Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
It's been this way at least since the Administrative Procedure Act. Solidified later with Chevron. Chevron is struck down, but in effect not too much has changed.
Yes, that is the way federal agencies work. Details of complex systems are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest.
One alternative is that Trump can do it at will. Or, to add a few more steps, Trump can fire the FCC head at will, replace him with a lackey, and then do it at will.
> [Laws] are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest
This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function. It feels like you're describing China rather than the US.
> Trump can do it at will.
Which is also not how our constitution is supposed to work. The executive branch (which includes both the president and his appointees) is not supposed to be able to make laws, only execute on existing law.
Yes, I know this is how the system works these days. I'm just lamenting how it went so wrong...
"This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function."
There is a family of interesting theories, or perhaps if you prefer, simply a way of looking at history in which you don't consider the "United States" as a single governance structure that has existed back to 1776, but as a series of related, but distinct entities with distinct "social contracts" (a term laden with some philosophical baggage, here I just use it in a very general sense of what people expect from each other in various roles), and distinct theories of governance. While the later entities wrap themselves in the 1776 flag the current ruling structure is quite different from that era. From this point of view you can even go back and include the Continental Congress as the starting point of the "United States" and gain some insight into the way governance can fail as well.
I mention this because it may help free your mind up to consider how the systems really work today beyond the at-times jingoistic "Democracy!". There's a lot of flexibility in how you approach this because it's all opinion anyhow, but there is a strong case to be made that this is the "technocrat" era, in which the executive branch has been given a lot more power both by design and by the stresses of history to give more power to "experts" to deal with the radical changes the world has undergone. I think I can say something generally politically agreeable by pointing out that Congress doesn't seem to be particularly good at handling the world right now; how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
The de facto rules haven't really matched the de jure of the 1776 governance in a long time.
I am trying to keep this as neutral as possible. I have as many opinions as anyone else, but I'm just bringing up the general idea. I think it's probably good to initially just ponder based on one's own understanding of history and match it against your own ideas before you find other people handing you a theory on a platter. There's time enough for that.
> how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
Isn't that actually a major cause of the trouble? You expect Congress to deal with more and more complexities but limit the number of people (i.e. experts) who are members of it, causing them all to be generalists and moreover to have to spend more of their time campaigning rather than debating because the value of each seat is higher and correspondingly so is the effort someone will put in to take it from you and the proportion of your time you have to spend merely defending it.
Meanwhile people feel that their vote doesn't matter because a member of Congress now represents almost a million people and then ordinary people can neither affect the campaign nor get the ear of their own representative.
Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people. The members who are doctors would understand both medicine and medical bureaucracy. The members who are engineers would understand technology. Instead of them being lawyers whose first job is campaigning.
>What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
Why must congress do more? Most of this stuff would be state issues if not for the absurdity that is current commerce clause interpretation.
There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law. It's pretty normal for Congress to sketch the general outline of regulation and require the relevant bureaucracy to fill in the details.
Though in this particular case, unless this is based on a change to the law it seems like an overreach by the FCC.
> There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law.
Isn't this the argument against unelected rulemaking?
Suppose administrative agencies worked like this: They draft rules and then periodically submit them to Congress who decides whether to enact them. For uncontroversial changes this is essentially a rubber stamp, Congress defers to the experts' recommendations and passes the proposed rules. But now if the administrative agency tries to make a major policy change, it can't go through without Congressional approval, and Congress is fully within their authority to reject or amend the proposal.
What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
Realistically, in this case, you're moving decision-making from unelected bureaucrats to unelected Congressional staff. It's an invitation for corruption without really improving the process.
Congresspeople (or local legislators) do not have the expertise to evaluate the rules. Or even bandwidth. For example, the NEC is around 800 pages and is extremely technical.
That's why these minutiae are delegated to agencies. But Congress can step in at _any_ point and override the decisions of individual agencies. The rulemaking process is also _extremely_ slow on purpose, giving Congress plenty of time to act.
