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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."
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...
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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!
not quite the same..
this calls the politician's offices (which are staffed by people other than them)
they call your home and cell phones
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.
Or, it might get you into trouble.
The politicians who wrote the laws about such things game themselves an exemption to call you. It is entirely possible that if you turn around it do it to them, you could be doing something illegal.
Remember, the deck is stacked, and not in your favor.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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'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.
I'd like to see a politician sue someone for robocalling them, see if that works out in their favor.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Any reasonably competent lawyer could argue you out of any charges on this on first amendment grounds. Not primarily the freedom of speech part, although that enters in, but the "right of the people to...petition the government for redress of grievances" part.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The politicians who wrote the laws about such things game themselves an exemption to call you. It is entirely possible that if you turn around it do it to them, you could be doing something illegal.
They didn't just exempt themselves, they exempted political organisations - an organisation dedicated to delivering the grievances of the citizenry to politicians sounds like the very definition of a political organisation. But then again, I am not a lawyer or a politician.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Or, it might get you into trouble.
The politicians who wrote the laws about such things game themselves an exemption to call you. It is entirely possible that if you turn around it do it to them, you could be doing something illegal.
Remember, the deck is stacked, and not in your favor.
Exactly.
;)
I've had to run a few of the robocall systems, and I frequently asked questions about it all.
Me: Can we give them a 'press 1 to unsubscribe' option?
Them: No, otherwise everyone would unsubscribe.
Me: What should I do with incoming calls (when people hit *69)?
Them: Just drop the call.
Me: I thought robocalling was illegal?
Them: It is. We're exempt because there are special provisions in $STATE-TELEMARKETER-BILL that allow for political calls.
Me: Hmm. The bill says we must stop calling at 6 PM, otherwise it says were 'harassing' people and could be liable...
Them: Look further down--it says political calls are exempt and can be run until 9 PM. And also on Saturday as early as 9 AM.
I remember waaay back in 7th grade, a kid was trying to impress everyone on the playground by saying he could build a 'screamer' bomb. It was a special 'pulse' you could send down the phone line that would blow up computers at the other end. Untraceable too.
*sigh* Every 4 years I start wishing that kid was right...
There's no place like
They wrote the laws, gave themselves an exemption, and have better access to law enforcement and legal advice than you or I.
You're more than welcome to test your theory and see how it turns out.
I'm just pointing out that they've stacked the deck in their favor, and that if you or I did the same thing they'd probably find some other laws they can abuse to make us go away.
Me, I'd expect you'd get a visit from the local police or from a Federal Agency. Neither is likely to turn out like you might hope.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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..
simple solution for that, just set your phone to call forward to the politicians call centre! Done right, and with a bit of luck, you could take out multiple call agents (and trunk bandwidth with every call they make!
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
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.
The politician, on the other hand, is making thousands of calls, to thousands of numbers. In many cases, they are calling a given individual more than once as they cycle through the landlines, business lines and cell numbers assigned within a geographic area.. Therein lies the basis .I'd like to see such laws challenged. Does the American telephone marketing law exemptions allow a politician to call people who can't vote for him because they live outside the district he represents? Does the exemption allow repeated calls to the same individual? Does it allow him to call businesses? (since the point of the calls is to "get out the vote" and businesses can't vote, if they are big enough, they don't need to vote, they control him anyway. If they aren't big enough, then they don't matter...)
I'm a Canadian, I have an Ontario area code, yet last year I and a few others with the same area code and exchange actually got a few calls from a NY politicians robocaller. I assume it was an error in setting up the dialer program, because only a bare handful of us got called (that I know of) before the calls stopped. Still, I'm sure it would have been mighty embarrassing if we had decided to pursue a class action against the guy in a US court.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
I'm pretty sure people other than the politician (you know their staff) are the ones who organize the robocalling in the first place. So that seems fair enough.
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
Except that judges usually don't tell the ignorant masses which compose a jury about jury nullification, and if they do, they instruct the jury to follow the law and not allow sympathy towards a party to sway their decision. Further, one attorney or the other, or the court itself, depending on jurisdiction will weed out jury members who might be emotionally swayed, or have the intelligence to understand the concept behind jury nullification.
It's a great idea in theory, but in practice, people are usually too stupid, or biased, or whatever.
