, though.[] https://www.acma.gov.au/support-law-enforcement-and-security...
Can you tell me more about how to order and receive a fake ID on the dark net in less than 30 seconds? It does sound rather implausible.
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Don’t eSIMs solve this problem for tourists?
Apple — and now Google — have "solved" this problem for the government by removing physical SIM slots in US iPhones.
Thus eSIM
In what way? Activating it still needs KYC.
Doesn't an eSIM link the SIM to the phone's IMEI which is usually logged somewhere?
Yes, eSIM doesn't really change this conversation
eSIM doesn't change local laws around cell phones - it's not magic.
It can if it's a roaming eSIM. I'm sure all the countries mentioned here e.g. Australia still handles US SIMs roaming there fine even when the US SIM dossn't have ID tied to it.
A roaming eSIM would work the same way as a roaming SIM. Just because it's easier to set up (no need to get a physical SIM) doesn't change the regulations around it.
I suppose this depends on how the law is written, but are roaming users subject to local SIM regulations for network use? I can't imagine asking for ID from tourists using their existing SIMs is going to work.
I believe some travel eSIMs are actually issued from outside the country you're going to.
Typically not. Because they don't have local phone numbers nor IP addresses, so they cannot be used for scams or fake identities domestically. In China, roaming SIMs also bypass all internet filtering, it's basically a built in VPN back to your home telecom.
And as you said, ones marketed as "China travel SIMs" are typically issued from Hong Kong. Interestingly, Hong Kong also has an ID rule (though it allows self upload of ID anyway), but it exempts these roaming-only cards. If you want the card to work in HK, and it is issued from there, you must scan your passport to activate it.
Right, but that distinction is not because it's an eSIM - it's just how it's issued. There's no technical distinction, just a practical ease of issuance.
Yep, they'll still prompt for the info.
Only if you do not require voice service.
Had to buy one of these SMS activation services from a guy in Nigeria using a memecoin because claude decided to ban my account because they didn’t like my credit card brand and Claude requires sms activation for new accounts.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
Walmart.com recently deleted my phone number from my decade+ old account and refused to let me purchase anything until I coughed one up. When I put my actual number in it told it was no good. Possibly this is because my wife has an account using the same number, which was never a problem until sudden phone numbers only belong to one person I guess? I'm trying to give these guys money.
I gave them a google voice number and apparently that satisfied them. Then lost access to the google voice number because I never used it for anything else.
An SMS activation price is about $0.13 btw, there are several sites that do this commercially with hundreds of thousands of numbers. Not going to name any since that'd be advertising for them.
I thought I was the only one!
Not because Claude banned my account (but they did that too), but because OpenAI one day decided I needed a phone number to login, and then proceeded to reject my real one.
I'm always surprised how bad ideas spread faster than good ideas among our rulers. Here is a map of countries where an ID is required (or not) https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/sim-card-regist...
If you want anonymous eSIM, Silent Link is pretty good. Pay with crypto, works nearly all countries/networks, quite reasonably priced.
> I'm always surprised how bad ideas spread faster than good ideas among our rulers.
it's not a bad idea from the POV of said "rulers" - more surveillance and control on the population is desirable (to them).
We at some point will have to stop complying. Not because we are doing anything at all wrong, but because we cannot trust our govt and the corporations they are beholden to.
Having multiple needless laws is another way to control the population. Everyone will be violating at least one law. The government will then just enforce the laws on the people they don't like.
> The government will then just enforce the laws on the people they don't like.
Which is explicitly against the 14th amendment.
There is a book titled Three Felonies A Day that explains this. US Federal laws/regulations are so obtuse, over-reaching, arcane and complicated that the average innocent person violates 3 felonies per day. And your point about enforce the laws on the people they don't like is one that the author makes as well.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
A previous job of mine was software developer for a state motor vehicle agency. I had to read far too many state & federal laws/regulations to make the boat/vehicle registration system compliant.
They will just run a PR campaign highlighting how anonymous SIMs have been used by pedos and terrorists so that majority of population will actually willingly support such laws, unfortunately.
These things are signs of surveillance economy which benefit very few.
If there’s one thing this administration has shown, it’s that they believe laws are just suggestions for other people and that ultimately nobody will stop them.
