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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?
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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
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.
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
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.
you might as well say the protesters in a dictactorship shouldn't protest because they will not affect the dictator, they will just make the life of police and military
miserable because they are the ones that have to shoot them
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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