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FCC May Stop 911 Access For NSI Phones
An anonymous reader writes: It's generally known that if you call 911 from a cell phone in the USA, you will be connected to the nearest Public Safety Access Point, whether or not the phone has an active account. This is the basis for programs that distribute donated phones for emergency-only use. However, the FCC has proposed a rule change that would eliminate the requirement for telephone companies to connect 911 calls made by NSI (non-service-initialized) phones. The main reason for the proposed rule change are the problems caused by fraudulent 911 calls made through NSI phones. Yet respondents cited by the FCC show that as many as 30% of 911 calls from NSI phones are for legitimate emergencies. The comment period for the proposed rule change ends on June 6th, 2015.
The main reason for the proposed rule change are the problems caused by fraudulent 911 calls made through NSI phones.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I wonder if the FCC will start a crusade against fraudulent 911 calls made through anonymous VOIP services? Maybe all 911 services? 'Cuz they're clearly getting abused.
Whew! I'm glad we're rid of that dirty bathwater. Too bad about the baby, though.
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Hello, 9-11? This is Demetri again. The aliens are back, and this time they brought Brett Favre with them!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
just toss old cell phones in the trash then
thats probably bad for the environment
Yet another government gift to the corporate oligarchy. Now if you want access to 911 you'll have to pay Big Communications for it.
Prank calls to emergency services have been going on long before 911, but I'm sure that burner phones, which seems to be the category of device we're dealing with here, would be ideal for calling in those false emergency reports designed to send SWAT teams to the home of someone you don't like.
What's the breakdown of the other 70%? Are they mostly prank calls?
So, for NSI phones, the figures are reportedly 70% fraudulent, 30% legit.
But what am I supposed to compare that to? What are the numbers for wired phones? Cellphones on contracts? Prepaid cell phones?
This seems like pretty important information if one hopes to make a decision. Nobody wants bogus 911 calls cluttering up the system; but is 70% fraud similar? Modestly worse? Terrible?
Also, if we deem 911 access to be a social good(which is why NSI 911 calls work at all, and seems pretty reasonable), why not split the difference and allow someone to 'register' an NSI phone(having their particulars on file with 911 dispatch is likely to discourage spurious use and potentially be useful for locating them in an emergency if they are unable to provide clarification themselves thanks to injury or exigent circumstance) without signing up for a paid calling plan? So long as it is 911 only, it's still no competition for actual calling plans; but it's less draconian than just killing NSI 911 entirely.
That sounds really bad. But we need the percentage of "legitimate" calls made from regular phones to really know if it is bad or not.
If that comparison number is less than 60%, than they have no real argument. But if say 90% of regular phone calls to 911 are legit, then they have a more reasonable argument.
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Flag the NSI calls. If the 911 dispatcher can tell that a call is coming from a NSI phone, they can apply the appropriate level of skepticism.
It's better than disabling all the phones.
I would like a break down of the break down of the 70% on pranks vs stupidiy calls and a compare on how many regular phones numbers get of valid prank and stupidly calls
I'd imagine 911 can charge fines to land lines and service cell phones for wasting their resources on non-emergencies. NSI phones might be harder to squeeze fines out of.
"If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911".
Oh. Wait.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
How many of the "fraudulent" 70% are from small children who are given an old cell phone to play with.
How many parents don't know that any cell phone which previously had service can make 911 calls? How many of these just get handed to Jr. to shut him up when he's begging to play with Mom's smart phone? How many times does Jr. manage to press the right buttons to dial 911? I'm guessing it's a lot..
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what percentage of valid mobile 911 calls are made from NIS phones? Strangely, that number does not appear in the federal report. Saying that 30% of NIS calls are valid focuses on the problem. But if 1% (or more) of valid mobile 911 calls come from NIS phones, that is a valuable service that definitely should not be terminated without a plan for cost-free replacement.
