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from the No,-I-do-NOT-want-to-hear-you-now! dept.
Robocallers "evolved" to sidestep new call blocking rules, AGs tell FCC:
The Federal Communications Commission should let phone companies get more aggressive in blocking robocalls, 35 state attorneys general told the commission yesterday.
The FCC last year authorized voice service providers to block more types of calls in which the Caller ID has been spoofed or in which the number on the Caller ID is invalid. But the FCC did not go far enough, and robocallers have "evolved" to evade the new rules, the 35 attorneys general wrote in an FCC filing:
One specific method which has evolved recently is a form of illegal spoofing called "neighbor spoofing." A neighbor-spoofed call will commonly appear on a consumer's caller ID with the same area code and local exchange as the consumer to increase the likelihood he/she will answer the call. In addition, consumers have recently reported receiving calls where their own phone numbers appeared on their caller ID. A consumer who answered one such call reported the caller attempted to trick her by saying he was with the phone company and required personal information to verify the account, claiming it had been hacked.
The attorneys general said they "encourage the FCC to adopt rules authorizing providers to block these and other kinds of illegally spoofed calls."
The industry can also make progress simply by using existing frameworks to authenticate legitimate calls and identify illegally spoofed calls, the attorneys general wrote. The FCC should encourage all service providers "to aggressively implement" the STIR (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) protocols, they wrote.
The letter was signed by state attorneys general from Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
[...] The FCC also heard from CTIA, the mobile industry trade group that represents AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. The group urged the FCC to make sure that "carriers... combatting illegal robocalls in good faith must have protection from associated legal and regulatory liability."
A safe harbor as proposed by the CTIA would limit carriers' liability when they mistakenly block calls that shouldn't be blocked. This would encourage carriers to adopt the STIR and SHAKEN protocols, CTIA said.
[...] Last month, the FCC issued about $120 million dollars' worth of fines to two robocallers accused of spoofing real people's phone numbers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @01:10PM (5 children)
"You have to be kidding me that this whole robocaller thing is due to the government preventing phone companies from shutting this down."
Actually yes. Making callerid unspoofable is literally one line of code in an SS7 switch, and has been for over 30 years now. Robocalls are an introduced problem. It was introduced intentionally. And if you read the regs, it absolutely falls on Congress and the FCC, because the regs compel the ability to spoof.
What you're looking at here is a Congressional land grab. They are trying to turn the FCC into an intel gathering service. Probably so they don't have to ask the NSA before trapping calls of people they don't like. IOW, this is about making it easier to do things like round up dissidents, develop propaganda, etc. etc.
IOW, congress wants to commit constitutional crimes, and is tired of LEOs telling them "no". So they are going to the carriers directly, who would happily facilitate a political purge, if it meant greater market share.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday October 11 2018, @02:31PM (1 child)
There's some customer support costs in the sense of many companies want calls from extension abc to identify as their nationally marketed 800 number not as some rando number that might not even call route back to where it came from.
Essentially PBX designers got too creative about the infinite possibilities of call routing and now that creativity is permanently part of the ecosystem, to most everyone's detriment.
In the long run it might not matter, business phone seems to be dying; it went from something I used every day in the office to pretty much unused given personal cellphones and 9248359258 incompatible text-format messaging systems and of course email and trouble ticketing technologies.
Why would someone call my extension when I'm probably not going to answer but my personal smartphone is with me?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @01:25AM
"extension abc to identify as their nationally marketed 800 number"
Or in other words, use a federally subsidized system to render a fraudulent representation of themselves.
The state is not able to technically and reliably distinguish between commercial and criminal deceptive intent. The state is not obligated to insure the desemination of deceptive intent of commercial interests. Yet the state, facilitates both commercial and criminal deceptive intent in its regulations. The way you know that, is because the system, by default does not implement deception. It is an added feature. And if you read the regs, the carriers are REQUIRED to make this feature available.
If you aren't civil enough to identify yourself in a person to person call, then why should anyone be obligated to be bothered by you? If you do this by mail, it is called mail fraud, and it is a felony.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)
As VLM already explained, it is a feature people who actually use phones need. Misuse of it is not a problem technology can fix while still retaining the useful feature. As usual the discussion turns to tech fixes to people problems.
And as usual I have been beating this drum for years with a solution that is simple, would almost instantly work and has absolutely zero chance of being implemented because it would solve the problem for customers while creating one for the telcos.
Add a short * code to report spam calls. While caller id is spoofable, and must be for those reasons VLM already pointed out, AIN is not, that is the internal system used for billing and is of course almost impossible to spoof and if somebody did manage it would be quickly patched. So add an automated reporting feature and publicize it. People get spam calls, report a few and the system kicks it up to a human. They monitor a few calls originating from that source and, confirming it is illegal network activity terminate the account. Problem solved. Problem calls drop to near zero in a month. And the phone companies lose most of their largest customers when pretty much every large contract call center is terminated; because they ALL do it to keep 100% line and employee utilization.
And now you know why there will be outcries, threats of legislation, technical fixes proposed and even implemented that somehow never fix the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:36PM (1 child)
Your post complete ignores what it says in the summary:
This clearly paints a picture of the FCC preventing telcos from dealing with this problem.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:08PM
Not at all. I simply assume that, being essentially a press release, it is full of crap. Industry blames the FCC, FCC blames industry, both are generally on the same side since industry long ago achieved regulatory capture. Lots of blame, lots of white papers get written and year after year nothing changes. Ignore a few high profile but mostly pointless distractions like Net Neutrality, the FCC is an industry friendly group.
One of the tells is wanting immunity to liability from call blocking. You won't ever solve this problem with real time blocking, they all know it so distraction. Disconnecting abusers from the network will solve the problem, but they want the money from those large customers more than a solution. So we will get more wanking and probably some bad stuff sneaking in through this attempt to "do something." Always run when politicians say "We must do something!"
Look at the Internet and spam. Has any technical measure worked? Back in the day Usenet had the "Death Penalty" for abusive nodes. That worked. But when the Internet passed from control by the IT people to the corporate people that wasn't politically viable so the practice was stopped and Usenet quickly collapsed in a pile of excrement. If we simply black holed any site that allowed spam to emit, disconnected entire countries until they got religion on the problem of network abuse, it would end in a few months. Technical problems can be fixed with tech, people problems can't. Network abuse is a people problem. All the crypto weenie bullcrap, all the detailed reports and new protocols will all fail. As they always have, as they always will. Because they are trying to fix the wrong problem. They are trying to defend against bad actors while accepting that the bad actors exist and no attempt to punish them is an acceptable option. No static defense has ever worked in the history of conflict, human or animal.