US House Passes Ban On Caller ID Spoofing 171
smarek writes "The 'Truth in Caller ID Act' passed the US House of Representatives on Wednesday. The legislation is trying to outlaw Caller ID spoofing. In some cases, this spoofing has led to individuals giving out information that has led to identity theft. Last year the NYPD discovered over 6,000 victims of Caller ID spoofing, who together lost a total of $15 million. A companion bill has already been passed by the Senate, and the two are on their way to 'informal conference to reconcile any differences.' The bill that results will most likely pass."
PCWorld's coverage notes that callers will still be able to block their information entirely, and that the bill may have negative consequences for legitimate phone-related services, such as Google Voice.
Yet another legal solution to a technical problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Still, at least the politicians are seen to do something about the problem.
Which is good for them because it will give them fodder for their television ads around election time, which is good for us because it informs us as to why we should vote for them. :-/
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Yup... vote buying. Wasn't it already illegal to fraudulently misrepresent yourself?
Again, a specific law where a generic one sufficed... all so they can say "see what we did?!?!"
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That's why I saw a slogan recently where one party was demanding "Outlaw criminality!"
(No joke!)
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Guess what - only criminals use guns to commit murder.
I'm unconvinced. I've met several law-abiding people who would likely be murderers if they had easy access to guns. Whether or not that -justifies- gun control legislation, I'm not going to argue. And whether or not legislation rather than laziness, rational thought most of the tmie, or financing prevented those individuals from having a gun, I also won't argue.
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There's a whole world out there, most of which is made up of neither blue nor red states and has no constitutional right to bear arms.
It seems like quite a few people from the USA automatically assume everyone else on the Internet is from the USA, and do things like make comments about what state or what part of the country a person's from without first having any idea which country the person's from. Nobody outside the USA seems to ever do this.
It just helps perpetuate t
Only criminals use guns ... (Score:2)
I'm unconvinced. I've met several law-abiding people who would likely be murderers if they had easy access to guns.
Yeah, and if they committed murder with those guns they would be criminals, no? So you see it's true, "only criminals use guns to commit murder."
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That's a truism. Only criminals commit crime. Any crime. Committing crime makes you a criminal, therefore only criminals commit crime. Unfortunately, there's no a priori classification of criminals.... However, many people who commit murder have prior criminal records for less severe crimes. It might not be difficult to go find a gun, but there's no reason to say, "Criminals can buy firearms anyway, so we should just go ahead let them." Or are you arguing that the rules which prevent felons from purc
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Re:Yet another legal solution to a technical probl (Score:5, Interesting)
People who steal identities will carry on spoofing caller ID, because they already commit more serious crimes, while users of legitimate services will be inconvenienced. Still, at least the politicians are seen to do something about the problem.
If they really wanted to do something about this, they'd discontinue the entire CallerID system and allow regular folks to use ANI [wikipedia.org] as a standard feature. That's the same system used by both toll-free numbers and emergency services like 911. Unlike CallerID, it's out-of-band and cannot be spoofed by the caller alone. It uses the billing data, the same data that the phone company uses to know whom to charge for the call. By comparison CallerID is a joke.
Of course a lot of the ID theft issues would be greatly reduced if people would use a little sense. That would include never giving confidental information to someone who calls you. If you think that's your bank calling about your account, tell them you are going to hang up and call them back at the number they publish in the phone book or your hardcopy account statements. This simple 20-second step would eliminate a great deal of these problems, no politicians required.
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Re:Yet another legal solution to a technical probl (Score:5, Insightful)
They do the same thing with their "mobile to mobile" calling features. If you block your caller id and call someone who is "in network" they will get charged minutes as though it was an out of network call. ANI is not blocked when caller-id is but they are too stupid to use it for their own billing purposes? WTF?
That doesn't sound like stupidity to me... That sounds like profitable evil, in the same vein as the "placing the button that causes your phone to load some crappy WAP page at $.10/KB right next to the button you actually want, and making it impossible to remap/disable". I'm sure that, if people who are out of network were using caller-ID spoofing to appear as "in-network", they'd start using ANI. As long as the net effect of not using ANI means more minutes billed, not fewer, though, why would they change?