They’re essentially daring the public to resort to violence and frankly, it’s getting exhausting.
Why follow the law when the president will pardon you and the Supreme Court has said he also won’t be held accountable for basically anything.
I welcome the reasoned responses that think this administration isn’t actively flaunting our laws. How’s that war powers act coming along?
A law that is not enforced is ultimately a suggestion
Wants to kill burner phones but somehow foreign phone scams are still rampant.
Disjoint issues really. Phone scams mostly rely on the shoddy/lack of verification of caller id info as calls transit the network where it's not verified so they are unblockable (because they just use a different fake number every time). They're actually calling from one or a pool of numbers but you can't block and report them on the receiving end because the number your phone thinks it's blocking isn't theirs. This will do nothing to fix spam/scam without patching the issues with caller id.
Hardly disjoint. Most of the scams come from foreign networks.
It is actually because you can't do anything with the source phone number being tied to an identity if the scammers are freely able to spoof the number that the end networks and users see. Even if every network in the world adopted this it wouldn't matter if caller id isn't fixed so that you can actually see the source number to go ask who it is!
You can. Finland forces operators to stop routing non-verified and spoofed numbers. Spam gone.
https://www.tieto.com/en/cases/telecom/global-anti-fraud-mod...
From your link: "The scam-blocking service is based on modern cloud technology, and it’s scalable, and easy to deploy" - I don't think we need another SaaS parasite for this as protocol-level solution like STIR/SHAKEN is a better approach IMO. The problem is that operators are not incentivized to do anything with spam/scam.
I don't understand how this isn't the default. I get multiple calls every week, sometimes many per day, from people saying I called them. This has been going on for years... (Portugal)
The telephone system design stretches back to the days when it operated purely electro mechanically so there wasn't even the data to know who the original caller much less a way to implement validation to ensure the call was actually from that number. That plus common carrier rules (at least present here in the US) required all the networks to connect every incoming call to prevent them from blocking out competitors. CallerID is a late addition patch on a system designed to remain compatible with the old exchanges and countries have only recently (in legal and bureaucratic terms) modifying laws to allow for blocking and screening.
As finn. I can verify scam calls are non-existent lately few do occasinally popup, but its like 2000 times better than before. When i learned about this originally, i was shocked like how this is not default?
Gotta remember the phone system used to run on electromechanical relays not digital systems and the digital upgrades since then were designed to be compatible with the old systems with common carrier rules requiring networks to route calls by default so blocking and verification weren't really built into any of the systems and interfaces between carriers.
Ok but that doesn't change the situation in the US where the law/rule is being proposed where we haven't done the same thing.
They can also use VoIP. So just banning calls from abroad is not enough, you need to better regulate VoIP services.
After the implementation of SIM card real-name registration in China, scam calls can accurately state your personal information.
In Russia you need an ID to buy a phone number, and almost every site or app requires it to sign up. As a nice bonus, you or any scammer can buy personal data on everyone for cheap in Telegram bots, because everytime there is a PII leak, these bots update their vast databases.
We should allow privateers to go after spammers, and get the seized assets. And spammer is then tortured appropriately. Satan could run a successful single issue campaign on this in the most religious state in the US.
I wish they would kill spam calling and texting instead.
Been getting two a day, clearly some ai voice robo call. We have all this technology yet these spam calls still persist.
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How about we start by forcing telecoms to not allow any fake caller ID from their network?
How about we not form our society into a jail?
This was the case in Belgium a couple of years ago.
Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.
Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.
Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled.
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones
That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims. Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.
Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.
But... what does your comment have to do with burner phones?
A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.
A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.
You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.
There are phone farms that exclusively use burner phones and do not need to spoof caller ID.
Let's recall the claim here:
>>> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
>> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
> That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones
This is total nonsense. A phone farm that doesn't spoof caller ID isn't presenting false caller ID.
Wait, you’re right, I think I misread your comment somehow or got it mixed with another comment.
Sorry about that.