Administrative law is the (suboptimal) answer to congressional gridlock, which is the real problem. If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow. Regardless the overturning of Chevron deference makes administrative rules like this more susceptible to challenge. Assuming the telcos have the backbone to do so of course.
Congress passes plenty of laws. 95 so far just since the last election: https://www.congress.gov/public-laws/119th-congress Last congress passed 274. It's really only the controversial stuff that gets gridlocked.
The problem is that our government is now so large and complicated that it's simply no longer possible for Congress to effectively set policy for all of it. (This would be true even if they weren't so polarized.) So instead they just keep delegating more and more power to the executive branch.
The Administrative Procedures Act, Congressional Review Act, and the recent overturning of Chevron are all good checks on executive/agency power here, but I don't think any of them solves the fundamental issue that the executive branch was simply never designed to wield this kind of power. I'm not really sure what the right solution is.
Two-party politics promotes gridlock. Multi-party systems, as long as they don't have veto players, don't have as much stagnation and do a better job of citizen representation.
> If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow.
Do we though? When there is a lack of consensus on what federal law should be, those are exactly the times the federal apparatus should be silent and leave it to the states.
So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?
This is just dodging the question of why can’t Congress do its job.
The US is a large country with a large economy and a very diverse economy. It is probably not feasible for Congress to deal with the low level details of managing all that.
Hold up: Parent-poster is obviously talking about federal regulations, not federal laws, and there are important differences between them... so why have you altered the quote to say [Laws]?
That's false. You've put your own words into their mouth to create a "sounds like China" strawman.
The regulations are [often] binding as law. When they change the regulations they are changing the law, under the fiction they're merely changing the interpretation of the law.
An example that comes to mind is the prosecution of Tate Adamiak. One of his machine gun charges was for having an improperly demilled machine gun parts. The parts were demilled under pre-2001 import standards, and the parts were imported pre-2001, and legally imported and sold through a licensed FFL on gun broker. Magically at some point the rule changed and the letter of law never did, and magically the parts weren't parts but actually a machine gun... this bound as law. I think he'll be released in about 15 years.
> they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break
If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)
I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not. It's literally the same damn thing but with a different sized cartridge. Nothing in the statute would allow this, yet executive 'delegation' mumbo-jumbo and magically one is basically unregulated and the other is felonies out the ass if you start commercially selling them without a host of licensing and checks.
The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.
> I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not
Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it.
We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.
The president has a large degree of control over the agencies and their output, so in practice agency delegation granted presidents immense power. This power went largely unexercised due to norms. But that has been slowly changing, and under Trump radically changing. And if SCOTUS adopts the Unitary Executive Theory, as they seem poised to do, then we'll have something very close to a king, difficult to distinguish from 18th century Great Britain.
I don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now. Currently the primary checks are procedural limitations; but were Trump a better, more well organized leader these procedural checks wouldn't pose much of a hurdle at all.
If you want a more technocratic administrative state, the agencies would require more autonomy from the president than they have now, but things are moving in the opposite direction both as a practical matter and constitutionally.
> don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now
A modern economy has a million small emergencies every day. Given the choice between dysfunction and autocracy, humans routinely choose the latter. So every time an emergency emerges that Congress takes too long to act on, and where the President steps in, the window shifts power to the executive.
>If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail
That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.
Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.
Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
> Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures
Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction.
>Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
And the sky is purple. See, we can both make baseless assertions. You can say it all day long. Doesn't make it true. At the end of the day the executive agencies are unilaterally costing people money that's on the same order as real deal criminal fines for comparable conduct. The word "civil" doesn't change that anymore than it changes the true nature of civil asset forfieture.
>Most civil monetary penalties are for....
They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for.
You list broad categories because when people dig into the nitty gritty of it they find it unconscionable. Municipalities threatening landowners hundreds of dollars per day multiplied by years for not having the proper permit to clear vegetation on their own land. OSHA fining businesses thousands because unsupervised line employees were doing dumb shit they were told not to that only endangers themselves. And then these people have to lawyer up and defend themselves for more thousands because the fines are always way higher if you don't. All at the literal whim of an enforcement official.
