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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: 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.