We really just need telcos to stop allowing caller id spoofing. Doesn’t even need your name, but with a real number we could actually report these scams.
You can still allow people to hide it, but then by default every non-business phone should block calls with hidden numbers.
What ever happened to SHAKEN/STIR? I thought this was supposed to happen 5 years ago. Did they just chicken out on the prospect of actually shutting down telcos sending spam volume? I still get loads of spam phone calls, so clearly something went wrong (or slow enough to be indistinguishable from wrong).
The FCC issued a report on this very subject[1]. TLDR, there have been four exceptions to the SHAKEN/STIR requirements:
- Providers that can't afford it implement it
- Non-IP networks
- Small voice service providers that originate calls via satellite using U.S. NANP
- Providers that lack control over the network infrastructure necessary to implement
Nothing is going to change as long as those holes exist.
I'm not certain, but I think on my phone incoming calls that fail SHAKEN/STIR show the caller id in red rather than black text. I'm on T-Mobile. It also shows "Number Verified" or something like that.
Now that you mention it, I believe I have seen a couple of red flagged calls, but I still get ~3 calls a day from a very aggressive business loan spammer, it's always a new number and never flagged.
According to a defcon talk, spammers just make sure all their spam gets routed through legacy TDM systems which discard the shaken/stir header because they're too old to support it. The other side then re-adds a "we got this from somewhere that didn't support this header" header.
Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these. I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962 can call her son in New York, but for the rest of us who are not in that situation, we can just blacklist all those calls and lose nothing. This would even fix spam for the people who opt-in, because so few people have grandmas in rural France that it's not worth it for the spammers to bother anymore.
> Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these.
Easier (and correct) fix: Telecoms operators should not be permitted to provide transit to a call that's routed through one of these.
> I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962...
This doesn't make sense. Even my inexpensive Mikrotik switches can augment packets with the ID of the port that they originated from. I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same. The fact that that grandma can send and receive calls tells you that both that that equipment exists and that it knows what port her phone is connected to.
> I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same.
The example should rather have been some telecom carrier in Africa or India. Telco equipment is expensive, the technology is ridiculously complex and getting companies especially in less well-off regions to replace aging stuff and updating it to modern standards is next to impossible. Think about it, the globally connected phone system includes countries where you get 10 GBit/s symmetric fiber in your home and it includes countries where people don't even have running water because they're so poor.
The fact that we in Western countries can have a realtime conversation with someone in the Saharan desert or in an Indian village that requires days worth of travel [1] is nothing short of a miracle.
I am, more in tune with "just get it over with" than ever. Ipv6? 25 years of this crap? should have just said, Jan 1 2001, all routers must support 64 bit ipv4 addresses. Like the chrome HTTPS switch over, JUST DO IT
What valid purpose does hidden numbers have? Government departments in my country hide their caller ID.
I find that abusive on its own but let’s not forget about the fact that now you have victims of domestic violence being forced to answer hidden numbers in case it’s welfare, or the cops, or their abusive spouse.
We don't, but the entire world currently does, and the amount of equipment deployed that depends on it is substantial.
I would be willing to bet money that any "better call addressing system" would be a design by committee where this just gets litigated there. And we'd end up with either a system that requires KYC per-call, or has compromises similar to what we're complaining about now.
Having worked with telco companies, 99% of it is "Yeah, but this stuff still works just fine;) And if a government compels us to change our equipment for reasons other than national security, we're going to pitch a fit and demand financial incentives beyond reason." A lot of the pressure to boot Huawei from tech stacks globally ran straight into that wall and flopped. Even with national security at its back.
Considering most of those same telcos are donors and employers of large numbers of people across many constituencies of almost every nation, usually no politician has or is willing to spend political capital to shoot themselves in the foot like that. And no nation with a national telco company runs it well enough to ever even dream of spending money for something like IP addresses, they typically barely keep the lights on.
It's even worse: Since cell phones broadcast your location at all times, this means telling hundreds of companies (and a number of governments) your location at basically all times.
That's already an issue with most cell phones. Making this apply to prepaid phones is even worse.