All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have. The government, federal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to meaningfully punish people (even corporate people) without the consent of the people (i.e. a jury). The way civil process cuts the judiciary out entirely is worse still.
Just declaring "well it's civil" because the accused's name isn't going on a naughty list and jail isn't a potential penalty doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit to argue in front of the arbitrary kangaroo process owned by the same agency that issued the fine (of course you can sue if you want but the enforcement agencies avoid creating situations where that's practical).
> They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for
Juries don't determine sentencing, either. The Seventh Amendment has broadly been interpreted to preserve jury trials for most civil liability, including from the federal government.
> Municipalities...
Not federal!
> All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have
Not a federal issue!
...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
> doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued
> without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit
...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
This is a wild conversation. I've gone from being somewhat sympathetic to your argument to now wondering if that entire platform is baseless. (I'm increasingly convinced we need a principles of law course mandated in high school. It doesn't even need to be a full year. But our republic suffers when folks don't understand the basics.)
The intellectual-academic class are having an existential crisis that they've lost the reigns of the unelected bureaucratic apparatus and it is now being wielded against them. They are still confused at how to respond to this as they're certain they couldn't have been wrong about deferring (uh, 'delegate regulatory authority') the power vested in congress and elected representation to themselves. Surprise pikachu when it turns out the "apolitical, public goal oriented specialists' were useful idiots in the process of handing power from congress to the executive.
If you thought the political apparatus was willingly going to leave the reigns to "apolitical specialists" rather than ruthlessly consolidating it toward the hands of the most power hungry self-dealing monsters that can command the executive branch then obviously you have not been living in in reality. Of course by the time the blindfold has been removed, the power is already largely consolidated.
There's a whole big conversation to have about the bureaucratic state.
One of the things that appeals to voters is the argument that too many decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats. Trump has been as effective at fixing this as with "drain the damp," and our elected officials clearly haven't been great about writing policy either. But one of the grievances that gets people to vote is "look at all this shit that some guy in Washington just decided."
Open to the possibility that I’m just cynical but my faith is very low that these comment processes are anything more than a regulatory requirement for the illusion of due diligence which legitimizes the actual corporate lobbying and security state actually making the policy.
The real issue is that it's a perpetual problem -- there are NGOs that literally pull out the same one pager, an endless dance of having some 1L repeat the same points over and over and over.
(Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.)
I made a grand total of one hill visit.
I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns come back here ever again, I'll see to it if you're lucky you only lose your seat, not face a mob outside your window, and when that happens lose my fucking number because I'll be sitting by the TV with popcorn.
Exactly that happened, a few years later.
Whether you're a public interest lobbyist or just another activist, we need to be more willing to TELL congress things. Not ask. Not lobby. TELL THEM.
We need to remind them that the Soviets raced to Berlin to seize brains like ours, that we will flourish whatever regime is in power, and that you can ignore us at your but we, the hackers, will no longer grovel before narcistic neurotypicals to stop misunderstanding on purpose.
I am once again asking that if you have a specific complaint, to please reply rather than silently downvote.
It's odd that I can repeatedly jump from +2 into the negative, and not once when I've begun calling out this pattern have I had anyone willing to engage.
I don't particularly care about my points, but the pattern is telling and tiresome, and feels like one set of people is reacting genuinely, another is trying to use the voting system as a disagreement button.
For the third time, I normally don't cry to the admins, but if you can't respond to my points but respond to my points, it's my understanding such behavior is a violation of the site rules.
You are not anonymous. Please behave accordingly if you cannot summon intrinsic motivation.
I'm nearly certain commenting, at least from my monitoring of commenting on ATF rulemaking, achieves the opposite of what the commenters hope.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
Great. As if telecoms can be trusted with customers' id. AT&T left my name, address, social security etc in an improperly secured database for others to have, and they tried to open accounts with it; they had retained the information after I closed my account, and they denied the information was coming from them for years before they finally admitted it and gave us all a quarter to call someone who cares and a year of credit monitoring.
I have heard very little about AT&T's actual telecom services, but my god have I heard about their billing department. I daresay the only departments in more of a shambles than their billing one is... well. A lot of Microsoft lately.
