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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.)
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.