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)
csb time: I had just added fancy dialing packages for call-forwarding, call-waiting, caller-id and some others (this was 10 or 15 yrs ago when that was still somewhat new). I wasn't used to all the star- number- number codes yet.
I was planning on having a phone interview and didn't want to be disturbed, so I disabled call-waiting for the duration of the call. I dialed the prefix, waited for beeps, then dialed the number for the company I was supposed to interview with. we had our little interview chat and we ended the call. that was that.
or so I thought.
a day or two goes by and my girlfriend (who gets all the calls; I never get phone calls) tells me that people have not been calling her lately. is something wrong with the phone? I go to check things out.
yes, it turns out, I had enabled call-forwarding for the duration of that call. and all calls! until explicitly disabled!
even worse, the poor guy at the company that I called: he was getting OUR phone calls! "who the hell is alison? why do people keep calling asking for alison?? I just don't understand it!". I can imagine that is what was going thru the poor guy's head.
I never did hear back from that company. not sure if they knew what was going on or not; but it was only enabled for a few days...
learned my lesson. make sure you press the right sequence and don't just assume you got *-something-something right.
--
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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.
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.
The most common expression of jury nullification in years past was for all-white juries to refuse to convict whites for murdering blacks. Juries are expressly for the purpose of deciding the facts, not the law, for precisely this reason.
Asking a stupid person to not vote is like asking a dog to not fart.
Me: Can we give them a 'press 1 to unsubscribe' option? Them: No, otherwise everyone would unsubscribe.
How about a reversal of this... when someone calls your home, you have a "call screening device" that asks the person to "Please press 1"
Since the robocaller cannot press 1, their call will be dropped in 20 seconds and never heard.
Hyperbole doesn't help your argument. If everyone that spoke out against the Obama administration were to be "accidentally" killed, the news would notice.
Outliers can be silenced. A critical mass cannot. Shit, look at the Middle East protests for evidence.
I'm not saying throw lightning bolts at Congress, or am I?
That fits pretty well with your sig. ;)
There's no place like
Whoever modded the above Flamebait is sadly, no, make that tragically out of touch with what is going on in the US today. The OP's statement is feasible based on just 2 items that came out of the government this week. Worst part? It would be legal!
The Obama government (whom I supported in 2008) is turning out to be one scary piece of work.
LOL. Instead of just being very vague to try and sound insightful, please specifically lay out for me which policies or actions by the "Obama government" makes you believe it is feasible that someone would be killed by the government for reverse robocalling politicians.
Still their office. I want the bastard who put me on a robocall list that calls my house phone as early as 6 AM or as late as 10 PM (yes, it does, and no, the secretary of state's office says it's not actually illegal and they can't do anything about it) strung up by the balls.
Any reasonably competent lawyer could argue you out of any charges on this on first amendment grounds. Not primarily the freedom of speech part, although that enters in, but the "right of the people to...petition the government for redress of grievances" part.
Any mentally competent American can see there is no Constitution, Bill of Rights, or Amendments being afforded any level of respect anywhere, in this post 9/11, PATRIOTic era we live in.
Spare me the history lesson until you can prove we actually still have a justice system, and not a legal system that does nothing but cater to the 1% who in this case, also happen to be the same 1% charging you with a crime. Good luck.
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.
Let me get this straight. You don't think a "politician" would feel "threatened" by a Robodialer enough to put the person on a "Terrorist Watch List" or something?
No, not really. In fact, if YOU believe they'd kill someone over a phone call, then they'd probably feel more threatened by you. If you are unstable enough to believe in such craziness, there no predicting what sort of action you might take to protect yourself from those delusions.
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?"
Been there, done that. I had an old system hooked up to the phone line with an FXO card and running asterisk. It had a default-deny policy -- meaning that if there wasn't an explicitly defined route that matched the incoming caller ID info the caller would get a short, snarky recording telling them to get lost and then get disconnected. If you got past that hump, the next step was "to continue in english, press 1". The next hump is a call queue where you'd hear hold music. At that point the phones inside the house would actually start to ring.
It was fun to look through the CDR list at the end of the month and look at all the calls that got dropped due to no Caller ID info. Since then the hard drive died and I've been too lazy to hash out the replacement system.