One thing I wonder is if this is just one step removed from 'Now we know the identity of every user so we can now have both probable cause and verified identity to arrest over statements containing speech we do not like.' "
Like that is Carr's FCC in a nutshell - he wants to control speech by controlling the airwaves. That is a raw fact in his behavior. But when the news stations say the thing they want them to say, what happens next other than slightly extending the definitions of public good to the internet and then restricting speech?
If you have to wonder, you don't need to wonder. So now not only can "antifa"-related speech qualify you as a terrorist (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...), now your phone is legally required to track you and report your location at all times. The legal infrastructure is in place to track and bring a wide range of consequences down on just about any and all political enemy, whether that be ruining their life by dragging them through years of criminal charges or simply black-bagging them and whisking them off to a prison for "enemy combatants" without any oversight from a court. All of this is being done in full view of Congress and the Supreme Court, therefore one can only conclude that they are comfortable with and complicit in what is going on.
They won't do that because that'll cause an uproar.
What they'll do, what they always do, what you can see them actively doing even at the local government level, is simply scrutinize these people for other laws they've broken or rules they've run afoul of and then enforce the shit out of those.
It's important to remember that Carr is but a bureaucrat doing what he needs to do to make his boss (or, rather, his boss's boss) happy.
We have a real problem with people in government buying into the idea that it's basically a private company set up for the benefit of one man in particular.
In my opinion, the real fix to scam, spam, and robocalls is to pass along the REAL(TM) Caller ID information not just the caller ID but the actual billed Caller ID information and allow the recipient easy ways to drop the calls when those two don't match. I don't know exactly the technical details of Stir/Shaken but someone somewhere is paying / getting paid for each call and this information should be transparently available to the call or message recipient. For "legitimate" reasons like doctors or call centers, they should already provide a separate work phone and not make them use their personal line. For leaky carriers, those should be blocked entirely. Nothing good comes from them. Basically what I am suggesting is if the full attestation level ("A-level") is not available, drop those calls and text messages by default unless the customer opts in (I have no idea why anyone would)
> Note: By checking this box, I acknowledge that I am filing a document into an official FCC proceeding. All information submitted, including names and addresses, will be publicly available via the web.
Is there really not a way to submit an express FCC comment that avoids all my personal info being publicly published to the web? Yeesh.
I spend a lot of time filing requests to take down my home address. Most low-hanging fruit options have been scrubbed. I am hesitant to increase the count.
You mean the link between your name and home address? Impossible to scrub. If you're registered to vote, own a home, or many other things, that is legally a matter of public record.
Im USA based use prepaid service because I dont want to provide information for a credit check to obtain postpay service.
Theres absolutely no reason for a US based telephony provider to retain the most sensitive PII on their customers.
Every large provider has a history of breaches and selling customer data.
The telephone companies are already tracking, storing, selling; so many data points on their customers.
They cant be trusted with any information.
Counterpoint: for my part I would like it to be the case that any phone line that can dial or message my phone can be traced back to a known human being who can be held accountable for abuse of that phone line in terms of generating spam, abuse or harassment.
Seems that we can’t both get what we want.
A potential solution is that you get your anonymous phone line but my phone provider simply refuses to let you call me with it.
Of course then we need to extend the same principle to data and to IP traffic originating from your device. If you don’t want to be traceable it seems reasonable that services should have the right to refuse to handle IP traffic you generate.
Would such a half-baked level of network access suit your needs?
Why can't you? They don't want to provide info for a credit check, you want human accountability. All that requires is for them to use a debit card for whatever service (prepaid or postpaid). Law enforcement can trace that if needed. No need for credit checks or really any other information directly in the hands of the telco.
The problem of the government tracking down people for political posts is supposed to be solved by having laws that constrain the government, not by having corporations provide anonymity as a service.
Any particular reason yall can't just argue in court that by creating opportunities for your PII to be stolen your governments (state or federal or both) are actively harming you economically?
Sure, not much money to be had by fighting that fight but basically any PAC should have the means to do this and by claiming money is at stake and not people's actual safety you do have a better chance at this not being dismissed because of how your justice system /is/.