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As a helpful tip; I went into my phone's options and pointed the WAP gateway to localhost, now attempting to reach that page throws errors, and doesn't bill me :)
Re:Yet another legal solution to a technical probl (Score:5, Interesting)
Using ANI (Billing Number) for all calls would probably be a bad idea. Say you're calling someone you have a business relationship with from your phone at work (technology type doesn't matter here). If billing number was the only thing available, every single call from your company would show up with the same number. Probably your main line that goes to a receptionist. In some situations this is what people want (telemarketers for instance) but in what many view as more legitimate business it would be annoying.
I'd hate it if every time various vendors that I have multiple account managers called my cell phone it just said "AT&T employee" etc. I like knowing who I'm going to be talking to.
Also, this completely ignores some of the other valid reasons for setting a caller ID value that most people outside of the telecom industry probably aren't aware of or care much about. Let's just say it's very useful for testing purposes and it's a great way to send a small amount of data to the entity you're calling if you're not using something like UUI.
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I like knowing who I'm going to be talking to.
So you pick up the phone and say 'Hi', and they say 'Hi, this is _____.'
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By this argument we should just scrap Caller ID altogether because no one wants to know who's calling them. If I have Caller ID as a feature (something I personally want) it's completely useless to me if the information it provides is usually inaccurate.
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Also to say that it's the same system that toll free numbers and 911 use it to grossly simplify things. 911 gets a lot more than just your billing number. And toll free numbers that go to anything more complicated than a POTS line can be configured to get many different types of data. A common configuration is called "Preferred SID" which means you will get the Station ID (SID, Caller ID, Calling Party Number, etc. It has a lot of names) if it's available and the Billing Number otherwise.
One thing that's
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With caller ID, you have the ability to say "I'm not telling you who I am, and if that's not acceptable then it's up to you to not answer the phone". Can you preserve that ability if you use out-of-band billing data? Presumably not without modfiying the phone system... so I'm not so sure that's a good trade-off.
I do agree that any solution is going to requier technical change, though I disagree with the strict dichotomy GP alleges between legal problems and technical ones. I would've made the same sort o
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Re:Yet another legal solution to a technical probl (Score:5, Funny)
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I am frequently baffled why so many of my jokes are modded "insightful" or "interesting". However, I am even more baffled how this got modded "funny"!
Funny mods are the new Overrated, but they're even more insidious. When you get moderated Funny you don't get any karma. When you get modded with any negative moderation, you lose karma. So moderating a comment funny when you think it will be moderated both positively and negatively is an attempt to steal the poster's karma.
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that's what pay phones are for.
If you can find one...
SB
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Caller ID is *not* in-band any more than connection routing is.
I have a T1 ISDN link in the U.S. There are 7 dynamic voice trunks on that T1 link. We have a pool of multiple phone numbers.
When the call is being set up, my switch (asterisk) sends out a message indicating the calling number. The contents of this message are taken by our telco's switch at face value, as long as the number is 10 digits long.
This number is recorded in the detailed billing statement we get (for international / overage long distan
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If they really wanted to do something about this, they'd discontinue the entire CallerID system and allow regular folks to use ANI as a standard feature.
As people have pointed out there are many reasons not to use ANI. But why should it be either-or? Let the caller continue to set their outbound ID to whatever they want, just make the ANI available to the receiver. Maybe with a *69-type special number. They have to look it up for billing anyway.
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You know, I don't really care what the caller wants to display on my phone. It's my phone! If they want to call it, it should be on my terms, not theirs. And my terms are: that I know who the fuck is calling me.
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I could care less what they use for a caller ID number as I am too cheap to pay An extra $2/month for caller id.
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Right on, brother.
I just went thru the 99 numbers on my caller id and none of them gave me any info I needed. Most of my friends block the ID. Scumbags fake it. It costs what, $7/month? I've had it for about 180 months. $1260. Fuck that. I'm canceling.
