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Reverse Robocall Turns Tables On Politicians
jfruhlinger writes "One of the great banes of election season is that any politician can shell out a few pennies per voter and phone-spam thousands of people who'd rather not hear a recorded pitch. But turnabout's fair play, and now a service called reverse robocall will deliver your recorded message to elected officials as often as you'd like for a nominal fee. If there's a representative you'd like to call repeatedly, check them out."
Turnabout is fair play.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Is this legal? Didn't they specifically write exemptions into the do-not-call list legislation exempting political parties?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
How come nobody had ever thought of this? It's pure genius. Now, a similar option for telemarketers would be even better...
Don't forget who's in charge.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
Weren't there republicans purposely annoying people with robocalls from the other party a few elections ago?
Do you wish to look as happy as me? Well, you've got the power inside you right now.
So, use it! And send one dollar to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield.
Don't delay, eternal happiness is just a dollar away.
--
and take the auto dialer with you or I will have no case.
Where's the all of the above option here...
I can't speak for the US, but in Canada Robo-calls are already illegal... unless you're a politician... must be nice to be able to write yourself an exemption in to any law you pass.
I generally make it a policy never to vote for anyone who uses such scummy practices. Problem is, I believe that I should vote, and last election there weren't any candidates on the ballot who hadn't robo-called my cell phone at least once, one of them almost 10 times!
Combine this with an ideological movement group, and twitter/facebook, and hilarity ensues...until it's banned.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I can't speak for the US, but in Canada Robo-calls are already illegal...
...from Canada.
I'm just sayin'.
Time to harass some elected officials in my new state of North Carolina.
"Governor Perdue, why did you sign a bill, written by Time Warner lobbyists, which effectively banned municipal broadband in North Carolina?"
Political campaigns aren't funded by tax dollars (unless they agree to take only public funds which hasn't really been done since Carter vs Reagan).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Interesting. A way to DDOS a politician? Almost worth the money. Wish we could do that in Canada...
Politician turn table on YOU!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
http://reverserobocall.com/products/barak-obama-2-offices
No.Comment.
Ah yes, maybe.
If you try... and it works... and you survive...
Please post 8p
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Politicians want to hear from people in their district. The moment the staffer realizes it's a robocall, they will HANG UP and not even record the fact that you called. If you call repeatedly, it still only gets you marked down once, until the staffer realizes that you do nothing but robocall at which time you get marked down zero times.
Anyone using this to advocate an issue is doing active harm to their cause. Call your politician your damn self. It's free.
The point is showing politicians how crass and condescending it is to call someone on the phone with a pre-recorded message.
If they realize you're a robot, start ignoring you, and no one draws any parallels to their own campaign tactics then it probably can't be saved - both the politicians' intelligence and that of voters who respond positively to robocalls - but at least you tried.
My first thought for using the system was harassing corrupt and ignorant jerks, with an ironic twist; I don't think anyone really expects much more from this than a symbolic gesture or some pranks/harassment.
You pay for 1 call, regardless of whether or not it's answered.
Yeah, like that's working.
I've gotten to the point where if I don't immediately know the number (or if you can't show me in the first 15 seconds that you are someone I do business with) then I just have to assume the caller is fraudulent and tell them to fsck themselves.
I get so many &^%#^%*( robo-calls in a week the fact that it's ostensibly illegal is almost laughable. There's no teeth to the enforcement, and the people calling from the US or internationally do it with impunity.
I mean, come on, do you really think I believe you work for "the windows service provider" or that my machine seems to be causing alerts when you're calling me from a (probably fake) number in Texas?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...you're just making the staffers' lives miserable. The ones that sometimes struggle to survive in the DC area due to the cost of living if they're new. The ones with 4 roommates and 2 other jobs. You won't affect your representative, but you will be a jerk. Congratulations.
Citation, please. What section of the criminal code covers this?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Campaigns aren't but law enforcement is. Legislators don't send their private body guards after you, they send the police, or the FBI or whatever other organizations they can get in on it.
Not likely, political speech gets the broadest possible protection under the first amendment.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Hello, this is Homer Simpson, a.k.a. Happy Dude. The court has ordered me to call every person in town to apologize for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power.
Face it, if they're spamming you they're scamsters and don't respect you. eg Congress
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This also works well for junk faxers: Just set a modem to auto-redial. It's easy. It's effective. Heck, I've heard of people setting the modem to auto-redial on a phone line that's rarely used (like a fax line), and simply forgetting about it for a few days.
I don't respond to AC's.
I haven't gotten one of these lately, but I did a while back get a political call that was very annoying. I hung up and the phone rang again continuing with the message. I hung up again, and it called me back. This was like 6-10 years ago I think. That can't be kosher..