Unless you've had fraud committed against you, that's a hard sell. What dollar figure do you use as the basis? Are you suing for years of credit monitoring? Because that's typically the solution for people who are the victims of PII leaks.
One could argue that it's a failure of law enforcement or telcos or regulators to do enough to prevent fraud and maaaaybe bring a class action or something, but that's a massive stretch.
You don’t see the harm in requiring telcos - famous for handing over data without warrants or court orders - being forced to have identifying data for every subscriber?
I can think of a half dozen ways that can get abused. Remember that in the states policing is decentralized. There is always some department somewhere willing to abuse their power. Look at how flock has been used to stalk partners, or how geofencing was used to sweep up everyone in the area of a protest, or how stingray is used to listen to all calls in an area. This is opening up avenues of abuse for almost no benefit.
> famous for handing over data without warrants or court orders
More concretely, famous for pushing data in bulk to the surveillance industry for a nominal fee. That is ostensibly the goals behind this development - all of these companies demanding phone numbers for "verification" and snake oil "2FA" want to reliably dox 100% of their users rather than just 80%.
at times? we can't even decide if women are allowed to control their own bodies. we're now open to states stopping people with dark skin from voting, and we have giant internment camps where we keep innocent men, women, children because they have a spanish accent. vaccines are apparently not a worldwide health miracle, education is overrated, we're bringing back jobs in coal and oil, and invading/destabilizing latin american countries is back in vogue. in two years we might be so backwards that women's suffrage becomes questionable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...).
Almost no one has physical phone lines anymore. It also used to be a given because they had to send a physical paper bill to someone, and hence needed an address.
Neither of these are true anymore.
Also, the tone is set from the top.
Do you think the current admin cares about actually tackling fraud and abuse?
KYC and AML are the most blatant attempts at subverting due process I’ve ever seen.
Instead of the government actually trying to catch money laundering, they just make 3rd parties like banks and payment processors judge, jury, executioner. Effectively giving them the power to decide who can do business. And if they decide you can’t, you have no recourse. If the government didn’t give this power to private companies, they would have to prove in court that you are doing something unsavory. And to people saying KYC/AML works, sure. HSBC was laundering billions and these guys know how to get around KYC. You’re just screwing over common people at this point and giving banks and financial institutions power to skirt due process.
> the most blatant attempts at subverting due process
This seems so clear to me; KYC is an end run around the constitution.
But how do we stop it? If we legislate "no KYC" then what is my recourse when an imposter empties my accounts? You'd want it to be at least allowed.
But if we allow industry to require KYC "we will only deposit your pay to a verified bank account" then you may end up with de facto KYC if not de jure. But if you tell businesses they may not require it, it enables other kinds of fraud.
Legislation does not constrain people who will to do evil.
We're making our law enforcement's job marginally easier, by making the criminals' job infinitely easier by creating millions of juicy PII honeypots.
No, you don't need my phone #, real name, captcha.. if you think you do, realign your incentives, and rethink what else can be used for your real need instead.
For background on KYC in the banking context @patio11's podcasts and essays are worth consuming:
Patrick: Yes, so "Know Your Customer" (KYC) and "Anti-Money Laundering" (AML)
are mandatory elements of the international compliance regime that have been
in place in the United States since the early 1980s. Over time, this regime
spread globally, largely fueled by the U.S. leveraging the dollar as a tool
of foreign policy—a point where I find myself agreeing with critiques from
the crypto community. Their complaints about this are largely accurate. You
can see this clearly in the documents as these laws were passed and as
supranational bodies increasingly tightened regulations on banking secrecy
havens.
Let me give you an analogy: Someone keeps blaring an airhorn outside your window at 4am. It's making it difficult for you to sleep. The government, in their bountiful wisdom, decides to hold an emergency meeting, and agrees to pass a law that people need to show an ID to buy an airhorn. You're appalled. This is an invasion of privacy! You protest outside of city hall. You try to get some of your neighbors onboard, but find that they're already protesting! Their protest is demanding that the government do something about the annoying airhorns.