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You're not preventing the problem, you're adding to the list of offenses you can charge people with while you investigate the actual crime.
I think if you're going to have caller ID you should be able to trust it. At the same time, it would be better to educate people that people can sneak into other people's houses or businesses and legitimately be calling from the phone, but not actually being the trusted person. Or picking up someone's cell phone that doesn't have password-protection. It's not foolproo
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That's my problem with it. I don't share the vindictive urge to nail people with as many charges as possible. Instead, I'd rather see fewer criminals.
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Stop and re-read my post, noting that I registered neither a "for" nor "against" stance. The closest I came was advocating education in place of laws. Do you disagree with my second paragraph? Or the first half of the third one?
Yeah, we all would. We can repeal laws all day long and have just the original ten commandments if you'd like. I didn't say this was good. At no point in my post did I side with the politicians, and if you think I did it's probably because you f
Re:Yet another legal solution to a technical probl (Score:2)
Probably but it is another charge to add to the list of charges they performed. Or if they were found innocent of everything else there is still a charge against them.
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I can't think of a single HONEST use for caller ID spoofing. What legitimate uses are there?
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There were two good answers to my question, and yours was one of them (a lot of redundant ones, yours was the first). I wouldn't call that "ID spoofing", I'd call it ID forwarding. That should be legal.
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Outbound calling with a VoIP service that's different from your inbound VoIP or landline service. You want the callee to be able to return the call to the number that reaches you. Not a generic DID number owned by your VoIP provider.
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I can't think of a single HONEST use for caller ID spoofing. What legitimate uses are there?
A Google Voice/Skype/other VoIP service which wants to identify itself as the actual caller, rather than the ID of the owner of the hardware link between the internet and phone network.
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Spoofing implies gaining access to something that isn't actually yours. If you use your cell number as the CID on a VoIP call, that's merely setting your Caller-ID. If you use the local police department's number as the CID, and you call your neighbor and tell him to turn down the annoying noise he blares day and night, that's spoofing.
Legitimate caller id spoofing (Score:2)
I've got a Google Voice number which forwards calls to my actual phone(s) based on rules I set up. One rule is "do you want to see the caller ID as the actual caller's, or as your Google Voice number?"
This is useful, but only because of the limited nature of caller id - it can only display one number. If it had slots for things like "original caller # and name" and "name of routing service", I wouldn't need to make that choice.
Also, it's unique in that *I* am deciding what information *I* want to see. I don
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I can't think of a single HONEST use for caller ID spoofing. What legitimate uses are there?
Where I work, with the phone switches I manage, not all of our phone extensions have outside numbers.
Many are internal only phones and can only make outgoing calls to the POTS network.
If one of those extensions calls an outside number, the callerID is spoofed to our main receptionist number, so any return calls will actually work (You call that number, talk to receptionist, give extension, and she puts the call through)
A lot better than the alternate method with no callerid or fake callerid, in which no one
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That's not really spoofing, though. It's the same number, it's your number. The law should be written to allow that, as well as ID forwarding (which isn't spoofing either).
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Bail bondsman, police, etc. attempting to locate a fugitive without spooking them. A call from Mom is more likely to be answered than one from Bounty Hunter Bill.
If you have a known valid telephone number then you have already located your fugitive. That's either because it's a landline assigned to a particular physical address or it's a mobile phone the signal of which can be triangulated. No phone call has to be made to use either approach.
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Unless the fugitive's ex's kid answers the phone, at which time you might realize it's not a known valid number for the fugitive.
Calling the number and hearing who answers, then asking if "Joe" (i.e. the fugitive) is around, is a good way for a bounty hunter to learn if he has the correct number. I've only watched one episode of Dog but that makes me an expert on this.
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What little I know about bail/bounty scenarios suggests that they alert police in the area that they are working. Especially bounty hunters, who might be reported to police as an attacker. So as long as you're talking to the police, you get them to spoof your ID. Did you know that police are allowed to break laws in order to catch criminals? Not all laws of course, but they can wire-tap phones and I can't, they can record me and in some places I can't return the favor, even though they are recording the
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That's not an honest use at all; it's dishonest to the extreme and is a good example of why this sort of crap should be illegal.