Model 551, Chambered in 6mm
Yep. Communist Russia had a wonderful constitution, outlining all sorts of individual rights, and it was regularly ignored by the state apparatus. With a majority of the USA Supreme Court now biased in favour of corporate rights over individual rights, non court-supervised secret intelligence/military operations against citizens, and more - the USA is well travelled down that same path.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Letting stupid people suffer is very darwinistic, and some may argue quite proper.
The problem is that us smart folks have to share the misery.
Not to mention that lying during voir dire about your propensity to advocate jury nullification is perjury.
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.
They* killed a killed a guy for being ... "dangerous terrorist". No trial, no judge, no lawyer, no oversight.
Care to share the name? News reports? Evidence? If you have evidence, go to the press, or Cryptome or...
The only suspected terrorist I can think of right now who was effectively summarily executed is Jean Charles de Menezes, and that did not happen in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes
I could go on and on about the crazy, anti-freedom, anti-democratic laws being passed in my own country; but so could anyone in their own state. There's always been crazy laws (either through malice or ignorance). What you'd need to do to convince anyone of anything is cite actual references and instances. I do not think my state is "out to get me", just pig ignorant at times and running a bit of an "old boy's club". Corporations...yeah, I might give credence to the idea that democracy is being eroded by the increasing power of tax evading mega corps via lobbying and media control. Representation and no taxation? Gotta love that.
The main worry I have about Obama (and in general I'd say he's a lot better than Bush, but I'm on the outside looking in so a lot of the internal politics goes unreported here) is how cosy the Democrats are with the MAFIAA. SOPA is a stupid act and needs to be killed dead. But once again the USA thinks it is fit to lord it's policies, laws and culture over the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
So, back to the point, citations please.
In my opinion, the appropriate response to such nuisance calls is the phrase "Impersonal robo-calling at 6am is losing you votes." followed by a loud air horn. Repeat at least six times, to be sure you get your money's worth.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
They* killed a killed a guy for being ... "dangerous terrorist". No trial, no judge, no lawyer, no oversight.
Care to share the name? News reports? Evidence? If you have evidence, go to the press, or Cryptome or...
So, back to the point, citations please.
Well, assuming GP was referring to US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, there is no shortage of press commentary. Apparently US citizen Salmir Khan was killed in the same attack, but was not deliberately targeted, being just another collateral casualty. The press reports include statements of concern regarding this extra-judicial execution of al-Awlaki being ordered by the sitting US president. It was not a "heat of the moment" death in a shootout or in an attempt to escape from being arrested. Moreover, was not convicted of any offence, not even in absentia. Although many accusations were made (presumably with justification), no charges were ever laid against him. From what is in the press reports, he was by no means a Mahatma Gandhi, but the ordering of an execution without even going through the motions of a trial (not even a mock trial) should be disturbing to any US citizen. It's easier to slide down the slippery slope than to climb back up.
Oh, here's a few press references, in the Wahington Post, the Huffington Post, and CBS News. Use your Google-fu to find many many more. There is also an interesting comment in the New York Times, which suggests that legal advice given to the president before the execution was that it would be illegal.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
It's not illegal because when politicians pass the laws banning disgusting practices like this, they specifically exempt themselves from it.
"They" have killed quite a few people for being a "dangerous terrorist". The only difference is this guy also had American citizenship. If you were going to be worried about this you should have started worrying when they started killing people. It shouldn't suddenly change everything because this time, the bad guy who was assassinated was an American.
I'm simultaneously amused and disgusted by your delusional belief that the nationality of the victim is more important than the murder. You've reminded me of the reason you're on my list of idiots and fools.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Exactly. The last time I was summoned for Jury Duty, the judge told us "raise your hand if you will consider anything beyond the evidence and your instructions during deliberations." Out of a pool of about 100, mine was the only hand to go up. I was under oath, and had to answer honestly. When questioned personally about my action, I informed the Judge, "It is my belief that our Constitution does not forbid jury nullification. As a juror, who has the potential to legally strip a defendant of liberty and property, I am the final arbiter of 'justice' in the application of the law, and the only thing standing between a defendant, and punishment for a law which may be unfair. In an extreme case, I cannot guarantee I would not use this power to nullify." The judge nodded and subtly smiled, apparently somewhat amused. The defense attorney's smile was more pronounced. And I could easily hear the Prosecuting attorney's pen as it scratched my name off his list.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno