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Canada and USA Feds Unite To Fight Spammers and Telemarketers
Reader Freshly Exhumed writes: Telemarketers in Canada and the USA have essentially been bypassing each nation's do-not-call registry by basing their efforts from the other or from off-shore locations, while cross border spam remains rampant. Now the CRTC, Canada's telecom and broadcast regulator, has announced it signed a partnership agreement with the Federal Trade Commission of the United States to fight against spam and calls from pesky telemarketers. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) consists of all unsolicited telecommunications, unsolicited commercial email (spam), and other "illegal electronic threats" that cover anti-spam laws in the United States and Canada.
Spam is largely a solved problem. I see little spam. However, I am receiving increasing numbers of telemarketing calls. These calls used spoofed caller-id so that the source appears to be very local. Because they are spoofing caller-id, they don't care about do-not-call lists.
What we need is for telecom companies to block spoofed caller-id.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The biggest issue is all the exceptions they've managed to weasel in. I don't care if I have a business relationship with you, or if you're a political party, or a charity, or whatever else. I still don't want you to advertise to me, that's why I put my number on the damned registry. That should be a clue that I do not take kindly to people calling me trying to sell me things. The only time I want to hear from my ISP, or bank, is if there is a problem with my account, or some other similar threat.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The US CAN-SPAM law was designed to permit "spam", unsolicited bulk communications, UBC, or "spam" as it was originally and very carefully defined. The law _protects_ spam, by setting an extremely low threshold for spam to be considered legal under US federal law, and by enforcing a US federal policy of "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" being the standard to avoid prosecution or civil suit for spam. It also prevents the publication and use of a "Do Not Spam" list for all bulk advertisers. Moreover, most commercial spammers consider any lists of "do not spam" addresses to be a very useful list of spam targets to use for their next company or next client, which they can legally do because of the "opt-out" structure of the CAN-SPAM law.
Spoofing phone numbers is a very distinct issue, and is now replaceable by using throwaway VOIP contact addresses from around the world, and throwaway phone numbers. I'd not expect this to get better.
I got important messages today about my credit card account being closed and a balance I owe on a purchase I didn't make. Who is going to repeatedly alert me to these things if the spammers are shut down?