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Making laws against other aspects of their criminal activities is quite important. If they have trouble getting people on their actual criminal activities, quite often they can be nabbed through their violation of other laws. Al Capone was brought down on tax evasion after all. And if they can get them on their main crime AND associated crimes too, then all the better! And their committing of the CLID spoofing goes a long way to prove intent which serves to better nail criminals by making the prosecutio
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When I make calls with Skype or Google Voice, I want the Caller ID to say my cell phone number, not the random outgoing phone line I get.
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How are users of legitimate services inconvenienced by not being able to use spoofed caller ID's?
Personally, I think it not only should be illegal but also, it should be the responsibility of the telephone companies to make sure that it is technically impossible, or at least very hard, to call under a false ID.
That companies and people call with anonymous ID is OK. I simply do not pick up the phone when the ID is hidden. But I should be able to trust that if it says number 123456789 is calling me, it really
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Your first sentence does not make any sense unless you're trying to frame this as a one-sided law which puts the good guys at a disadvantage. The banks don't currently use spoofing with intent to deceive, do they? And bad guys already do, which is part of the reason for the law. The bad guys won't "start" doing anything different, they will keep doing what the law is trying to prevent.
Since this law only works under the conditions you listed, and we know that won't be the case because no other law is enf
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Just as legislation failed to keep telemarketers from calling my cell phone? Not. This was actually a successful measure.
I think a law like this would force the *ability* to spoof to dissipate if anything. I'm all for it - I get pretty cranky when some autodialer calls me at some jacked up hour and doesn't have the courtesy to call me with a real caller ID # for me to even report. I know of one instance where I called the number back and it was some poor hospital who got spoofed getting their phone lines sl
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I don't think it should be considered spoofing if the one who proposes to use someone "else's" identity on a caller ID has the consent of whoever's ID they're using.
For example, prank call services have the consent of the pranker, and Google Voice would presumably have consent as well.
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To hell with THAT theory, I know for a FACT that this ban will be useful.
I work as a Customs broker, and thus receive calls from many trucking companies... their dispatchers and drivers.
There are multiple trucking companies that spoof their caller ID for... I can't even begin to guess what reason. One of them shows up as "123456" on our caller ID... I can't fathom what use THAT is. There's another one that uses something random, can't recall what offhand.
And another one... the actual trucking company of w
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People who steal identities will carry on spoofing caller ID, because they already commit more serious crimes, while users of legitimate services will be inconvenienced. Still, at least the politicians are seen to do something about the problem.
I expect this will help with the third category. Legitimate (or quasi-legit) businesses that use caller ID to disguise themselves and trick you into answering the phone. Primarily telemarketers and collections agencies These groups will generally follow the new rule, because they are legal businesses that can be tracked down and punished.
Obviously those deliberately breaking the law won't stop doing so. But those taking advantage of a loophole in the law largely will stop.
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Google voice: when it calls you to connect a call, it spoofs the ID of the number that is calling it. They could probably get an excpetion for this, but as written it could be an issue.
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According to these [slashdot.org] guys, as written it would not be an issue as the spoofing needs to be done "with the intent to defraud or deceive".
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If Congress legislates Email From: headers... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if Congress legislates that in all email messages, the "From:" headers cannot be forged, THAT will stop SPAM. I'm certain of it. Just like this will stop caller ID spoofing.
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remember reading somewhere a number of years ago that laws to do just that were considered in a number of US states.
Re:If Congress legislates Email From: headers... (Score:5, Funny)
And if Congress legislates that in all email messages, the "From:" headers cannot be forged, THAT will stop SPAM. I'm certain of it. Just like this will stop caller ID spoofing.
Just require that the Evil Bit [ietf.org] be set to 1.
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And if Congress legislates that in all email messages, the "From:" headers cannot be forged, THAT will stop SPAM. I'm certain of it. Just like this will stop caller ID spoofing.
