Millions and millions? I doubt it's that many. And if there are that means there are millions of developers who are going to start working on rewriting them really soon.
Very often, when someone has their identity stolen, they are treated like the criminal and not the victim.
Like I said, they may be harrassed, but that doesn't mean the law isn't on their side.
At the worst, the corporate entity that extended credit to "them" can write it off, get a tax break and just up their fees annually to cover for it.
Huh? At the worst? What are you talking about?
The victim, however, will have their credit ruined at the least.
It may be temporarily ruined with false information, but credit reporting agencies are required by law to remove that false information.
When your identity is stolen, there is very little you can do about it.
Actually there is a lot you can do about it, and if you catch it quickly you won't have many problems at all.
And when all of my identity was stolen five years ago (from my office, no less), the local police didn't offer any hope or information.
I'm not sure what you expected the local police to do. If you wanted something forcibly removed from your credit report, you'd need to go to a judge, not the police.
I'm only lucky that the person was apparently too stupid to know what data they had (they had my social security card, state photo identification card, birth certificate, pay stub, bank account and checking numbers)...
Huh? So wait a second... What do you mean that you had your "identity stolen"? Just that someone knew your private information?
Except when it becomes the impersonated individual's problem as well.
Well, I don't think it's really the job of the government to assign liability for such incidental damages as the time spent contacting your credit reporting agency to get everything straightened out. But if you want to assign liability, I think there are at least two people to look at before you look at the person who leaked the number. 1) the thief herself, and (in the likely case that the thief cannot afford to pay for the liability) 2) the idiot who gave a loan to the thief and slandered your name by reporting the loan to the credit reporting agency.
If someone is granted a line of credit in my name and don't make payments, the bank comes knocking at my proverbial door, right?
They might knock at your door, but that still doesn't mean you owe them any money.
What a lot of people may not know is you ARE NOT required to give your social security number to utilities, banks, creditors, etc.
Required by what? By law? Yes, there isn't a law saying you have to give your social security number to any of those people. But you are required to give your social security number to most of those people, by those people (in other words, if you want to do business with them).
Sure, it helps your standing with them and they can probably find them on their own, but I personally think with the amount of abuse of this central identification number there needs to be a new, more secure system with safe guards to prevent this sort of rampent abuse.
The vast majority of businesses know this. And the ones that don't will find it out really quickly. Knowing a social security number doesn't prove you are who you say you are.
The first step is for financial institutions to limit the customer's liability for identity theft related fraud, because they're insured by the FDIC.
Limit liability? You have no liability whatsoever for identity theft related fraud. The law is already firmly on your side on that. You're never going to be required by a court to pay back a loan that you didn't take out just because someone knew your social security number. That would be ludicrous.
After that, perhaps a biometric or RFID identification system could eventually be implemented. I know it sounds very big brotherish, but the current system is horrible.
No, the current system is (pretty much) already fine. A business who wishes to extend credit to someone can use whatever means they wish to identify that person. If they screw up and misidentify the person, and that person never pays back, that's their problem. We don't need the government to step in and mandate what form of identification you need to check in order to extend credit to someone. Yes, that would be very big brotherish, and it would be a terrible idea.
RFID? I'm not sure what that would help. RFID is utterly insecure, the benefit of it is convenience, not security. Yes, biometrics are a help, and we've already got a fairly good biometric system set up - the photo ID. Beyond that, for places making significant loans or needing to check your credit which can't verify your address, there's another biometric system commonly used - the fingerprint. Many banks require fingerprints when you cash a check there without having an account, and almost all check cashing places do. In order to get an account, you almost always have to verify that you receive mail at your address and receive phone calls at your non-mobile telephone number.
Unfortunately, the person robbed is the individual whos ID was stolen and then a loan was given fraudulently in their name. The lender or creditor isn't robbed, because they're going to get their blood out of you, whether you're the actual initiator or not.
Apparently you know nothing about the law. No judge in the world would make you pay back a loan that was taken out by someone else just because that person knew a number which was related to you.
Regardless, you seem to have your sense of responsibility completely screwed up. An idiot lends money to a thief and refuses to pay back, and you think some person who happened to tell the thief a number should be responsible.
Honestly, I'd like to see all of the victims of ID theft get together and start filing class-actions against the companies that allow this sort of thing to happen.
Please no. If you're dumb enough to lend someone money because they know a number, you deserve to be robbed.
There are widgets that you can connect to your computer to let you login with your thumbprint.