For any candidate who did not robocall you.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Political speech is speech done by a politician. Not speech too a politician. Politicians themselves have the largest degree of protection, and if the message is just a complaint then they will call it harassment, and if the message against them has anything resembling a threat, it won't just be the police, it will be homeland security.
Expensive.
Some robocalls have been deliberately deceptive: they are run by the opposing candidate using a voice actor to sound like the opponent and made as obnoxious as possible. They were pretending to support the candidate they were trying to defeat.
A while back I donated money to the ACLU. I thought it would go towards defending civil liberties, but it turned out my donation was used to pay a company to repeatedly call me and ask for more money.
After a few hours of research, I found the private home phone number of their CEO. A few days worth of repeatedly calling him and hanging up got my number off their list forever.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Starting in about the 2004 election, the tactics of the local election robocalls changed quite a bit. The call would start out with a line like: "Hi! I'd like to talk to you about candidate Mark Smith..."
At that point, you'd hang up thinking "Damn Mark Smith!" BUT: what you didn't know was that a few more minutes into the call, you'd discover that the call was sponsored by Mark's opponent, and if you had stayed on long enough, you would have heard about Mark's failings and how good his opponent was.
If you were on the fence before the call, you SURE weren't going to vote for Mark after a dozen of THOSE calls.
The "R"s used this a LOT in 2004, and it has picked up every year since then.
Slime.
Just this past summer the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals found that a union could be held liable under computer hacking laws (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) for doing exactly this -- using a combination of auto-dialing and member phone calls to protest an action, and thus filling up the business' voicemail and making the lines unavailable for a period of time:
http://computerfraud.us/articles/can-a-labor-union-be-sued-under-the-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act-for-spamming-an-employer%E2%80%99s-voice-and-email-systems
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Telecom Decision CRTC 2008-6 Section IV
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2008/dt2008-6.htm#m4
(as for what role the CRTC has in such matters... you can look that up yourself, but they do have the force of law behind their decisions)
Actually, the last robocall that called me WAS calling from Texas. I got through to a real person, and my opening gambit was "what part of the US is your call centre located in?" He must have been new, because he answered, and was then very confused. I then explained to him that the people who hired the people who hired his call centre were engaged in illegal activity, in contravention of numerous laws, and asked to speak to his manager. HE didn't know what to do, but eventually I heard the click of someone else joining the call, and then it terminated.
When politicians robocall, I just respond with an email stating that there's a reason we have DNC lists and antispam laws... and if they want to continue to be popular, they'll honour their constituent's right to privacy.
Amazingly, this results in only one call per party per election. Except the Green party... they can't afford a robocaller, so they end up with a bunch of wooden placards littering the landscape instead.
And it needs to be annoying both in destination and time of day.
While I am ALL for bombarding our sometimes misguided, uninformed or overzealous congressmen with public opinion...I have a fear that giving people the ability to set up automated calling in this fashion would just overwhelm their call centers to the point where they just stop picking up the phone and listening to the public at all.
So now how can we expand this marvelous service to include pollsters, banks, realtors, obnoxious sales people, wall street brokers, anybody with a "good deal", scammers and my cousin Freddie who just can't figure out that some people actually *sleep* at night?
Tell that to the Conservatives. They're using robodiallers on their political campaigns, even though the rules say quite clearly that the rules for robodiallers apply regardless of whether the person on whose behalf the calls are being made is exempt from DNC rules, and that robodiallers may not be used without express consent, which is defined as an explicit oral or written contract permitting this kind of communication.
I am going to bookmark that one for the next political campaign in the area, and use it to file a grievance with the CRTC.
Local extremely idiot municipal candidate not only robocalled on E-day, he managed to call both of our numbers at least ten times. Before 9 am.
And got Bonus Points because he kept robocalling people in a different city from the one where he was running.
AND Got Extra Super Bonus Points for blaming the computer and saying that he couldn't control how it called.
AND AND Got Mega-Stupendous Super Extra OMFG PONIES Bonus Points because neither the robodial phone number or his campaign office had anyone answering phones, and his voicemail box was (surprise...) full.
Three Squirrels
Just remember, just one Presidential candidate since the invention of the Federal matching funds for campaigning has refused that funding and the spending caps that go along with it...
I'm slightly curious whether he'll manage to raise enough money that he's willing to do it again....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Political campaigns aren't funded by tax dollars (unless they agree to take only public funds which hasn't really been done since Carter vs Reagan).