Wish I could recall the podcast I listened to a few years ago that was telling the history of robo-dialers and caller ID spoofing. The general gist was that AT&T was making money off it from 1-900 operators so they weren't eager to self-regulate. So even though ending spam calling is a bipartisan issue, feet were dragged on the implementation.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.
of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!
https://archive.org/details/3f25eeb8affc11e6892a43edc8087050
~~I _think_ this is the one.~~
God I miss this podcast.
Edit: this IS the one.
Are you familiar with the Search Engine podcast?
I am. I couldn't get into it. I'll give it another shot. Maybe I didn't try long enough.
Probably not the issue isn't knowing who owns a number it's that the actual number for the call is just a data field that's not validated or required to be correct. Spam calls would be a lot less annoying if they had to come from real numbers that could be blocked instead of being able to spoof as many numbers as they want.
Spam calls are a different issue (spam is usually VOIP). Spammers also often use spoofed numbers since STIR/SHAKEN is somehow still not properly implemented.
All carrier interconnects use VoIP protocols since forever anyway. So this is pretty much a distinction without a difference. STIR/SHAKEN affects both
This is unrelated to spam calls. Business will register thousands of phone numbers for "surveys" and will continue spamming with AI calls.
Fundamentally un-American.
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
Well - it's not exactly a surprise that all these non-American countries engage in un-American practices.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
American exceptionalism was always a lie; name an “un-American” practice, and I'll show you a piece of American foreign policy.
A lie, or an ideal to try and live up to, depending on the context. In the context of discussing liberty-destroying privacy invasions it's an ideal, and we should not be so quick to dismiss it.
Violations of the US Bill of Rights.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
It's hardly un-American if America does it the most, is it?
>Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S.
I need to know whether these other countries are rich western europe before I know whether to agree with you or to cook up some snide rebuttal.
Joking, obviously. And by "joking" I mean mocking a specific type of person and set of beliefs that is who is a) bad b) too common around here.
Free, anonymous political speech is the bedrock of American freedom. Also, guns
America, where the Amendments to the Constitution start counting at "2".
Also, apparently ends there, too.
there still are a bunch of viable messaging apps/services that work without a phone number:
matrix, wire, deltachat, threema, maybe jabber/xmpp (depends on their support of encryption). any others?
> many messaging apps require a phone number
But not all, so what's the actual point?
If a messaging app ever gets the attention of government regulators, it must succumb to this verification.
I don't know any way to avoid this.
How would they enforce that on a decentralized communication platform?
outlawing the platform
Did you ever read about how the creator of Session was forced to flee Australia and move to Switzerland?
No more anonymous driving, thanks to Flock. Soon, no more anonymous calls, thanks to the FCC.
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
Worse, we are becoming a burden.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
They want us replaced by machines that are 100% compliant slaves, they're hoping for AI with human capabilities (or better) and no will to pushback at their tyrannical natures.
You're projecting harder than IMAX here with your conspiracy theory tropes. Remember it was the Bolsheviks who actually liquidated entire classes of people as 'useless parasites'.
You can listen to Thiel yourself and form your opinion, I don't have an agenda to change anyone's mind.
I do wonder though how you hallucinated me as a Bolshevik sympathiser.
It was a terrible scattered movie, but they want Elysium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
No, Elysium still had all the desperate poor people. That's not the end goal.
They want to scan your soul. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v5HLLkgo5A
They want the future setting of Unanimity in Cloud Atlas. Even that might be too much of an underclass.
right, they definitely want depopulation down to the levels their paid hacks tell them is sustainable for a compliant population, "saving the earth", and continue to lives out as gods.
Can even go to the bodega on foot anonymously, too many of my neighbors have ring cameras pointed at the street.
Flock is being rejected in a number of cities, thanks to citizens.
How data-driven policing is sold, spoke to someone who set it up once, good odds FLock is doing it, or in the spirit of the below, Flock doesn't have to do it:
- There are networked webcams everywhere: DoT cameras, 18 wheeler fleet cameras, traffic cams, etc.
- Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
- For average jane and joe citizenry: great, no Flock in town!
- For ongoing negotiations with Flock and the PD: ok, sure, kick us out of town. But we'll just pull the 18wheeler feeds with the vendor we have an agreement with, as they roll through town. Or the DoT feeds via the State contract we have or the...
- As such, negotiations could land as does local PD at least want the control of the feeds already going through their town with each Sysco big rig delivery?