No there aren't. You must be talking about someone else's computer.
Lots of "secure" things rely on your fingerprint
Name one. So far you're 0 for 1, suggesting that my fingerprint could be used to get into my computer.
About the only thing I can think of is someone who wanted to make an elaborate plan to frame me for a crime. And anyone who wanted to go through that much trouble could easily get my fingerprints anyway.
If some important information about you was leaked from a database, would you rather it be:
A) Your Social Security Number
B) Your fingerprint scans
C) Your Iris/Retina scans
D) Your picture (head only)
Iris/retina scans, then fingerprint scans, then SSN, then my picture. I think about it this way: which would I rather have released on Slashdot, and that's the order I'd put it in.
If you think you can walk down the street, go to the airport, a store, the post office, the bank or use an ATM without your face ending up recorded on some sort of analog or digital medium you're mistaken.
If you think you can do any of these things without leaving fingerprints, then you're even more mistaken.
It's already been done. There was even a Slashdot article on it. The guy took an computer image and make a mold and use gelatin. Then he put the gelatin on his thumb and fooled almost every finger print device he could find. He could also eat the gelatin off if someone got suspicious.
So why not make a fake gelatin thumb when you sign up? Surely you can find a thumbprint image somewhere on the internet. Then the gym won't have your thumbprint, they'll have the fake one.
If anyone is collecting sensitive information from you: SSN, biometric data, etc. you need to get a data retention and privacy policy in writing.
Too late for that. The FBI already has a copy of my fingerprints. They got it when I signed up as an originator of electronic filed tax returns. Pretty much any other part of the federal or state government could get it if they wanted it, it's probably already in databases accessible to all of the federal government. If the government already has it, I don't see who's left to worry about. Anyone who knows me well can easily get it from something I've touched. I just don't see a potential harm.
Exactly, the problem with a thumbprint is that it's insecure as a sole method of authentication. But for something like a gym membership, who cares?
But that doesn't seem to be the problem people have with this. Instead I think they're concerned about some sort of "privacy issue". I'm not sure how you can consider your fingerprint to be private information, since it's trivial for your gym to get a copy of your fingerprint anyway (surely you touch some of the equipment), but that seems to be the knee-jerk slashdot reaction.
Sure, why not? I submitted biometric data to join Busch Gardens. They measured the distance between my fingers or something. See the story about it. Sure, it's not fingerprints, but what's the difference?
If you have a Phase 2 phone, the dispatcher should get lat/long coordinates for the phone, though I'm not sure exactly how accurate it has to be.
Does that work for all 911 call centers? Because last time I heard, about a year ago, the call center where I lived in was just in the process of being upgraded.
Yes. Make it into something that does not look like a phone.
And you'll still have people who hook something that does look like a phone up to it. In fact, you'll probably have the VoIP companies make it as easy as possible to hook up a normal phone to it, and then tell you not to hook up a normal phone to it, because some idiot in Congress made it illegal.
Or better still, provide as much 911 service as you can.
Those two ideas are contradictory though. Having a half-assed 911 service is worse than having no 911 service at all. If you have a half-assed service, then people will grow to rely on it. If you just tell people they won't have 911, then they can easily plan for this, by having a land line (maybe without any other service), by having a cell phone, by having a two-way radio, etc.
It seems to me you don't understand how 911 dispatchers work. If you call in to report your house on fire, for instance, you don't get connected to the fire station, you get connected to the 911 call center. They then contact the fire station to relay the message. They might do this by phone, but more likely they do it through radio. You call from somewhere in the jurisdiction next to them, and they can easily radio that jurisdiction and give them the message. You call from somewhere 1000 miles away and the best they can do is tell you to hang up and call XXX-XXXX (the phone number of the 911 center you're located at, which they probably don't even have easy access to, since they weren't designed to handle this situation, and there might not even be an outside accessible number in which case they'd have to figure out the number of the fire/police/whatever where you live).
You'd have been much better off just calling your local police emergency number in the first place. In fact, that'd be a quick solution. The VoIP companies could let you remap 911 to your local police emergency number. At least these numbers are designed to allow calls from anywhere in the world, even if they don't generally receive calls from all over.
A better solution, though quite expensive, would be to start a national emergency call center. You'd have to train the operators to answer calls from all over the country, and then work with the 911 calling centers from the jurisdiction they're located. This would be very expensive, and would only benefit a very small portion of the population. But if you really really want to let people call 911 from their laptop, that's the only reasonable way to do it. Of course you could then add in location information on top of that, and you could set up a whole system where you train operators on how IP addresses work, etc. In the end it could be almost as good as just using a land line, and probably would cost so much and raise VoIP costs so much that it would kill the systems completely.