In theory, it could help. In practice, for KYC to reduce spam and scam calls, FCC would have to be willing to drop hammer big time on people and telcos who allow it to happen. With current political climate in the US, I don't see that happening since companies would scream "Poor pitiful us" and fines would be the cost of doing business.
It did in every other country that did it. What's different about this one? If you get a spam call in Europe from Europe, you call the police and the spammer gets located and punished.
Europe does not consistently have KYC for phone service, at least for mobile connections. Normal phone companies in Ireland don't ask for information when buying SIMs (physical ones, at least). Some eSIM providers in Europe don't ask for information at all, and accept cryptocurrency payments. (I'm also aware that some other European countries have very different requirements, up to actually needing copies of identification.)
More widely, however, there do seem to be differences that I don't know the details of. VOIP seems quite different (I use it for my old phones): DID numbers in the US seem extremely cheap and available instantly, with little information, while European ones seem to have an actual verification process and prices that would make large-scale spamming difficult.
We really just need telcos to stop allowing caller id spoofing. Doesn’t even need your name, but with a real number we could actually report these scams.
You can still allow people to hide it, but then by default every non-business phone should block calls with hidden numbers.
What ever happened to SHAKEN/STIR? I thought this was supposed to happen 5 years ago. Did they just chicken out on the prospect of actually shutting down telcos sending spam volume? I still get loads of spam phone calls, so clearly something went wrong (or slow enough to be indistinguishable from wrong).
The FCC issued a report on this very subject[1]. TLDR, there have been four exceptions to the SHAKEN/STIR requirements:
- Providers that can't afford it implement it - Non-IP networks - Small voice service providers that originate calls via satellite using U.S. NANP - Providers that lack control over the network infrastructure necessary to implement
Nothing is going to change as long as those holes exist.
1: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-416732A1.pdf
I'm not certain, but I think on my phone incoming calls that fail SHAKEN/STIR show the caller id in red rather than black text. I'm on T-Mobile. It also shows "Number Verified" or something like that.
Now that you mention it, I believe I have seen a couple of red flagged calls, but I still get ~3 calls a day from a very aggressive business loan spammer, it's always a new number and never flagged.
That's because they are bulk purchasing numbers from voip providers, cycling through probably hundreds per day.
> I thought this was supposed to happen 5 years ago. Did they just chicken out on the prospect of actually shutting down telcos sending spam volume?
It would certainly hurt a consumption-based economy, for starters.
Why would that hurt a consumption-based economy?
Telcos make money off of scammer activity.
According to a defcon talk, spammers just make sure all their spam gets routed through legacy TDM systems which discard the shaken/stir header because they're too old to support it. The other side then re-adds a "we got this from somewhere that didn't support this header" header.
> legacy TDM systems
Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these. I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962 can call her son in New York, but for the rest of us who are not in that situation, we can just blacklist all those calls and lose nothing. This would even fix spam for the people who opt-in, because so few people have grandmas in rural France that it's not worth it for the spammers to bother anymore.
> Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these.
Easier (and correct) fix: Telecoms operators should not be permitted to provide transit to a call that's routed through one of these.
> I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962...
This doesn't make sense. Even my inexpensive Mikrotik switches can augment packets with the ID of the port that they originated from. I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same. The fact that that grandma can send and receive calls tells you that both that that equipment exists and that it knows what port her phone is connected to.
> I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same
Mikrotik is a young spring chick compared to the dinosaurs in telecom.
> I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same.
The example should rather have been some telecom carrier in Africa or India. Telco equipment is expensive, the technology is ridiculously complex and getting companies especially in less well-off regions to replace aging stuff and updating it to modern standards is next to impossible. Think about it, the globally connected phone system includes countries where you get 10 GBit/s symmetric fiber in your home and it includes countries where people don't even have running water because they're so poor.
The fact that we in Western countries can have a realtime conversation with someone in the Saharan desert or in an Indian village that requires days worth of travel [1] is nothing short of a miracle.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth...
I am, more in tune with "just get it over with" than ever. Ipv6? 25 years of this crap? should have just said, Jan 1 2001, all routers must support 64 bit ipv4 addresses. Like the chrome HTTPS switch over, JUST DO IT
This is already not allowed.
