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.
Re:Yet another legal solution to a technical probl (Score:1, Informative)
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.
While this is fine for regular consumer uses, I have a hundred users here on the same ANI information - each with different caller ID. When the help desk makes calls, the Caller ID is set to the toll free number we use for it - not the phone number registered by our telco. ANI would not display a toll free number, in any case.
Caller ID is driven by a very real business need. We can't simply drop it.
Re:Yet another legal solution to a technical probl (Score:3, Informative)
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".
Re:Yet another legal solution to a technical probl (Score:2, Informative)
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 :)
Recieved out of band, delivered inband (Score:2, Informative)
Caller ID is delivered in band to POTS lines. This might allow the originator to send phony caller ID information inband. However, the speech path forward may not be opened until the call answers, which would make things tricky for the spoofer.