That is why I see this as a more failed law then anything. The issue with this law is that it's trying to put it's heart in the right place, but this law will only effect calls from within the US. If your calling from outside the US then that law has little to no hold. Its like privacy laws online, the company is limited to the laws of where the hardware and company HQ is located. I see this often here in Canada. We have privacy laws that go above and beyond the US ones, but if I need to deal with a US comp
This will show the wrascally criminals (Score:5, Insightful)
Fraud (Score:2, Insightful)
Last year the NYPD discovered over 6,000 victims of caller ID spoofing, who together lost a total of $15 million.
It's this already called fraud?
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Last year the NYPD discovered over 6,000 victims of caller ID spoofing, who together lost a total of $15 million.
It's this already called fraud?
Yes, but it was committed with a computer or other telecommunications device, which somehow magically makes it a completely different event!
Sometimes I think the Founding Fathers made one egregious omission when writing the Constitution. There should be a requirement that all written Federal laws may take no longer than 5 hours for an individual to audibly and understandably (i.e. not too quickly) read aloud. Once that point is reached, a new law may be created only by first repealing an old one. That
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Yes, but it was committed with a computer or other telecommunications device, which somehow magically makes it a completely different event!
That's because government officials have run out of new things to make illegal that won't get major pushback from the citizenship (eg guns) so in order to make it look like they're still needed, they make existing things illegaler, just so that your hard-earned tax money doesn't go to waste.
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Last year the NYPD discovered over 6,000 victims of caller ID spoofing, who together lost a total of $15 million.
It's this already called fraud?
If the intended victim doesn't fall for it, or if the fraudster doesn't even try it (after getting some information from intended victim and decides to move on), it's not so clear if it's fraud. But under this bill, it'll still be a caller ID spoofing crime.
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Last year the NYPD discovered over 6,000 victims of caller ID spoofing, who together lost a total of $15 million.
It's this already called fraud?
If the intended victim doesn't fall for it, or if the fraudster doesn't even try it (after getting some information from intended victim and decides to move on), it's not so clear if it's fraud. But under this bill, it'll still be a caller ID spoofing crime.
Since when does a crime have to be successful (i.e. obtain the criminal's intended result) in order to be a crime? For example, say you take a swing at someone but at the last moment they dodge your punch. You are telling me you could only possibly be charged with assault if the punch connected? I have a hard time believing that. Or let's say you forge a check (fraud) and the bank you give that check to immedietely notices that it has been forged. Are you telling me they would not be able to charge you
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Attempted crime is a different law than actual crime. Attempted assault is a lesser crime than assault. Police can charge anyone with anything, but in your example the person would not have committed assault.
In the second example, though, tendering a forged check is itself fraud, regardless of whether they take the check or not. Just carrying a forged check might not be a crime if unless there was intent to use it.
On topic, I can walk up to you and claim to be almost anyone I want to be except a law offi
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You clearly don't understand the mental workings of politicians.
Even if something already has a law against it, if someone finds a new way of circumventing that law, then CLEARLY we need to have a new law outlawing that particular form of circumvention!
After all, what else do they have to do? They know they can't solve the real problems facing society, and since the job of a legislator is to legislate, they can't be seen not doing their job, now, can they? If they did then the peopl
Movie Tech (Score:2)
Google logic gets pretty thin (Score:5, Insightful)
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It really isn't debatable if the intent is to defraud or deceive. If I call you from my phone through google voice, and the caller ID displays my name and my google voice number which, if called, connects to me on whatever phone I can be reached at, where is the deception? Who's being defrauded? What should the number say, Google, Inc.?
Similarly if I'm at work making a business call on a work phone, how can anyone argue displaying the company name and main phone number be deceptive?
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You know.. that was kinda my thinking too..
Which number is the 'real' one I have to publish.. My businesses main number (good luck verifying this). My DID number? the phone number on the outgoing phone line from my PBX?
In my last office, we chose to have the PBX send out the DID numbers for business reasons. (so if people hit redial or whatever on their cell phones, it would come right back). Other businesses have other reasons for doing what they do. But we are all, technically, spoofing the Caller ID.