If your carrier accepts a spoofed call they're already violating FCC recommendations.
[delayed]
What valid purpose does hidden numbers have? Government departments in my country hide their caller ID.
I find that abusive on its own but let’s not forget about the fact that now you have victims of domestic violence being forced to answer hidden numbers in case it’s welfare, or the cops, or their abusive spouse.
Calling in an anonymous tip to the police and such.
Why do we even need to run on the 20th century system of numbers anyways? Why is there not a better call addressing system?
We don't, but the entire world currently does, and the amount of equipment deployed that depends on it is substantial.
I would be willing to bet money that any "better call addressing system" would be a design by committee where this just gets litigated there. And we'd end up with either a system that requires KYC per-call, or has compromises similar to what we're complaining about now.
Having worked with telco companies, 99% of it is "Yeah, but this stuff still works just fine;) And if a government compels us to change our equipment for reasons other than national security, we're going to pitch a fit and demand financial incentives beyond reason." A lot of the pressure to boot Huawei from tech stacks globally ran straight into that wall and flopped. Even with national security at its back.
Considering most of those same telcos are donors and employers of large numbers of people across many constituencies of almost every nation, usually no politician has or is willing to spend political capital to shoot themselves in the foot like that. And no nation with a national telco company runs it well enough to ever even dream of spending money for something like IP addresses, they typically barely keep the lights on.
Because the concept of numbers is so heavily baked into many systems. Momentum is a beast.
It's even worse: Since cell phones broadcast your location at all times, this means telling hundreds of companies (and a number of governments) your location at basically all times.
That's already an issue with most cell phones. Making this apply to prepaid phones is even worse.
[delayed]
One thing I wonder is if this is just one step removed from 'Now we know the identity of every user so we can now have both probable cause and verified identity to arrest over statements containing speech we do not like.' "
Like that is Carr's FCC in a nutshell - he wants to control speech by controlling the airwaves. That is a raw fact in his behavior. But when the news stations say the thing they want them to say, what happens next other than slightly extending the definitions of public good to the internet and then restricting speech?
If you have to wonder, you don't need to wonder. So now not only can "antifa"-related speech qualify you as a terrorist (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...), now your phone is legally required to track you and report your location at all times. The legal infrastructure is in place to track and bring a wide range of consequences down on just about any and all political enemy, whether that be ruining their life by dragging them through years of criminal charges or simply black-bagging them and whisking them off to a prison for "enemy combatants" without any oversight from a court. All of this is being done in full view of Congress and the Supreme Court, therefore one can only conclude that they are comfortable with and complicit in what is going on.
They won't do that because that'll cause an uproar.
What they'll do, what they always do, what you can see them actively doing even at the local government level, is simply scrutinize these people for other laws they've broken or rules they've run afoul of and then enforce the shit out of those.
It's important to remember that Carr is but a bureaucrat doing what he needs to do to make his boss (or, rather, his boss's boss) happy.
We have a real problem with people in government buying into the idea that it's basically a private company set up for the benefit of one man in particular.
In my opinion, the real fix to scam, spam, and robocalls is to pass along the REAL(TM) Caller ID information not just the caller ID but the actual billed Caller ID information and allow the recipient easy ways to drop the calls when those two don't match. I don't know exactly the technical details of Stir/Shaken but someone somewhere is paying / getting paid for each call and this information should be transparently available to the call or message recipient. For "legitimate" reasons like doctors or call centers, they should already provide a separate work phone and not make them use their personal line. For leaky carriers, those should be blocked entirely. Nothing good comes from them. Basically what I am suggesting is if the full attestation level ("A-level") is not available, drop those calls and text messages by default unless the customer opts in (I have no idea why anyone would)
> Note: By checking this box, I acknowledge that I am filing a document into an official FCC proceeding. All information submitted, including names and addresses, will be publicly available via the web.
Is there really not a way to submit an express FCC comment that avoids all my personal info being publicly published to the web? Yeesh.