Telecom billing is seemingly designed to stochastically fail in favor of the telecom. This is not a shambles, but excellent system performance, from their perspective.
As a Russian: huh, you guys could still just buy a sim card without any kind of identification? Impressive. We had that ID requirement introduced way back in the 00s.
Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.
It seems to depend a lot. It's kind of hard in Germany - they wanted my permanent address. I didn't find France as difficult. Iceland didn't care. Italy wanted my passport. Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
Situation circa 2019 at least was that foreign tourists in Chile could purchase a SIM card, but it would be automatically disconnected after some amount of time without registering the phone in a way few foreign tourists would do.
Different EU countries seem to heavily vary on this point. I’ve seen everything from requirements for id scans and addresses to esims that accept cryptocurrency as payment.
yeah I think in Italy this was introduced in the security push after 9/11, and in other EU countries I also had to provide an id to get a sim card, tho I'm not sure it's all of them.
In the US it gets fought hard because Wall St uses it to dodge state income taxes. Everyone thinks it's drug dealer related for us, but it's actually Finance bros driving into NYC from out of state (NJ or CT) but trying to hide it.
We at some point will have to stop complying. Not because we are doing anything at all wrong, but because we cannot trust our govt and the corporations they are beholden to.
Having multiple needless laws is another way to control the population. Everyone will be violating at least one law. The government will then just enforce the laws on the people they don't like.
If there’s one thing this administration has shown, it’s that they believe laws are just suggestions for other people and that ultimately nobody will stop them.
They’re essentially daring the public to resort to violence and frankly, it’s getting exhausting.
Why follow the law when the president will pardon you and the Supreme Court has said he also won’t be held accountable for basically anything.
I welcome the reasoned responses that think this administration isn’t actively flaunting our laws. How’s that war powers act coming along?
Yeah. Looks like the future they want is complete marginalization of free computers, of free people. The machines will have to be corporation and government owned in order to network and participate in society. If we own the machine, we're excluded. Ostracized. Even the language they use is disgusting. They say we're "tampering" with the system, as though it wasn't ours to begin with. It makes me really sad that this is what we're heading towards.
Citizens creating informal horizontal networks between themselves is threatening to social harmony, and as more states around the world learn from the highly successful Chinese model, they are unlikely to permit the Wild West à la the old-school internet you are thinking about.
The thing about governments is they are just as tyrannical as the corporations. "Any network we cannot surveil and dominate is banned" is absolutely within the realm of possibility.
More than that, a ban on all general purpose computing.
You can only use specific applications downloaded from walled gardens. You cannot write and execute arbitrary code.
If you are an engineer, all code must be generated via LLM and it passes through some verification through a centralized security and compliance authority on the way to you. You must be fully licensed.
This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go on your way to the taxi or train like most other places.
Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing was with a Canadian credit card number. Whoops. This was only for a month, so I put in mine and he reimbursed me in cash. Other carriers may still let you buy one-time payment cards for cash at retail; this one didn't.
You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch !
Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip
Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...
Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
In my experience, you then need to activate it using real data from real people. I lent my data to a colombian colleague a couple of years ago, as he did not have a DNI yet.
I wasn't taking blatant fraud into account. I'm sure that's possible everywhere. I'd bet you can buy cigarettes without the tax stamps in the same shop too.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sure, but if you’re a tourist in e.g. Barcelona trying to get a prepaid SIM, odds are the shopkeeper will not ask you for your ID despite being required to.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
I would think most tourists would trust a carrier-branded store over Honest Jochen's Tobacco Emporium where you may or may not get a working SIM after paying cash.
Has this changed recently? I thought I heard about this several years ago, but the last 2-3 times I've visited (in the last couple of years) I've been able to pick up a prepaid SIM from Colesworth without any ID check.
> This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go
I don't see the connection. This is also how it works in China, which means... when you grab a SIM card at an airport kiosk, they take a picture of your passport. You obviously have your passport with you, because you just arrived in China and haven't left the airport yet.