It isn't impossible to provide location at least most of the time anyway.
Maybe, but incorrect information is much much worse than no information at all.
Sure you can't come up with a single mechanism that covers all cases, but the same is true of cellphone triangualtion etc too.
I can access the cell site from ~15 miles away with a regular phone (ie something like 150sq mile of searching for where I might be.
I don't think you understand why you need location information. It mainly isn't so that the emergency workers can find out where you are if you can call 911 and can't speak. That's nice, but 911 service is at least useful without that. The problem is when you live in Los Angeles and get sent to a 911 service in New York City. It's going to take a very long time to sort things out when that happens. 911 centers were not designed to take calls from all over the world. 15, 30 miles away, they can handle that. Even if it's not in their jurisdiction it's in one nearby and you can bet the operators have been trained on handling that situation. If you hit the 911 center 1500 miles away, they
Well, sure, if you're going to redesign the whole internet, of course if you're going to do that, and you're the government, why not just require telcos and cablecos to provide address location for all IP addresses. I'm sure the slashdot crowd would just love that one.
So let people set up 911 as a speed dial to the local police emergency number. Then if their 4 year old or guide dog picks up the phone and calls 911, at least they'll get somewhere useful.
If it looks like a phone, and for 99% of use behaves like a phone, then in an emergency (== time when people are not thinking), it should also act like a phone.
Whatever, if that were the rule, I'd just create a VoIP service with devices that don't look like phones.
You seem to be missing the point that it's inherently impossible to accomplish what you're requesting. In essence you're saying that VoIP should not exist.
And don't give me some bullshit that it is possible, because it just isn't. You can use GPS, but that won't work in locations that can't access the GPS signals. You can require people to set their address every time their IP address changes, but people will forget. What do you do then, shut off the phones completely? That's great, now they not only can't call 911, they can't call the police station either.
This is a problem which can only be solved with the help of the end user. If the end user wants 911 access to work, they're going to have to *gasp* do something to make it work.
How long have phones been required to work with 911 anyway? I thought just a few years ago there were areas of the country without any 911 service at all.
It depends. The old system gave the 911 operator the telephone number and address of the cell tower. They're supposed to change this, but they probably haven't gotten that far. I called 911 a couple years ago from my cell phone and I remember the operator asked me my phone number, which absolutely shocked me that she didn't already know.
What if you don't get GPS reception? Oh well, no 911 for you?
At least with a cell phone they'll have a general idea of where you are based on the tower. And it's a lot more likely you have GPS reception if you already have cell phone reception.
It's not so much a matter of where you are specifically, as a matter of where you are generally. 911 centers are run by state and local governments, not the federal government. People answering the phones are not trained in the procedures of centers half way across the country, and there really isn't a reasonable way to do this. Sure, if you can tell the dispatcher in New York that you are located in California and your house is on fire they could eventually figure out how to get in contact with the local fire department, somehow, but this would likely take a very long time, because the systems just aren't set up to support that. Basically, the dispatcher would probably have to ask you your area code and then talk to a telephone operator in that area code, who might be able to look up your address and correlate it to a 911 dispatch center, which you could then call and relay the message. Not only would it slow down the response greatly, it'd also waste a lot of the dispatcher's time which would increase the chances of running out of dispatchers due to simultaneous calls.
In my opinion the only reasonable way to mandate 911 service for VoIP is to create a completely separate national dispatch system to handle those calls. You'd have to create expert systems to guide the operators through all the different procedures of all the different jurisdictions, and in the end you'd probably still wind up adding a layer of delay to anyone using the national system (the only reasonable way to do it would be to have the national dispatcher relay to the local dispatcher who would then relay to the local fire/police/ambulance station, there are just too many procedural differences to let the national operators dispatch directly, beside the fact that local dispatch frequently uses radio waves which wouldn't be feasible to send across the entire country).
Slashdot Mirror
Millions and millions? I doubt it's that many. And if there are that means there are millions of developers who are going to start working on rewriting them really soon.
Very often, when someone has their identity stolen, they are treated like the criminal and not the victim.
Like I said, they may be harrassed, but that doesn't mean the law isn't on their side.
At the worst, the corporate entity that extended credit to "them" can write it off, get a tax break and just up their fees annually to cover for it.