Think of it like a petition or testifying before Congress. The whole point is that you are putting your real name behind it.
And if you think your name and address are private, then I have some bad news for you.
I spend a lot of time filing requests to take down my home address. Most low-hanging fruit options have been scrubbed. I am hesitant to increase the count.
You mean the link between your name and home address? Impossible to scrub. If you're registered to vote, own a home, or many other things, that is legally a matter of public record.
call your congress critter instead
what, they keep no records, or as lege branch they aren't foi-able so you won't ever know if they do or not?
Yeah if US mail is as spam compromised as it is, you can forget about phone calls ever being cleaned up.
Im USA based use prepaid service because I dont want to provide information for a credit check to obtain postpay service. Theres absolutely no reason for a US based telephony provider to retain the most sensitive PII on their customers. Every large provider has a history of breaches and selling customer data. The telephone companies are already tracking, storing, selling; so many data points on their customers. They cant be trusted with any information.
Counterpoint: for my part I would like it to be the case that any phone line that can dial or message my phone can be traced back to a known human being who can be held accountable for abuse of that phone line in terms of generating spam, abuse or harassment.
Seems that we can’t both get what we want.
A potential solution is that you get your anonymous phone line but my phone provider simply refuses to let you call me with it.
Of course then we need to extend the same principle to data and to IP traffic originating from your device. If you don’t want to be traceable it seems reasonable that services should have the right to refuse to handle IP traffic you generate.
Would such a half-baked level of network access suit your needs?
> Seems that we can’t both get what we want.
Why can't you? They don't want to provide info for a credit check, you want human accountability. All that requires is for them to use a debit card for whatever service (prepaid or postpaid). Law enforcement can trace that if needed. No need for credit checks or really any other information directly in the hands of the telco.
It should show up as anonymous. And you should have a setting: allow anonymous calls y/n
I would like any message that is spam to be able to be traced back to the offending human.
I would like anonymous political posts to be untraceable by the government.
I can't even get all of what I want.
The problem of the government tracking down people for political posts is supposed to be solved by having laws that constrain the government, not by having corporations provide anonymity as a service.
Any particular reason yall can't just argue in court that by creating opportunities for your PII to be stolen your governments (state or federal or both) are actively harming you economically?
Sure, not much money to be had by fighting that fight but basically any PAC should have the means to do this and by claiming money is at stake and not people's actual safety you do have a better chance at this not being dismissed because of how your justice system /is/.
Unless you've had fraud committed against you, that's a hard sell. What dollar figure do you use as the basis? Are you suing for years of credit monitoring? Because that's typically the solution for people who are the victims of PII leaks.
One could argue that it's a failure of law enforcement or telcos or regulators to do enough to prevent fraud and maaaaybe bring a class action or something, but that's a massive stretch.
"force phone providers to collect identity information from ordinary people before they can acquire or renew service with a phone carrier."
don't see the harm in this? isn't this already the case for 99.9% of phoneline havers already?
You don’t see the harm in requiring telcos - famous for handing over data without warrants or court orders - being forced to have identifying data for every subscriber?
I can think of a half dozen ways that can get abused. Remember that in the states policing is decentralized. There is always some department somewhere willing to abuse their power. Look at how flock has been used to stalk partners, or how geofencing was used to sweep up everyone in the area of a protest, or how stingray is used to listen to all calls in an area. This is opening up avenues of abuse for almost no benefit.
> famous for handing over data without warrants or court orders
More concretely, famous for pushing data in bulk to the surveillance industry for a nominal fee. That is ostensibly the goals behind this development - all of these companies demanding phone numbers for "verification" and snake oil "2FA" want to reliably dox 100% of their users rather than just 80%.
The big ones already force you to give SSN for service. Then they lose it in a data breach.
The crazy thing is that a simple 9-digit number (that you must give away for many things) can ruin your life if it gets public.
The US seems so backwards at times.
at times? we can't even decide if women are allowed to control their own bodies. we're now open to states stopping people with dark skin from voting, and we have giant internment camps where we keep innocent men, women, children because they have a spanish accent. vaccines are apparently not a worldwide health miracle, education is overrated, we're bringing back jobs in coal and oil, and invading/destabilizing latin american countries is back in vogue. in two years we might be so backwards that women's suffrage becomes questionable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...).