Very, very tricky terrain to solve.
> Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
Except, they totally want to make a deal with Flock. If not Flock, another similar vendor.
I am quite confident that there will eventually in any of those cities be some kind of major mass casualty type event that will be attributed to that rejection. I don’t hope for it and am sorry for all of humanity for what we are allowing to seemingly inevitably come about, but here we are; like cattle being herded to the feed lot. “But they’re saying they’ll feed you”, you will hear, “they don’t mean you ill. You should stop being a conspiracy theorists. This food is good.”
We’ll see how it goes, but we also have suits like this that push back on that narrative as if you’re going to say your tech protects against a certain kind of tragedy, and that tragedy actually happens and you didn’t protect against it, maybe you bear some liability.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-...
Every step of the way enabled by useful idiots who think that because each incremental step applies more/cheaper government violence to some class of petty deviants they don't like that it is worth doing even if the overall trajectory created by the sum total of the steps is bad. Selfish jerks.
> We should also abolish cash while we're at it.
Why do you think all the rich people (and by extension the oligarchy running this country) are pushing Crypto?
Monero is the best alternative to cash. And any crypto acceptance helps you pay with Monero because crypto-->crypto is 10x easier than crypto-->fiat.
I don’t think pointing that out will get very far. People didn’t notice when “democracy” was pushed by the same people, in direct contradiction to the Constitution. “Democracy” was the lynchpin to neutralize the Constitution and usher in oligarchic control again, just like digital/programmable currency will complete the pivot of slavery into a total and global system. Why only enslave a few people when you can enslave all people with smoke and mirrors that will make them cheer on their own deception with amusement.
I get over 10 scam calls a day. I'm forced to pay a company to block them because the free methods don't work. There's no way to work around it because they refuse to enforce the law on these companies cycling through burner numbers.
They are not using cell phones, they are using VOIP.
I'm aware; I'm referring to their priorities.
And people will keep carrying their phones with them. And keep using them. And keep installing apps. Yes, ideally we'd have laws against government infringement, but the capability to not use your phone is in your hands.
More and more things require having a smartphone. Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border. Install the app to use the street parking in this city. Install the app to board the bus. Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz. I admire your spirit of rebellion, but avoiding using a smartphone in daily life in most places will result in a lifestyle contorted specifically to avoid using a smartphone, and will cut you off from activities that were previously doable without smartphones 20 years ago.
This is not meant as an argument or a counterpoint, I'm just not familiar with some of your examples. Would you be able to elaborate?
>Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border.
Would this be a national border? I haven't traveled internationally for a while, but this would be quite troubling.
>Install the app to board the bus.
Is there no option to pay without an app?
>Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz.
Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
> Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
Government offices in many developed countries don't realistically answer the phone any more. You either use the official app on your phone, or you log into the official website using strong authentication that requires a phone. A luddite workaround might be a registered letter by post, but you might wait a long time for an answer.
I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines. To my knowledge there was no other way to get the required approvals.
My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone, credit card tap or with a reloadable transit card. To my knowledge, the only way to reload the card is to use their app or travel to a handful of authorized agents to have them reload your card.
I can call my government office and wait on hold for an hour, ultimately probably needing to schedule an appointment in person to handle my issue or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
>I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines
That's good to know. Me and my family will definitely never be visting the philippines. My phone doesn't have mobile data enabled at the provider level. Would have been an award search for Wifi.
>My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone,
It's baffling to me that anyone would want to link payment to their phone. This is one of the least intelligent self-owns of the last decade.
>or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
I take your point but I'd say that most people don't put much value on their freedom if they'd trade it for a couple of hours of convenience.
> Would this be a national border? I haven't traveled internationally for a while, but this would be quite troubling.
Yes.
> Is there no option to pay without an app?
No option.
> Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
The time I saw this, the non-app option was waiting in line for several hours.
Could you expand on this? What happens at the national border? What happens if your phone just won't do a QR code? I'm not arguing with you or disagreeing with, I'm just curious what the process is.
This comment is so divorced from reality. It is very difficult to live life in the modern world without a phone unless you want to go Amish.
I'm not Amish, but if I walk into a restaurant where they won't show me a menu without scanning a QR code, I walk right out.
