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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.
But in case that never happens, you can just buy a call blocker and hook it up to your phone.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
That's so nice of you to want to protect us from spam. But you know what's even more annoying and threatening and expensive than spam?
Worse than spam, is stuff that "finds its way" into our laws without ever being attributed. The guilty parties are never punished or even informally shamed or identified so that anyone can ever vote approval or disapproval for that person in the next election.
Put an end to unattributed "malgislation" (eww, let's keep working on finding the right word) and then you'll really be heroes. I want every item in every bill to have a person's name on it. Let them continue to be as evil and un-American as they want with their laws, but let's stop allowing them to be irresponsibly anonymous when they do it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Investigating "a loophole for debt collection robocalls had found its way into the budget bill":
I can narrow this down to having been introduced by the House. Commit 2015-10-28 pushed by House shows:
https://www.govtrack.us/congre...
Previous 2015-05-22 revision committed by Senate
https://www.govtrack.us/congre...
Diff places blame on house.
Perhaps an improvement would be
"The United States House of Representatives added a loophole for debt collection robocalls into the budget bill":
This is the limit of my journalism abilities here, but just hoping to make some improvement.
I would glad pay money for Slashdot if somehow the journalism could be improved.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Robocalls from political campaigns are exempted too. My parents made a largish political donation a few years back, which apparently put them on some sort of list. They were harassed by robocalls asking for more political donations for over a year. It was so bad that when I visited a few months before the election, they didn't even bother answering the phone anymore, letting it go straight to voicemail and answering only if it was someone they knew leaving a message. They got 5-10 of these calls every night while I was there. When they moved and I asked if they wanted to keep their old phone number, their answer was hell no.
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”.