Almost no one has physical phone lines anymore. It also used to be a given because they had to send a physical paper bill to someone, and hence needed an address.
Neither of these are true anymore.
Also, the tone is set from the top.
Do you think the current admin cares about actually tackling fraud and abuse?
How about instead we do "know your company" and consumers get intel about the ones doing the calls?
KYC and AML are the most blatant attempts at subverting due process I’ve ever seen.
Instead of the government actually trying to catch money laundering, they just make 3rd parties like banks and payment processors judge, jury, executioner. Effectively giving them the power to decide who can do business. And if they decide you can’t, you have no recourse. If the government didn’t give this power to private companies, they would have to prove in court that you are doing something unsavory. And to people saying KYC/AML works, sure. HSBC was laundering billions and these guys know how to get around KYC. You’re just screwing over common people at this point and giving banks and financial institutions power to skirt due process.
> the most blatant attempts at subverting due process
This seems so clear to me; KYC is an end run around the constitution.
But how do we stop it? If we legislate "no KYC" then what is my recourse when an imposter empties my accounts? You'd want it to be at least allowed.
But if we allow industry to require KYC "we will only deposit your pay to a verified bank account" then you may end up with de facto KYC if not de jure. But if you tell businesses they may not require it, it enables other kinds of fraud.
Legislation does not constrain people who will to do evil.
Honestly, stop the KYC regime everywhere else.
We're making our law enforcement's job marginally easier, by making the criminals' job infinitely easier by creating millions of juicy PII honeypots.
No, you don't need my phone #, real name, captcha.. if you think you do, realign your incentives, and rethink what else can be used for your real need instead.
For background on KYC in the banking context @patio11's podcasts and essays are worth consuming:
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/true-crime-ba...https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-th...
Let me give you an analogy: Someone keeps blaring an airhorn outside your window at 4am. It's making it difficult for you to sleep. The government, in their bountiful wisdom, decides to hold an emergency meeting, and agrees to pass a law that people need to show an ID to buy an airhorn. You're appalled. This is an invasion of privacy! You protest outside of city hall. You try to get some of your neighbors onboard, but find that they're already protesting! Their protest is demanding that the government do something about the annoying airhorns.
KYC == ''Know Your Customer''
>open link
>AI slop art right at the start
Instant close
Will this KYC reduce spam and scam calls?
In theory, it could help. In practice, for KYC to reduce spam and scam calls, FCC would have to be willing to drop hammer big time on people and telcos who allow it to happen. With current political climate in the US, I don't see that happening since companies would scream "Poor pitiful us" and fines would be the cost of doing business.
Italy had forced KYC for all mobile numbers at least since the early 2000's and no, it doesn't fix the spam/scam calls problem at all.
No.
It did in every other country that did it. What's different about this one? If you get a spam call in Europe from Europe, you call the police and the spammer gets located and punished.
Europe does not consistently have KYC for phone service, at least for mobile connections. Normal phone companies in Ireland don't ask for information when buying SIMs (physical ones, at least). Some eSIM providers in Europe don't ask for information at all, and accept cryptocurrency payments. (I'm also aware that some other European countries have very different requirements, up to actually needing copies of identification.)
More widely, however, there do seem to be differences that I don't know the details of. VOIP seems quite different (I use it for my old phones): DID numbers in the US seem extremely cheap and available instantly, with little information, while European ones seem to have an actual verification process and prices that would make large-scale spamming difficult.
> It did in every other country that did it
Citation required.
SMS farm/machines don't work in the UK at least, I suspect not even in NL
> It did in every other country that did it
Italy has mandatory KYC for all mobile numbers, and scam/spam calls are a common problem. So no, it doesn't fix the problem at all.
Has it?
Spam calls frequently don't have a source in the same country as their target victim.
I will not be called to action by a page with a big slop image at the top.
Leave it to the Trump administration to implement mass surveillance as the solution to spam.