I’m with you there, I probably would too.
But when your child is late to school but they won’t allow you in until you scan the QR code and fill in a form? Do you stand and wait hoping to be noticed? Hoping to tailgate somebody with a phone? Just head home?
The school also sends general communications only by app.
Just think about your comment if we ever see for-real 1940s-style fascism at the same time we have all these stupid tracking devices on us all the time. If we made it through to better times people have no idea how so many people could have so easily and freely given up their privacy and freedom. With no fight whatsoever. Giving it up gladly. Hoping even more freedom could be taken from them so they could be just a little bit more comfortable.
That should be brought up to the school board and parents should be up in arms about it. I don't see how it's even acceptable to require you to do paperwork every time you kid is late to school. If on the day I couldn't get a human at a school to talk to me and a phone call to the office didn't work either I absolutely would go home. People let others get away with this way too often. Sometimes you can't fight it (good luck fighting parking meters in your city that require an app once contracts are signed and the infrastructure is in place), but often you can demand reasonable accommodation if not a change of policy.
I've been thinking about it as an experiment lately. Not fully throwing my smartphone in the bin, but considering leaving it at home for a day.
If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them. Public wifi these days has almost vanished so it's difficult to connect to the internet without cellular access now.
>If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them.
I left prime running a bunch of 80s comedy films in the background as I cleaned my house on the weekend. And so much of the "situation" end of sitcom relies on people having prearranged things beforehand and just happening to arrive on time.
A couple of SMS's and every situation would be resolved.
I could get by on just an SMS/Call only device, the problem is these days everyone moved to internet based apps which require an android/ios app. In theory you could use some kind of bridge server to convert it in to a simple text protocol for a dumb device, but I'm always worried you'd get flagged as a bot and have your account deleted.
Not really. Rural America you don't need a mobile phone. I can go days without ever touching my phone. And if it wasn't for my bank, I wouldn't need it at all. Even then I could just go to the bank but I'm too lazy to do that.
Even in NYC you could get by pretty much just fine without a phone (a credit or debit card is pretty much required though). The hardest part would be losing contact since expectations of how people organize and meet up are completely mobile phone centric, and plans are almost expected to be modified in real time.
The "I can't bank" complaint is strange to me. I've never done any banking on my phone, the closest is when paypal extorted a phone number out of me for SMS verification. I still do banking through web browser at home, for several different accounts. But maybe it's different outside of the US.
Yes when you are away from society you don't require a device to connect with society.
I'm with you. On my list of things to do is seek out a a local credit union so I'm not reliant on a banking app.
This is the pathway Iran is using to provide tiered internet btw.
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
does nothing to fight spam; only polices lawful users
they call that "anarcho-tyranny"
I probably said it dozens of times in here, phone numbers are the link between your IRL identity and digital one, that’s why a lot of services still require a phone number to “prevent spam”, yeah right, it’s just to get to you if ever needed.
I expect the FCC to adopt this rule, and I also expect it to be challenged in court, on the basis that there are many other approaches to fighting spam calls that the FCC has not tried, but are much less intrusive.
I hope you're right. I am not informed - is this typically how these decisions get challenged?
There are two ways to challenge FCC decisions. There is the upfront approach where a business whose operations are harmed by an FCC decision sues to block the decision. Then there is the approach where said business announces their non-compliance and dares the FCC to sue them. The FCC does not have criminal charging authority, so it has to rely on courts to enforce compliance. See the Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T case that just wrapped up at the Supreme Court.
This has been the case for a long time in Switzerland. If you want a mobile phone SIM, you need to provide your ID. Of course easy if you have a national ID...
I don't see the issue here and I am surprised that this wasn't the case in the United States.
However since it is now trivial to communicate encrypted with so many other devices, I don't see the point now. This would have been a "good" thing back in the 90'.
And phone companies are enabling telecoms by manufacturing devices that don't take physical sim cards anymore. I recently migrate from pixel 8 to 10, it only supports eSim. In order to migrate my sim to an eSim I had to provide voice, image, documents and info of the phone I was installing the eSim on. One of the worse companies in Brazil, Vivo, now have everything about me. I bet they keep it in a big excel file accessible via a secret but public link
A voluntary model would be nice - what X (more or less) does currently. You can elect to be verified by X, and it will show the badge, or you can opt out and not get the badge, but you can still use it.
