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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday November 17 2019, @09:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-luck-with-that dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956__

The House and Senate finally agree on something: Robocalls – TechCrunch

In these times of political strife, it’s nice that despite our differences we can still band together as a nation in the face of a catastrophe that affects us all equally. I speak, of course, of robocalls, and it seems that the House and Senate have put their differences aside for the present in order to collaborate on a law combating this scourge.

[...] As often happens in Congress, two competing versions of the bill emerged to address this issue, and both passed in their respective chambers earlier this year. Now the leaders of the committees involved have announced an “agreement in principle” that will hopefully allow them to pass a unified version of the bill.

The “Pallone-Thune TRACED Act” owes its name to its primary sponsors — Rep. Pallone (D-NJ) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — and the earlier and superior acronym from the House act, Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence.

“Our agreement will require telephone carriers to verify calls and allow robocalls to be blocked in a consistent and transparent way, all at no extra charge to consumers. The agreement also gives the FCC and law enforcement the ability to quickly go after scammers,” said Rep. Pallone in a statement accompanying the news.

The bill text is expected to be finalized in a matter of days, and it will hopefully make it onto the legislative calendar in a hurry.


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  • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday November 17 2019, @07:24PM (1 child)

    by toddestan (4982) on Sunday November 17 2019, @07:24PM (#921290)

    I find it surprising that you only get 1 robocall a month. There's only a finite number of 10-digit phone numbers, and a good proportion of them are in use. There are definitely robocallers that don't use lists and just increment through the possible phone numbers, which is obvious in places where there are bunch of phones with sequential numbers like in an office. I'd expect any phone number to get at least a few spam calls a week, no matter how careful one would be giving out the number.

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  • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:30PM

    by linkdude64 (5482) on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:30PM (#921332)

    Maybe I'm just lucky, but as I said, I've been vigilant for years, and if there were a convenient way for me to anonymously upload my call history, I would do so to prove it.

    Unfortunately, as far as the article is concerned, it's more likely that this is only popping up at all because the Congresscritters themselves have no opsec and are being harassed incessantly.