Posted on 04/03/2019 8:24:51 AM PDT by jazusamo
A Senate panel on Wednesday advanced legislation that would levy a hefty fine on illegal robocalls, the latest congressional effort to crack down on the billions of unwanted calls that irritate U.S. consumers every year.
Lawmakers on the Senate Commerce Committee approved the bill in 26-0 vote. The measure's co-sponsors include Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who is running for president, and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Commerce consumer protection subcommittee.
The Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act, introduced by Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), would give the federal government the authority to slap offenders with fines of up to $10,000 per call.
It also would give the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) more time to bring charges against companies behind illegal robocalls, lengthening the statute of limitations from one to three years. The telecom industry would be required under the legislation to take stronger action against spoofing, a practice where robocallers make it look like they are calling from a number in the recipient's area code.
As nearly half of all calls to mobile phones this year will be robocalls, this legislation cant get signed into law soon enough, Thune said during the hearing. The TRACED Act is a bipartisan act that targets the worst of the worst.
Markey called the vote historic.
Today, the committee did just take a historic step towards finally ending the deluge of unwanted and intrusive robocalls bombarding millions of consumers across our country on a daily basis, Markey said.
Lawmakers during the previous Congress held three hearings and passed 13 bills aimed at curtailing robocalls, but the measure advanced by the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday is the most significant piece of legislation to address the issue.
U.S. residents received an estimated 26 billion robocalls last year, with a quarter of those from illegal robocallers, according to an industry estimate cited by The Washington Post on Tuesday.
The Federal Trade Commission and FCC have said the most complaints they receive pertain to unwanted and illegal robocalls.
But critics say the two agencies have not done enough to address the issue, as the number of unwanted calls has climbed significantly in recent years.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai last month warned phone service providers that if they don't crack down on "spoofed" caller IDs from robocallers, the agency will consider regulatory intervention."
Updated at 10:21 a.m.
I am in favor of deporting illegal robots.
Ohhhh...illegal robocalls..never mind.:)
I have a Tracfone that is seldom used. Just for emergencies.
If robocalls are to randomly generated numbers, then why does my cell phone get zero robocalls while my landline gets half a dozen a day?
A Telco knows if they originated a call or not. A Telco (landline or cellular) knows that if a call being sent to one of their customers from someone outside of their network, but has the same area code and exchange prefix as their customer (neighbor spoofing), that the call is being spoofed.
I realize that with number portability this is harder now than it used to be, but throwing our collective hands up and saying nothing can be done isn't the answer, either.
Don’t see how this law will be enforceable. The people doing this are already committing fraud or theft in many cases and could be busted for that and aren’t. With internet based phone systems, you can pop up a robo scam and disappear it in an instant.
I’m don’t get any ring at all. Silence is bliss.
And how fast would that capability get disabled and locked down if using it to make a spoofed spam call resulted in the originator being hunted down and blocked from the phone system?
What I'm saying is, that focusing on penalizing the telcos that allow spoofed Caller ID will result in them turning around and coming down hard on the originators.
A Telco knows if they originated a call or not.
But they dont know from where. Thats my point.
And contrary to popular belief Telcos dont have the capability to monitor the outbound caller ID of literally billions of calls per day. Believe me the packet overhead alone required to do it would slow every network in the country to a crawl not to mention the lack of processing power at the CO level.
I work for one and get paid to design them. Prior to that I designed both premise based and hosted VOIP systems.
Its not possible. The technology to do so doesnt even exist.
Period.
L
And fining the phone carriers in amounts that greatly exceeds the spoofer revenue will put a stop to it real fast.
Excellent!
Then start enforcing the do not call list again.
And expand the do not call list to have options to decline sales calls, charitable calls, surveys and political calls.
And how fast would that capability get disabled and locked down if using it to make a spoofed spam call resulted in the originator being hunted down and blocked from the phone system?