I mean. It’s the same, you just have to show your passport and fill a form. It takes 1minute to get it done, you can do it on your way to the taxi if you want. Though e-sim are more practical now
I wonder what exactly are they hoping to achieve then? Anything that can be filled out in 1 minute in a taxi can be spoofed with an extra 30 seconds on the dark net buying dark IDs. So this does less than zero for crime, actually encourages more of it, while doing what exactly? It's madness.
You do not have the right to a phone number without providing ID. If you're an American, those unwritten rights that come from other firm rights written down in laws and constitutions can always be argued, they're always being whittled down.
Rights for everyone are achieved through blood and toil, and if you truly want a right to anonymity and the digital tools necessary to achieve it, you will need blood and toil. Until then, we'll have to squeeze through fast developments that governments have yet to address.
"Law enforcement" and national security is given as the verbatim headline justification when you reference Australia's Communication and Media Authority[] for rules on ID collection.
Carriers and carriage service providers (CSPs) must help law enforcement and national security agencies.
...
You must verify a customer's identity before you activate a prepaid mobile phone service. You can do this when the customer buys the service or when they try to activate it. The Determination on identity checks for prepaid mobiles lists the ways you can check a customer's identity.
Unfortunately I can't dig up the original debate from 1997 on the Telecommunications Act when the requirement appears to have been introduced. Would be shocked if it did not include similar language from the representatives shilling the requirement, though.
Most of time it's billed as law enforcement fighting tool. If people can't have anonymous cell phones, once you capture one criminal phone number, you can quickly look at who they call and since they can't be burners, you figure out the criminal network.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
There a significant difference between "the user can be identified fairly well if you can get access to sensitive stuff" and "the owner is always explicitly recorded in a searchable database".
The free anonymous internet was only ever a ruse to get people to use it so the CIA could spy on them. DARPA, folks, created a “free as in beer” global surveillance network and we all bought it.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
It can if it's a roaming eSIM. I'm sure all the countries mentioned here e.g. Australia still handles US SIMs roaming there fine even when the US SIM dossn't have ID tied to it.
Had to buy one of these SMS activation services from a guy in Nigeria using a memecoin because claude decided to ban my account because they didn’t like my credit card brand and Claude requires sms activation for new accounts.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
An SMS activation price is about $0.13 btw, there are several sites that do this commercially with hundreds of thousands of numbers. Not going to name any since that'd be advertising for them.
Not because Claude banned my account (but they did that too), but because OpenAI one day decided I needed a phone number to login, and then proceeded to reject my real one.
Disjoint issues really. Phone scams mostly rely on the shoddy/lack of verification of caller id info as calls transit the network where it's not verified so they are unblockable (because they just use a different fake number every time). They're actually calling from one or a pool of numbers but you can't block and report them on the receiving end because the number your phone thinks it's blocking isn't theirs. This will do nothing to fix spam/scam without patching the issues with caller id.
It is actually because you can't do anything with the source phone number being tied to an identity if the scammers are freely able to spoof the number that the end networks and users see. Even if every network in the world adopted this it wouldn't matter if caller id isn't fixed so that you can actually see the source number to go ask who it is!
We should allow privateers to go after spammers, and get the seized assets. And spammer is then tortured appropriately. Satan could run a successful single issue campaign on this in the most religious state in the US.
And phone companies are enabling telecoms by manufacturing devices that don't take physical sim cards anymore. I recently migrate from pixel 8 to 10, it only supports eSim. In order to migrate my sim to an eSim I had to provide voice, image, documents and info of the phone I was installing the eSim on. One of the worse companies in Brazil, Vivo, now have everything about me. I bet they keep it in a big excel file accessible via a secret but public link
In Russia you need an ID to buy a phone number, and almost every site or app requires it to sign up. As a nice bonus, you or any scammer can buy personal data on everyone for cheap in Telegram bots, because everytime there is a PII leak, these bots update their vast databases.
This was the case in Belgium a couple of years ago.
Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.
Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.
Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled.
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones
That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims.
Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.
Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.
But... what does your comment have to do with burner phones?
A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.