If phones could reliably tag an incoming call as "ID provided" or not, then people who cared could screen calls appropriately, and people who wanted to protect their identity could still have a phone.
Regardless of this, I see phone network as a legacy thing that in perfect world should already be replaced with lightweight upgradeable calling protocol over IPv6.
This would apply equally to said IP calling network since you'd need a SIM card to access the tower interesting strewn across the country either way.
WiFi / pure-VOIP based calling should be able to disambiguate between the network and the messaging layers. This means that a given cellular modem wouldn't be traceable to a specific contact, or call history. The modems could be swapped amongst individuals readily.
This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.
Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.
I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.
<https://theconversation.com/young-people-hate-making-phone-c...>
This is essentially requiring ID for IP connectivity.
Pretty sure that this would just encourage privacy minded folks to find a loophole.
Or if you get fed up enough you just start blasting FM transmissions without a license..... Keep the burst short enough while your mobile and don't make the transmitter obvious and you could probably get away with it for short SMS comms.
Or just use something like lora or meshtastic/meshcore
The loophole is to use a homeless person's ID for $20.
Wait. In the US don't they not even have an ID standard? The homeless person probably doesn't have any valid ID and neither do members of several other disenfranchised groups, right? So now they're not allowed to have cellphone service?
Some states allow homeless people to get IDs. Some do not. My state outlawed homelessness in last year's Crime Bill - the charge is now called "unlawful camping" and it outlawed cities from having zones where people are allowed to camp unless they basically create something like a KOA campground (and outlawed using tax money to do so).
This has been tried in Mexico at least twice - crooks are still finding ways to have burners and smuggle anonymous phones into jails etc.
It's not about stopping crime, it's about control.
Sure but that’s not how they’re selling it.
This is already the case in most (all?) EU countries. Government-issued photo ID is required to activate a SIM card.
If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country
I was a teenager when Switzerland introduced the mandatory ID check, in 2003 or 2004 iirc.
My carrier added 10 CHF credit to my prepaid plan for the trouble.
It's still fairly easy to buy a Lycamobile SIM/number that was enabled with a fake or stolen ID. Consequently some banks and services ban entire number ranges, which is not only ineffective but also affects people who committed the sin of keeping their first phone number even after moving to a proper postpaid plan...
This is essentially already a reality in Australia. I had to email identity documents + a photo of my face holding an ID to two separate companies just to shift eSIMs to my new phone.
They have to have your residential address for "emergency reasons" which is fairly defensible at least
Maybe a way around this is for intermediary companies to own the phone that happens to have service and then lease the phone.
And with that suggestion, a clause is being added to close that loophole….
So it would be illegal to lend a phone to anyone, even just for one call?
Not illegal. You’ll just be held liable for anything they say.
My work can’t provide a cellphone now?
True for most EU countries since a while - at the premium Telcos shops.
Not true in most EU countries if you just go into one of those shady shops nearby train station and ask friendly, while the shop is empty, if he could sell you a SIM thats already verified.
Anything about the 10 spam phone calls I get a day? no I didn't think so.
Something about no taxes without representation
I’m surprised it’s taken this long to go after this.
In the name of “national security” and “protecting the children” and all.
This is one of those rules/laws that is worse than useless, without fixing the protocol shortcomings that make spoofing trivial the only people who will be affected by this rule are regular people.
It was only a matter of time.
The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.
Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.
They don't have that right, that's why Ben Franklin set up the USPS
I do not understand the outrage, law abiting users have nothing to fear (TM) and criminally minded users (or undocumented) can always pay a homeless person, a few bucks to register their burner.
Seems pointless to do this without also doing something about phone number spoofing.
It's not about controlling them, it's about controlling you and me
This is standard in my country. Seemingly as a consequence, eSIMs require physically going to a store to be activated (on the telco side), which has always seemed insane to me.
Lot's of countries already require this but it's trivially by-passable just by using a roaming capable SIM from a country that does not require it.
I've got my popcorn and lawn chair out to watch the "voter id is racist" crowd to take a stand on this issue.
