I’ve been studying a draft the FCC published a few days ago of a Declaratory Ruling (DR) they’re planning to adopt at their June 6 meeting. Honestly, I’m flabbergasted at the FCC’s action. You might know that generally I am not a fan of most robocalls – even the legal ones. The DR gives phone providers (AT&T, T-Mobile, Vonage, etc.)…
Last week I asked, “How many laws does it take to stop a robocall” and since then, several people have asked for my specific critique of pending robocall legislation. The Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, which is part of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, is holding a hearing on April 30. Their backgrounder lists SIX bills (re)introduced already…
Great news from Washington: The TRACED Act and the ROBOCOP Act are pending; Congress is holding more hearings. Reflecting the mood of their constituents, lawmakers are fed up with robocalls. So far, laws have not been very effective at stopping these calls. Those makings the calls can obscure their locations and identities. They are hard to locate, and when they…
2019 has kicked off with a lot more press coverage of robocalls. What used to be an occasional annoyance is now a persistent daily or even hourly irritation. Many Americans feel they shouldn’t be subject to this sort of abuse. As the number of illegal calls continues to grow, the clamor for a definitive solution has reached a dull roar…
Last year, Congress passed the RAY BAUM’S Act (what a terrible name). It’s a hodge-podge of legislation, but relevant to us here is that it made some tweaks to the Truth-in-Caller-ID Act which became law ten years ago. Both the original and revised laws specify that it is “unlawful … to cause any caller identification service to knowingly transmit misleading…
Last month, Transaction Network Services (TNS) published their “2019 Robocall Investigation Report.” It explains various aspects of the problem and presents a lot of statistics. Footnote 6 in the report caught my eye: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7546510/. That’s a paper from the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy titled “SoK: Everyone Hates Robocalls: A Survey of Techniques Against Telephone Spam”. (My own…
In November 2018, FCC Enforcement Chief Rosemary Harold, along with Chief Technologist Eric Burger, wrote to eight small telecommunications providers, asking them to respond to specific questions about their cooperation (or lack thereof) in industry efforts to mitigate illegal robocalls. We can safely assume that these providers were targeted because they’d resisted entreaties from others to reign in calls originating…
A recent blog post from Google caught my eye: Ask a Techspert: Why am I getting so many spam calls? The post says Paul Dunlop, the product manager for the Google Phone App, claims “voice-over IP (VoIP) is the culprit.” “Using VoIP technology, spammers place phone calls over the Internet and imitate a different phone number,” Paul says, and the…
Today I heard from my long-time friend Mary. Her adult son Jon died several hours ago from a massive aortic aneurysm. He was 46 years old and otherwise healthy. As Mary explained to me how the tragedy had unfolded, she mentioned that she had received several calls this morning from a number she didn’t recognize. She didn’t answer; she told…
All of my efforts with telephone providers and regulators are focused on ILLEGAL robocalls. But like most people, I’m also bothered by certain legal calls; the industry refers to these as UNWANTED calls. This week, my phone rang at dinnertime (6:48 PM) – the Caller-ID showed +1-202-225-8104 / CPTL U S. I answered to hear the recorded voice of Anna…