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with the intent to defraud or deceive (Score:5, Insightful)
IANAL but I have a lot of experience with telephony and telephony policy. So take this with as many grains of salt as you want.
The key phrase in the House bill is "with the intent to defraud or deceive". There is similar language in Senate bill. There's a lot of reasons to legitimately set your caller ID to something. With ISDN PRI service it's up to the calling party equipment to set the Caller ID. So for something like Google Voice, if they're bridging SIP to the PSTN, you absolutely don't want your caller ID showing up as the trunk identifier or billing number for their equipment. My reading of these bills doesn't outlaw it.
The bills in question are H.R. 1258 and S. 30. I made a comparison document that highlights the differences in each bill the other day. It's located here:
http://dfs.org/comparison.pdf [dfs.org]
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So for something like Google Voice, if they're bridging SIP to the PSTN, you absolutely don't want your caller ID showing up as the trunk identifier or billing number for their equipment. My reading of these bills doesn't outlaw it.
Exactly. Agreed. My reading of the bill doesn't outlaw this practice either. I think Google voice will be just fine -- particularly, since (despite popular belief); the courts tend to act sanely... even if somewhat randomly. I think in arguments it would be clear the int
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I read it the same way, with the same "IANAL" disclaimer.
When I call you using my Google Voice number, my CallerID will show up on your phone with a number that I own and can be reached at. If you dial that number, you will reach me, or at least my voicemail if I don't like you (grin). No attempt has been made to fool anyone into thinking the phone call has come from anyone else. There's a difference between spoofing a CallerID (which is actually not banned by this new change), and spoofing a CallerID wi
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I don't have your experience, but I agree. In any case, it's already illegal, as far as I know, to misrepresent one's identity with intent of fraud. This is just another redundant piece of legislation, as far as I can see.
SB
CallerID blocking (Score:2)
callers will still be able to block their information entirely
TrapCall says you won't. :)
Accountability for CID system integrity. (Score:2)
Finally, a little common sense kicks in and puts some responsibility onto the CID/POTS admin to maintain their CID/DID systems. Hopefully this will go double for the scamming telemarketers that use blank or spoofed CID idents.
Toll Free Call (Score:2)
I hate it when this comes up on caller ID, 95% of the time it's a telemarketer, the other 5% it's my credit card company telling me there's a problem with my card. I don't know why anyone would want to be confused for a telemarketer, but inexplicably my credit card company does.
Voice Vote (Score:3, Interesting)
That practice, not recording each rep's vote, should be illegal.
Recieved out of band, delivered inband (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:What they didn't bother to do. (Score:4, Insightful)
(Now, there might well be an argument to be made if the caller-ID spoofer could demonstrate that the spoofed call was strictly intrastate; but I'm guessing that vanishingly few of them are.)
Re:Fine by me (Score:4, Interesting)
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IIRC, when you are getting 'harassing' phone calls, use *69 after each one and then call the phone company to say you're being harassed.
If it's the same number, the phone company will eventually block the number for you.
In the meantime, they'll tell you to call the police.
The police usually won't do anything until you've received >=3 calls,
but they'll open a file and will start a paper trail.
What happens next depends on your local police and where the calls are coming from.
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its *57 in most places, no 69. Also, in most cases, this is something you have to request your carrier to enable on your line (its free, but not automatically enabled, since the trace happens every time once enabled and only "saves" the trace then pressed, it has a cost the them on some small level if you're not using it).
Further, *57 traces can not be provided to you, only your local magistrate, which means you need to sue someone to get it, and even then for the real scammers, this is easily overcome.
Fur
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If the police won't help you, it doesn't much matter whether it's illegal or not.
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There's a working ENUM system someplace? There's e164.org, and while useful, that's not really an authority. And none of the actual authorities have any working, useful service available. Nor should you expect them to while the authorities are related to the phone companies -- why would the phone company want to give their users the ability to re-route calls without charge, or to change service providers without the lock-in provided by the current system?