Context: Voter ID Laws may seem like a good idea, but they’re actually pretty terrible! On the surface, these laws appear to be a reasonable way to stop people from pretending to be someone else when they vote. But the reality is that this kind of voter fraud almost never happens!!! Instead Voter ID Laws primarily prevent the poor, the elderly, and people of color from voting. They way they’ve disenfranchised people of color is part of a very long history of voter suppression and is a classic example of structural racism.
Isn't this the exact same thing? If you don't have a valid ID to vote, now you don't have a valid ID to use a cellphone either. And if you wanted to go and get one, too bad because you probably need a cellphone to do that.
So by "Voter ID is racist" crowd you more broadly mean "people who understand that requiring identification in order to exist in society is a burden on the citizens with little benefit to them but of great value to authoritarians who wish to use these laws for nefarious means".
Which, often, does not include exclusively people who think "Voter ID is racist" as plenty of unhinged libertarians hate make great points about why you shouldn't want the government to have access to 100% of your daily data points 100% of the time.
Same thing seems to be happening in every other nation. I assume this is binding to your future digital wallet
Communicating anonymously without a phone number is really easy what does this solve
Isn’t this already a requirement? Can you really buy a burner phone/sim without providing identifying information?
not at all, it’s easy to buy cash only tracphone, mint, boost, etc. and there are plenty of explicit anonymous providers such as phreeli.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
the only solution is to upgrade the phone system to require ID, but that would cost billions to AT&T, so that ain't gonna happen
Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
They'll just add regulation that requires KYC for roaming agreements.
So basically people from Africa won't be allowed to use their phones in the USA by order of the government? (If they can even get into the country without ending up in an ICE camp, of course)
That will be a feature and not considered a bug.
I had reason to pick up a couple cheap pre-paid phones at a gas station once. I wasn't asked to give an ID to anyone to buy them, but once I had them I needed to call a company to activate the phone and they were very particular about what phone number it would work from. It had to be a landline. Payphone wouldn't work. My work phone didn't work. It was difficult to track down a phone line they'd accept and even then one of the phones refused to register.
It seemed to me like they wanted to make sure they could tie the phones to an individual through activation.
T-Mobile prepaid accounts for example
You can just walk in there with cash and walk out with a fully activated SIM without them asking for ID?
Correct
Yes, I recall doing that. I'm a foreigner but I was in the US on vacation. Went to T-Mobile, so easy to get a SIM card.
I used to buy test phones for software testing at a bodega where they had a laundry basket full of phones, and they would sell prepaid SIMs no questions asked.
In the US you can buy a SIM card and activate without providing any information at the airport. At least in NYC. I was really surprised the first time
Why were you surprised?
Because I’m from Europe, and we need to provide an ID to get a SIM card
Not who you were responding to, but most of the western world requires IDs already. The US is an outlier on this issue.
I don't think that's true. At least not in the European countries I visit.
It’s a EU wide requirement
I dunno. I can go to Tesco in Ireland and the UK (fine, UK is not EU no more, but still Europe) and get a sim without ID.
You’re right, I was mistaken. A proposal circulated to have an EU wide ID requirement but it went nowhere. So it depends the country
Nordics, Baltics and a couple of other countries are the places this still works. The rest of Europe is locked down.
This is a good thing, die scammers die!
Well dangit - there go all my favorite crime solving shows.
It will simply go through a reseller layer
This sounds like a great thing for people that beat their domestic partners. Make it harder for their victims to escape.
But this is for the sake of the children safety... And terrorism... Whatever you want to have it wrapped in
so instead of burnerphones, they will steal phones and keep phone awake until they have accomplished the crime they gonna do.
This is what always happens when governments enforce laws like this, victims and innoncents always suffer as result.
Its happening in finance where criminals groom dumb teengers for laundering money, or eldery's bank accounts they obtain via installing remote software.
So lets add 1 more reason for criminals to steal phone.
Edit: This is also happening in crypto world where criminals perform fake KYC. I guess with age verifications, this crime will increase in demand multiplefold and the last defense ID will be obsolete after data leaks and the fraud happening around it.