That is just a matter of shuffling cash around so it looks like they are private funds. Occasionally they get caught.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
They can have matching funds if they agree to campaign spending limits. Sen. Obama declined the matching funds; Sen. McCain took them. Sen. Obama made a calculated decision that paid off for him.
So who was it? Remember, not everyone on slashdot is American.
So you're supposed to have a tag line at the end of the call explicitly stating who paid for the call. Maryland, today, convicted someone for illegal political robocalls designed to suppress votes. Among the critical points was the lack of the tag line. I don't think he's been sentenced yet, but looks like jail time is expected. (Personally, I think stocks would be much more appropriate in cases like this, but you have to take what you can get, I guess.)
Using this on politicos' personal phone numbers at 6 AM would be the real fair game. If only one of ten people woken up by a robocall participate in this, it has a chance of quite decent success.
If they annoy us, let's annoy them! We can do it, we have the technology.
Those aren't supposed to come out of the tax coffers, though. Allegedly, they come from that line on your tax return where you agree to donate $x for political campaigns, that I assume everyone must say, "oh, that sounds like a good cause" and checks off.....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I've gotten to the point where if I don't immediately know the number (or if you can't show me in the first 15 seconds that you are someone I do business with) then I just have to assume the caller is fraudulent and tell them to fsck themselves.
As a Windows user, I tell them to chkdsk themselves. They usually hang up after that.
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"
President Obama's campaign was (AFAIK) entirely grassroots, all money raised from donations by citizens. At least I think that's what GP was talking about.
And I doubt he'll manage to do it again.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
A year later someone figures out how to crowdsource it :D (actually it probably won't even take that long)
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Do they actually work? A disproportionate number of people are deeply irritated by being disturbed by a recorded message. Only a small number are going to listen to the pitch.
I'd have thought the hatred caused by spam would essentially eliminate any benefit of those who don't mind and are willing to listen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_election_campaign_fund_checkoff
"Checking the box does not change the amount of an individual's tax or refund. The $3 is paid by the government. In other words, checking the box causes the federal government to receive $3 less in tax revenue for other spending, than if you hadn't checked the box."
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This is a freaking brilliant business idea. Those guys are going to make a fortune. Wish I'd thought of it.
Money is fungible, just because they move it from account A to account B and say it doesn't effect your return doesn't mean it doesn't effect the tax (or currently borrowing) structure of the government. Of course even if every federal election was fully funded by the act it would still be less than a month in Iraq of Afghanistan.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I once owned OutsourceCongress.org. Basically, it was a site to load up the staffers of Senators and Representatives and allow one to click once and load all the staffer email addresses of a Rep/senator into your mail client. Thus, I didn't send the emails, others did via their ISPs; so they couldn't block me or stop me either. It side-tracked(with ease) around their Contact Me pages at the House/Senate. Plus, you could email your issue straight to the people that matter(Chief of Staff), not some intern that just reads email and counts For/Against on the issue. It was a lot of fun; knowing the same jerks at Rep John Mica's office that mislead us and the Senators that ignored our issue (training our foreign replacement workers on L1 and H-1b visas, then getting laid off) were sometimes getting pounded with emails from all across the country. The best story was Senator Arlen Specter(PA). His chief of staff wrote back to someone saying he was going to turn her into the FBI for "threatening his people". She was a 60+ year old retired teacher. His threat to her made it on the radio here in Orlando, then onto multiple websites with my URL too. He got pounded with emails. My estimate was in 1000's per day, possibly more. I heard he couldn't use his phone(blackberry) because there was so much mail coming down to it. Eventually he changed his email address. They hated me and would constantly ask that they get removed from the list. This thread sortof motivates me to do it again.
Uh, no. The receiver doesn't pay for calls in the US, unless you have an 800-number or a cellphone.
After working debt collections USING a robo-dialer .. (you know the one that calls and goes "press 4 to speak to a rep" then slaps you on hold for an hour) - I can say that we collected on debts with less proof, sign up a collections agency and send em to work .
Well, where do you think that $x box's money comes from? Government can only get money by taxing people to get it now, borrowing it now and paying for it out of later tax receipts, or printing it (which is effectively a tax on bank accounts).
technically you are correct, however one of the strict rules you refer to is that they must have explicit prior consent of the person they are calling. And I can tell you that there are currently NO organizations on this planet who have my consent to robodial me.
Actually it's interesting that you point out that the decision doesn't appear to exempt political parties on the robodial rules. As for "Tell that to the Conservatives"... how about also telling it to the Liberals, the NDP, and even an independent candidate in my riding last election. Every one of them Robodialled me.
Wait.. what? It doesn't affect your return when you check the box??!? So.. you're "donating" other people's money if you check it?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!