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CallerID Spoofing to be Made Illegal
MadJo writes "US Congress has just approved a bill that will make it illegal to spoof CallerID. From the bill: 'The amount of the forfeiture penalty (...) shall not exceed $10,000 for each violation, or 3 times that amount for each day of a continuing violation, except that the amount assessed for any continuing violation shall not exceed a total of $1,000,000 for any single act or failure to act.'"
There's a campaign going on at Binary Freedom right now that some of you may be interested in.
http://binaryfreedom.info/node/163
Basically, there are several arguments against this law
1. It doesn't do anything
Criminals will still make calls and spoof, so it won't stop fraud. Police can already track down spoofers with the same amount of non-spoofers who are using their phones for illegal purposes.
2. It costs money
We're gonna have to spend money to catch spoofers.
3. Jurisdiction
If the phone companies want to stop spoofing, they should design a secure system instead of relying on the congressional police
4. Privacy
It strips privacy that is gained by spoofing.
5. Legitimate use
It has legitimate uses such as for telecommuters who want the name when they make business calls to be the company's. Or how about a business that has several people using one phone line? They might want the sales associate's name to appear, which would be done through spoofing.
Fact of the matter is, this gains us nothing. If I can write a fake name on a letter and mail it, why can't I do the same with my phone?
So I'm actually reading the legislative action on this bill (through Thomas, provided by the link), and it doesn't appear as though there's been any kind of a vote on this. Am I, you know, missing something? Or does somebody not understand that a bill actually has to be voted on by each full chamber (both the House and the Senate) in an identical format, before it can be said that "Congress" has approved anything?