This is already a thing in most countries btw
Which is depressing
Fun fact: in India, it is a crime to connect the IP network to the telephone network in any way whatsoever that allows calls originating in IP to terminate at telephones. This is because IP network users don't have to provide ID. (It does not prohibit calling from telephones to IP networks, or IP apps calling other instances of themselves)
Can't read the article without an account.
This will kill so many movie plots.
They want perpetual monitoring of everyone. Same with age sniffing.
Anyone still has any doubts? Or is it to ... protect the children?
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Woow next level
Straight out of China playbook. Every SIM must be registered with government issued/recognised ID. Yes combats fraud. Yes means govt can track you thru IMEI 24x7 anywhere in the world.
And yet, for some reason, it is impossible to stop spam calls and texts.
Having looked into the history of call tracking / blocking, it's pretty evident that major US telcos have very little interest in making marketing calls difficult. However tenuous the association between "marketing" and the actual practice of the scammers, harassers, abusers, and worse generating literally billions of such calls monthly (see: <https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/ringing-in-our-fears-2025-...>, "The monthly average of scam and telemarketing calls increased from 2.14 billion a month in 2024 to 2.56 billion a month through September, according to YouMail").
AT&T's efforts to thwart effective government regulation and mitigation stand out especially. The industry oranisation ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) has been central to blocking any effective action. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Telecommunication...>.
While Trump can travel to the China with his burn phone, the citizens of the US cannot. Surely everyone is equal.
They’ll get around to guns eventually …
They're already trying to regulate the shape of guns to effectively outlaw everything but the bullet.
Hopefully they tax th bejeesus out of bullets too. Who was the comedian “imma gona pop a cap in yo ass, but first imma set up a layaway”
Chris Rock. And honestly probably the easiest way for gun control
Not really, at least with current SOTA for ammunition. Reloading has long been a thing for high volume shooters.
Right who, at least in my experience, tend to be a bit more responsible gun owners. It would be interesting to study that.
good for bitcoin
The Trump administration has been working overtime trying to build databases of people in this country. Leaving no stone unturned, legal or otherwise. I vaguely remember a time when American conservatives were against precisely this, often as a first principle. Maybe that's just an idealized memory on my part.
The American conservatives who can afford to be are effectively exempted. When they're not flying around on private jets, the ownership and metadata created by their cars, phones, etc. are obfuscated by layers of shell corporations.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
Spoiler: They were never against it, just biding their time.
Yep, just in different flavors based on ideology. For example, forced labor requires logging & tracking of pregnancies. Anti-trans folks want gender identity on the books to gatekeep who can teach in schools or enter bathrooms. Same for preventing same-sex marriage. Folks railing against voting rights want more and more checks to prove who you are and where you live
Can't read the article without an account. Just sayin.
Good luck with this.
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
They'll just push it to activation time and require you to upload ID.
Don't those clerks go to jail?
> “We never thought that would happen here.”
I guess a lot of people weren't around to see civil libertarians screaming about the effect of the USA Patriot act in 2001.
> Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project
Oh, come on, Jay, this should have been on your radar for 25 years.
We're already forced into the credit bureaus. Into traffic cameras. Into using credit cards and banks. The idea the state would let us actually say things online anonymously (or to each other) is completely unrealistic: we must be tagged and tracked through our lifecycle.
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Regwall / archive: <https://archive.is/ZobUQ>
(NB: the notion of having to register to read content strikes me as equally reprehensible as requiring KYC for access to the telephone network.)
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I want to believe this is just a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference [0]... but I fear that might be too-optimistic.
[0] The profession of Telephone Sanitiser on planet Golgafrincham.
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US of A’s Chinafication letsgooooooo
Seems like classic regulatory overreach.
Good. Telecoms should have a duty to know who uses their networks.
Let’s have your name and address then, citizen. Posters have a right to know who is commenting.
The person using the network is the one who put a quarter in the payphone.
Payphones are rather seldom seen these days, friend.
Not to disagree with the principle, but it's somewhat opaque as to what your point is.
I've hazy memories as well of reports that payphones were being more surveilled (a camera placed nearby, for example), or tapped / monitored more than other phones, particularly if in areas with other known issues. Nothing that's turning up in DDG searches though...