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Senators Attempting To Remove Robocall Loophole
New submitter bearded_yak writes: Last week, it was reported here that a loophole for debt collection robocalls had found its way into the budget bill. In the end, the loophole survived. Now, several senators want to remove it with Senator Ed Markey's "Help Americans Never Get Unwanted Phone calls" (HANGUP) Act. Meanwhile, according to an article at Consumerist, "the Federal Communications Commission has nine months to craft rules dictating the conditions under which the government would be allowed to make these robocalls", so perhaps this loophole will meet its end before that time.
Most Americans hate robocalls. More Americans put themselves on the “Do Not Call” (DNC) list than voted for any presidential candidate. The law does not work for two reasons. First, the federal government refuses to enforce it so none of the robocallers end up in jail. Second, the politicians wrote loopholes for themselves and friends. Political campaigns are allowed to make robocalls as are certain kinds of political non-profits.
The only answer I can see is to create a political non-profit to advocate for the end of all robocals by using.... robocalls. Let’s call it the “ National Association To Stop ALL Robocalls” (NATSAR), and have the organization distribute to its members free software that allows them to randomly robo-call area code 301, 703, 202 and 212 numbers with a message saying “Hi, we are NATSAR and we want your support for legislation to make it a crime to send ANY unwanted /Marketing/Polling/Political message to a person on the DNC list. Would you like to join us?”. When the people in the DC area and NYC who run our government start getting 20 “political”- and thus legal- robocalls every day at dinner they’ll do something about it.
I spend time in the Virginia suburbs of DC and take my word for it they don’t get tons of spam calls like people in the rest of the country. Why? For the same reason that in the 1960s every city in the U.S. except Washington had a Mafia crime family. The deal was “We’ll leave you alone in DC as long as we get a free hand to operate in the rest of the country”.