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John Oliver Fights Robocalls By Robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners. In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners. "Hi FCC, this is John from customer service," Oliver's recorded voice says on the call. "Congratulations, you've just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today... robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes -- here's some bagpipe music."
When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said. "It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls." Under U.S. law, political robocalls to landline telephones are allowed without prior consent from the recipient. Such calls to cell phones require the called party's prior express consent, but Oliver presumably directed his robocalls to the commissioners' office phones. Oliver told the FCC commissioners: "if you want to tell us that you don't consent to be robocalled, that's absolutely no problem. Just write a certified letter to the address we buried somewhere within the first chapter of Moby Dick that's currently scrolling up the screen... find the address, write us a letter, and we'll stop the calls immediately."
When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said. "It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls." Under U.S. law, political robocalls to landline telephones are allowed without prior consent from the recipient. Such calls to cell phones require the called party's prior express consent, but Oliver presumably directed his robocalls to the commissioners' office phones. Oliver told the FCC commissioners: "if you want to tell us that you don't consent to be robocalled, that's absolutely no problem. Just write a certified letter to the address we buried somewhere within the first chapter of Moby Dick that's currently scrolling up the screen... find the address, write us a letter, and we'll stop the calls immediately."
Why such a long period in between calls? It should be 90 seconds.
Is this happening to anyone else? About two weeks ago we started getting regular robocalls at 6 AM local. (Usually they've waited until 8:30 AM local time.) And then, late last week we got one robocall at 5:15 AM. (I'm on call, so I *have* to answer the phone.) And this is to a cell phone! (We haven't had a land line for a couple years.) This is going beyond annoying, to the point where I'm going to start calling FCC commissioners myself.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They DO have a legitimate purpose. The people being called are public officials. They are the natural recipients of petitions for the redress of grievances WRT communications in the United States. No law may abridge that right.
If only he had some sort of position of power involving communications. He could do something about robocalls.
Oh he said he’s against them but he’s also on record as being opposed to rules that former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler put in place to fight them. Also his current solution is to “urge” the telecoms to do something about them. Perhaps if Pai was head of the FCC he could do more but he simply doesn’t have that kind of power.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It is not that hard.
The phone company know who they're billing when they complete a circuit. They know who every caller on their network is and what numbers they are assigned. The TELCO should be responsible for assigning the id to the circuit. Not the subscriber.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
"But the phone companies can't do that due to $TECHNICALITY"
This is 2019, and they can't keep track of 20 bytes of information? Give me a break. They always seem to know who to bill for a call. With this financial incentive in place, they'd figure it out right quick.
On my iPhone, 90% of scam calls say "Scam Likely". The false positive rate seems to be 0% (No legitimate call has been falsely flag as a scam).
If Apple can detect these calls, why can't the FCC require the telcos to block them? They have at least as much info about the calls as Apple does.
Robocalls LIE about their number. They use random numbers in the same area code as you (often) to encourage you to pick up. They do NOT own these numbers.
What you're advocating would be punching a random person named "Frank X" cause two days ago someone hit you in the dark and yelled "I'm Frank X". Not the most reliable source of information there.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
please explain what the FCC can do?
The FCC should ban number spoofing, unless the company doing it has full legal control over both the calling number and the spoofed number.
Any spoofed call should be required to have a live human available to handle callbacks on the spoofed number, and that human should be required to provide the full name and legal domestic address of the entity that made the call.
There are legitimate reasons for spoofing. There is no legitimate reason for anonymous spoofing without accountability.
It is ALSO true it was enough of a problem when Obama was president, the FCC should have been doing something at that point.
If you had watched the Last Week Tonight episode you would know that under Obama the FCC tried to block robocalls. Current FCC chair Pai was on the FCC back then and voted against it. What a surprise.
Congress should set broad guidelines and leave the technical details up to the regulatory agencies.
So this should be done by the FCC.
As usual, a bunch of excuses.
The ID misrepresented if the person making the call is not entitled to use the number displayed. It's as simple as that.
You people have known about this problem for decades, but have done jack squat about it so far. But I'm sure at $10 bucks a pop, smart people like you would figure out a solution in no time. After all, protocol handshakes, whitelists and the like aren't exactly rocket science anymore.