A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.
You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.
Probably not the issue isn't knowing who owns a number it's that the actual number for the call is just a data field that's not validated or required to be correct. Spam calls would be a lot less annoying if they had to come from real numbers that could be blocked instead of being able to spoof as many numbers as they want.
Wish I could recall the podcast I listened to a few years ago that was telling the history of robo-dialers and caller ID spoofing. The general gist was that AT&T was making money off it from 1-900 operators so they weren't eager to self-regulate. So even though ending spam calling is a bipartisan issue, feet were dragged on the implementation.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.
of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!
Spam calls are a different issue (spam is usually VOIP). Spammers also often use spoofed numbers since STIR/SHAKEN is somehow still not properly implemented.
Pretty sure that this would just encourage privacy minded folks to find a loophole.
Or if you get fed up enough you just start blasting FM transmissions without a license..... Keep the burst short enough while your mobile and don't make the transmitter obvious and you could probably get away with it for short SMS comms.
Or just use something like lora or meshtastic/meshcore
The loophole is to use a homeless person's ID for $20.
Wait. In the US don't they not even have an ID standard? The homeless person probably doesn't have any valid ID and neither do members of several other disenfranchised groups, right? So now they're not allowed to have cellphone service?
And people will keep carrying their phones with them. And keep using them. And keep installing apps. Yes, ideally we'd have laws against government infringement, but the capability to not use your phone is in your hands.
More and more things require having a smartphone. Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border. Install the app to use the street parking in this city. Install the app to board the bus. Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz. I admire your spirit of rebellion, but avoiding using a smartphone in daily life in most places will result in a lifestyle contorted specifically to avoid using a smartphone, and will cut you off from activities that were previously doable without smartphones 20 years ago.
> Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
Government offices in many developed countries don't realistically answer the phone any more. You either use the official app on your phone, or you log into the official website using strong authentication that requires a phone. A luddite workaround might be a registered letter by post, but you might wait a long time for an answer.
I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines. To my knowledge there was no other way to get the required approvals.
My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone, credit card tap or with a reloadable transit card. To my knowledge, the only way to reload the card is to use their app or travel to a handful of authorized agents to have them reload your card.
I can call my government office and wait on hold for an hour, ultimately probably needing to schedule an appointment in person to handle my issue or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
But when your child is late to school but they won’t allow you in until you scan the QR code and fill in a form? Do you stand and wait hoping to be noticed? Hoping to tailgate somebody with a phone? Just head home?
The school also sends general communications only by app.
That should be brought up to the school board and parents should be up in arms about it. I don't see how it's even acceptable to require you to do paperwork every time you kid is late to school. If on the day I couldn't get a human at a school to talk to me and a phone call to the office didn't work either I absolutely would go home. People let others get away with this way too often. Sometimes you can't fight it (good luck fighting parking meters in your city that require an app once contracts are signed and the infrastructure is in place), but often you can demand reasonable accommodation if not a change of policy.
I've been thinking about it as an experiment lately. Not fully throwing my smartphone in the bin, but considering leaving it at home for a day.
If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them. Public wifi these days has almost vanished so it's difficult to connect to the internet without cellular access now.
>If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them.
I left prime running a bunch of 80s comedy films in the background as I cleaned my house on the weekend. And so much of the "situation" end of sitcom relies on people having prearranged things beforehand and just happening to arrive on time.
A couple of SMS's and every situation would be resolved.
I could get by on just an SMS/Call only device, the problem is these days everyone moved to internet based apps which require an android/ios app. In theory you could use some kind of bridge server to convert it in to a simple text protocol for a dumb device, but I'm always worried you'd get flagged as a bot and have your account deleted.
Not really. Rural America you don't need a mobile phone. I can go days without ever touching my phone. And if it wasn't for my bank, I wouldn't need it at all. Even then I could just go to the bank but I'm too lazy to do that.
Even in NYC you could get by pretty much just fine without a phone (a credit or debit card is pretty much required though). The hardest part would be losing contact since expectations of how people organize and meet up are completely mobile phone centric, and plans are almost expected to be modified in real time.