Also, the blather about how inexpensive mobile phones are is seriously flawed. I recently dropped my full featured Verizon plan and changed instead to a minimal pre-paid plan. What I discovered is that Verizon plays lots of dirty tricks to cheat poor people of their money. For example, they tell you that you must pay monthly, but what they mean is every 30 days. If you set up auto-pay via credit card based on their web site, you will be ok until there is a month with 31 days. Then they cancel your service and seize the balance in your account, which could be hundreds of dollars. Even if you owe only $5, they take all the money in your account.
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Keep 911 for real emergencies.
Add 922 for fake emergencies.
This is the message for 922:
"Thank you for calling the prank emergency line. Your prank will be recorded and the best ones will be added into a 'best of' compilation of the year. Thank you."
Putting an incentive (the "best of" compilation) will push a lot of those pranks to the new number ("Hey man! My prank was chosen! I rule!") and those compilations could be sold as profit to help pay for both 911 and 922 services.
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I don't believe that you can donate your old cell phones to be used as 911-only phones by victims of domestic violence, etc. It's an urban myth.
I checked it out once because of a 90-year-old neighbor. He had a stroke, and he was lying in the bathroom for 24 hours, unable to call for help, until one of his children came over for their daily check-in.
I tried to find out where in New York City I could get one of those 911-only reconditioned cell phones, that he could carry with him and use if something similar happened again. I researched the Internet, made several calls, and couldn't find one.
But who needs one? Low-income people can get a free Assurance or Safelink phone, that they can use to call 911 and everything else (like doctors and relatives). So why would anybody want a phone that could do nothing but call 911?
I just called another nationwide service (which I am not identifying because I don't want everybody calling them), and the woman answering the phone told me that they really don't provide people with reconditioned 911-only cell phones. They collect the old phones, turn them into Verizon, and Verizon gives them "Help" phones which are cheap cell phones with free minutes on them.
Try it yourself. Call one of those services and ask them whether they can give you a reconditioned phone. They can't.
Think about it. You can buy a low-end wireless phone new for $15 retail (and probably $5 wholesale). In order to "recondition" them, you'd need a technician to check it out, to make sure it's working. People would be using them for life-threatening emergencies, so they have to work reliably. You'd have to repackage and distribute them. It's cheaper for a phone company or any agency to just buy new phones in bulk. But why bother? Why not just let people get a phone directly from Assurance or Safelink?
As an experienced person in the 911 industry, there was some fraudulent calls, but the larger volume of non 911 calls came from a cell phone refurbishing company that would dial 911 as a testing procedure and then hang up. Do this hundreds of times a day, and you can see the issue with saturating 911 trunks with test calls opposed to real emergency calls. The ability to call 911 from an uninitialized mobile phone evolved from the same ability with a land line in a building to call 911 without service. The problem is that wireless phones are mobile, and can be difficult to track in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore is ripe for abuse and potential abuse. Some kind of identification would be ideal, but there is also burden placed on some entity to do that for essentially free, or as someone suggested having a low-cost SIM that would only call 911. That still doesn't prevent abuse just ties the caller/TN to an account or transaction paid by a customer. Still plenty of room for fraud if someone was determined to commit it.
Coming from someone who works at a LE Comm center and has taken a "SWATing call..." the simplest versions are someone using Skype or similar service to dial into a LE non-emergency number. That's how the one call I took worked. We didn't activate SWAT either, it was apparent when officers were on scene nothing was going on. As other have said, the more sophisticated methods involve ANI/ALI spoofing. Not easy, but not impossible. Haven't seen this method used, but heard about it.
We cannot normally get subscriber information on wireless phones. The information we get is the phone number, the tower it's pinging off of, and sometimes location information gained either by triangulation from nearby cell towers or the phones internal GPS. It works this way whether its an activated phone or an NSI phone. So regardless of which, I can get at least some degree of location information off of ANY wireless phone. (The scene in the movie The Call where they say we can't get location information because it's a prepaid is complete bullshit, fabricated for the sake of the plot).
The real issue is having to use finite resources to respond to fraudulent or illegitimate calls. When you consider most police departments and 911 call centers are short staffed as it is, it makes this an even bigger problem.
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