See my other responses. How precisely would you do that? Even if you could somehow manage to block them from the system, which isnt even one system at all but an extremely complex network of dozens of providers each accessing the public network from literally tens of thousands of COs and data centers, all theyd need to do is have back up lines from secondary providers. That, by the way, is considered an industry best practice, and has been for a couple of decades.
Switched networks can almost instantly detect if one connection is cut and switch to a secondary or tertiary network without even dropping the call.
Like I said I hate these people as much as anyone. Personally I think burning them at the stake in the public square is just about right. But, once again, Congress has no fricking clue about how things work out here in the Real World.
L
Trouble is they won’t enforce it. Just like too loud of TV commercials.
Its going to work as well as the Do Not Call registry did, no doubt.
But what they DO have is the ability to discard the caller ID info in the call initiation, and replace it with "IP:" and the IP address, unless you pay to be whitelisted.
But what they DO have is the ability to discard the caller ID info in the call initiation, and replace it with “IP:”
And youre right back to the problem I already mentioned. ARIN issues IP addresses in bulk to providers. Those providers hand them out pretty much randomly. Now ARIN does, these days anyway, sort them by country. But they didnt always do that.
So once the IP is at the provider level all bets are off.
And Ill say it again. ALL calls are IP based these days. Its the only way to handle the volume. Its why IPv6 was introduced. Even IP addresses can be spoofed if you know what youre doing. So there goes that idea.
I wish it were as easy as you think it is. I really do.
But, once again, its not possible.
L
And we havent even tossed DHCP into the mix.
For instance the IP is hosted at some data center in Elk Grove Village IL, there are about a dozen there and more planned btw, but the PBX uses DHCP for the WAN.
The IP phones are physically located in a call center somewhere in Pakistan that all have 10. IP addresses. So Agent Orange from the FBI picks up the phone and dials granny in Bugtussle Arkansas to fleece her.
That call identifies as coming from Elk Grove to the Teclo. They have no fricking clue where it actually originated. None. Worse yet theres no way they can find out because its behind a firewall.
I wish this were possible. But it simply isnt. Holding the Telcos responsible is lunacy. They dont know and they are unable to know.
Thats just how it is.
L
But what they DO have is the ability to discard the caller ID info in the call initiation, and replace it with “IP:”
Actually, they dont. All the Telcos are doing is passing data through their networks as quickly as possible. Thats what their customers pay for. They dont analyze each and every packet on their network. They cant.
Hey, Mr, Customer. I know youre paying $8,000 a month for a 9 location gig network but we are going to slow that to a crawl so we can analyze every packet just to make sure youre not being naughty. Please just sign here.
No IT Director would ever agree to those terms.
But why let that stop Congress. God knows they legislate on thousands of things they know absolutely nothing about.
L
They can monitor them closely enough to bill.
Believe me the packet overhead alone required to do it would slow every network in the country to a crawl not to mention the lack of processing power at the CO level.
The packet overhead is no more than it is for firewalls, or DNS servers, or just plain old routers. You don't need to sniff EVERY SINGLE PACKET, just the initial handshake that 'nails up' the call.
But you are right, it cannot be done today using only today's infrastructure. New technology needs to be implemented.
The FCC has already begun the process of mandating Caller ID authentication. Congress needs to codify it, and the penalties for subverting it, into law.
https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/understanding-stir-shaken/
Just like too loud of TV commercials.
Except for American Idol, which I watch live to participate on the forum AI thread. Even then, I am bowled over by the number of commercials they run. It must be exhausting to sit through this crap nightly.
They can monitor them closely enough to bill.
So? The only things that are billed per minute these days are international calls. Domestic, which includes all of North America including Canada, arent even metered anymore. And if the international call is on a private MPLS network so the outbound call hits the PSTN in the US its not even considered international.
So, nice try. Trust me. Ive been doing this for over 20 years.
Its
Not
Possible.
Period.
L
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