No more anonymous driving, thanks to Flock. Soon, no more anonymous calls, thanks to the FCC.
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
How data-driven policing is sold, spoke to someone who set it up once, good odds FLock is doing it, or in the spirit of the below, Flock doesn't have to do it:
- There are networked webcams everywhere: DoT cameras, 18 wheeler fleet cameras, traffic cams, etc.
- Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
- For average jane and joe citizenry: great, no Flock in town!
- For ongoing negotiations with Flock and the PD: ok, sure, kick us out of town. But we'll just pull the 18wheeler feeds with the vendor we have an agreement with, as they roll through town. Or the DoT feeds via the State contract we have or the...
- As such, negotiations could land as does local PD at least want the control of the feeds already going through their town with each Sysco big rig delivery?
I am quite confident that there will eventually in any of those cities be some kind of major mass casualty type event that will be attributed to that rejection. I don’t hope for it and am sorry for all of humanity for what we are allowing to seemingly inevitably come about, but here we are; like cattle being herded to the feed lot. “But they’re saying they’ll feed you”, you will hear, “they don’t mean you ill. You should stop being a conspiracy theorists. This food is good.”
We’ll see how it goes, but we also have suits like this that push back on that narrative as if you’re going to say your tech protects against a certain kind of tragedy, and that tragedy actually happens and you didn’t protect against it, maybe you bear some liability.
Every step of the way enabled by useful idiots who think that because each incremental step applies more/cheaper government violence to some class of petty deviants they don't like that it is worth doing even if the overall trajectory created by the sum total of the steps is bad. Selfish jerks.
I don’t think pointing that out will get very far. People didn’t notice when “democracy” was pushed by the same people, in direct contradiction to the Constitution. “Democracy” was the lynchpin to neutralize the Constitution and usher in oligarchic control again, just like digital/programmable currency will complete the pivot of slavery into a total and global system. Why only enslave a few people when you can enslave all people with smoke and mirrors that will make them cheer on their own deception with amusement.
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
Well - it's not exactly a surprise that all these non-American countries engage in un-American practices.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
A lie, or an ideal to try and live up to, depending on the context. In the context of discussing liberty-destroying privacy invasions it's an ideal, and we should not be so quick to dismiss it.
Fun fact: in India, it is a crime to connect the IP network to the telephone network in any way whatsoever that allows calls originating in IP to terminate at telephones. This is because IP network users don't have to provide ID. (It does not prohibit calling from telephones to IP networks, or IP apps calling other instances of themselves)
This is already the case in most (all?) EU countries. Government-issued photo ID is required to activate a SIM card.
If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country
I was a teenager when Switzerland introduced the mandatory ID check, in 2003 or 2004 iirc.
My carrier added 10 CHF credit to my prepaid plan for the trouble.
It's still fairly easy to buy a Lycamobile SIM/number that was enabled with a fake or stolen ID. Consequently some banks and services ban entire number ranges, which is not only ineffective but also affects people who committed the sin of keeping their first phone number even after moving to a proper postpaid plan...
I expect the FCC to adopt this rule, and I also expect it to be challenged in court, on the basis that there are many other approaches to fighting spam calls that the FCC has not tried, but are much less intrusive.
There are two ways to challenge FCC decisions. There is the upfront approach where a business whose operations are harmed by an FCC decision sues to block the decision. Then there is the approach where said business announces their non-compliance and dares the FCC to sue them. The FCC does not have criminal charging authority, so it has to rely on courts to enforce compliance. See the Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T case that just wrapped up at the Supreme Court.
Straight out of China playbook. Every SIM must be registered with government issued/recognised ID. Yes combats fraud. Yes means govt can track you thru IMEI 24x7 anywhere in the world.
I had reason to pick up a couple cheap pre-paid phones at a gas station once. I wasn't asked to give an ID to anyone to buy them, but once I had them I needed to call a company to activate the phone and they were very particular about what phone number it would work from. It had to be a landline. Payphone wouldn't work. My work phone didn't work. It was difficult to track down a phone line they'd accept and even then one of the phones refused to register.
It seemed to me like they wanted to make sure they could tie the phones to an individual through activation.
I used to buy test phones for software testing at a bodega where they had a laundry basket full of phones, and they would sell prepaid SIMs no questions asked.
Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
So basically people from Africa won't be allowed to use their phones in the USA by order of the government? (If they can even get into the country without ending up in an ICE camp, of course)
I get over 10 scam calls a day. I'm forced to pay a company to block them because the free methods don't work. There's no way to work around it because they refuse to enforce the law on these companies cycling through burner numbers.
I probably said it dozens of times in here, phone numbers are the link between your IRL identity and digital one, that’s why a lot of services still require a phone number to “prevent spam”, yeah right, it’s just to get to you if ever needed.
Having looked into the history of call tracking / blocking, it's pretty evident that major US telcos have very little interest in making marketing calls difficult. However tenuous the association between "marketing" and the actual practice of the scammers, harassers, abusers, and worse generating literally billions of such calls monthly (see: <https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/ringing-in-our-fears-2025-...>, "The monthly average of scam and telemarketing calls increased from 2.14 billion a month in 2024 to 2.56 billion a month through September, according to YouMail").
I've got my popcorn and lawn chair out to watch the "voter id is racist" crowd to take a stand on this issue.
Context: Voter ID Laws may seem like a good idea, but they’re actually pretty terrible! On the surface, these laws appear to be a reasonable way to stop people from pretending to be someone else when they vote. But the reality is that this kind of voter fraud almost never happens!!! Instead Voter ID Laws primarily prevent the poor, the elderly, and people of color from voting. They way they’ve disenfranchised people of color is part of a very long history of voter suppression and is a classic example of structural racism.
Isn't this the exact same thing? If you don't have a valid ID to vote, now you don't have a valid ID to use a cellphone either. And if you wanted to go and get one, too bad because you probably need a cellphone to do that.
So by "Voter ID is racist" crowd you more broadly mean "people who understand that requiring identification in order to exist in society is a burden on the citizens with little benefit to them but of great value to authoritarians who wish to use these laws for nefarious means".
Which, often, does not include exclusively people who think "Voter ID is racist" as plenty of unhinged libertarians hate make great points about why you shouldn't want the government to have access to 100% of your daily data points 100% of the time.
This is standard in my country. Seemingly as a consequence, eSIMs require physically going to a store to be activated (on the telco side), which has always seemed insane to me.
Regardless of this, I see phone network as a legacy thing that in perfect world should already be replaced with lightweight upgradeable calling protocol over IPv6.
WiFi / pure-VOIP based calling should be able to disambiguate between the network and the messaging layers. This means that a given cellular modem wouldn't be traceable to a specific contact, or call history. The modems could be swapped amongst individuals readily.
This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.
Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.
I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.
The Trump administration has been working overtime trying to build databases of people in this country. Leaving no stone unturned, legal or otherwise. I vaguely remember a time when American conservatives were against precisely this, often as a first principle. Maybe that's just an idealized memory on my part.
The American conservatives who can afford to be are effectively exempted. When they're not flying around on private jets, the ownership and metadata created by their cars, phones, etc. are obfuscated by layers of shell corporations.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
Yep, just in different flavors based on ideology. For example, forced labor requires logging & tracking of pregnancies. Anti-trans folks want gender identity on the books to gatekeep who can teach in schools or enter bathrooms. Same for preventing same-sex marriage. Folks railing against voting rights want more and more checks to prove who you are and where you live
We're already forced into the credit bureaus. Into traffic cameras. Into using credit cards and banks. The idea the state would let us actually say things online anonymously (or to each other) is completely unrealistic: we must be tagged and tracked through our lifecycle.
Payphones are rather seldom seen these days, friend.
Not to disagree with the principle, but it's somewhat opaque as to what your point is.
I've hazy memories as well of reports that payphones were being more surveilled (a camera placed nearby, for example), or tapped / monitored more than other phones, particularly if in areas with other known issues. Nothing that's turning up in DDG searches though...
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express
Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
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