Huh? At the worst? What are you talking about?
The victim, however, will have their credit ruined at the least.
It may be temporarily ruined with false information, but credit reporting agencies are required by law to remove that false information.
When your identity is stolen, there is very little you can do about it.
Actually there is a lot you can do about it, and if you catch it quickly you won't have many problems at all.
And when all of my identity was stolen five years ago (from my office, no less), the local police didn't offer any hope or information.
I'm not sure what you expected the local police to do. If you wanted something forcibly removed from your credit report, you'd need to go to a judge, not the police.
I'm only lucky that the person was apparently too stupid to know what data they had (they had my social security card, state photo identification card, birth certificate, pay stub, bank account and checking numbers)...
Huh? So wait a second... What do you mean that you had your "identity stolen"? Just that someone knew your private information?
Except when it becomes the impersonated individual's problem as well.
Well, I don't think it's really the job of the government to assign liability for such incidental damages as the time spent contacting your credit reporting agency to get everything straightened out. But if you want to assign liability, I think there are at least two people to look at before you look at the person who leaked the number. 1) the thief herself, and (in the likely case that the thief cannot afford to pay for the liability) 2) the idiot who gave a loan to the thief and slandered your name by reporting the loan to the credit reporting agency.
If someone is granted a line of credit in my name and don't make payments, the bank comes knocking at my proverbial door, right?
They might knock at your door, but that still doesn't mean you owe them any money.
What a lot of people may not know is you ARE NOT required to give your social security number to utilities, banks, creditors, etc.
Required by what? By law? Yes, there isn't a law saying you have to give your social security number to any of those people. But you are required to give your social security number to most of those people, by those people (in other words, if you want to do business with them).
Sure, it helps your standing with them and they can probably find them on their own, but I personally think with the amount of abuse of this central identification number there needs to be a new, more secure system with safe guards to prevent this sort of rampent abuse.
The vast majority of businesses know this. And the ones that don't will find it out really quickly. Knowing a social security number doesn't prove you are who you say you are.
The first step is for financial institutions to limit the customer's liability for identity theft related fraud, because they're insured by the FDIC.
Limit liability? You have no liability whatsoever for identity theft related fraud. The law is already firmly on your side on that. You're never going to be required by a court to pay back a loan that you didn't take out just because someone knew your social security number. That would be ludicrous.
After that, perhaps a biometric or RFID identification system could eventually be implemented. I know it sounds very big brotherish, but the current system is horrible.
No, the current system is (pretty much) already fine. A business who wishes to extend credit to someone can use whatever means they wish to identify that person. If they screw up and misidentify the person, and that person never pays back, that's their problem. We don't need the government to step in and mandate what form of identification you need to check in order to extend credit to someone. Yes, that would be very big brotherish, and it would be a terrible idea.
RFID? I'm not sure what that would help. RFID is utterly insecure, the benefit of it is convenience, not security. Yes, biometrics are a help, and we've already got a fairly good biometric system set up - the photo ID. Beyond that, for places making significant loans or needing to check your credit which can't verify your address, there's another biometric system commonly used - the fingerprint. Many banks require fingerprints when you cash a check there without having an account, and almost all check cashing places do. In order to get an account, you almost always have to verify that you receive mail at your address and receive phone calls at your non-mobile telephone number.
Unfortunately, the person robbed is the individual whos ID was stolen and then a loan was given fraudulently in their name. The lender or creditor isn't robbed, because they're going to get their blood out of you, whether you're the actual initiator or not.
Apparently you know nothing about the law. No judge in the world would make you pay back a loan that was taken out by someone else just because that person knew a number which was related to you.
Regardless, you seem to have your sense of responsibility completely screwed up. An idiot lends money to a thief and refuses to pay back, and you think some person who happened to tell the thief a number should be responsible.
Honestly, I'd like to see all of the victims of ID theft get together and start filing class-actions against the companies that allow this sort of thing to happen.
Please no. If you're dumb enough to lend someone money because they know a number, you deserve to be robbed.
OK, fine, so you could wear gloves all the time. But do you? If you don't, the fact that you could doesn't help very much.
*cough* mask *cough*
There are widgets that you can connect to your computer to let you login with your thumbprint.
No there aren't. You must be talking about someone else's computer.
Lots of "secure" things rely on your fingerprint
Name one. So far you're 0 for 1, suggesting that my fingerprint could be used to get into my computer.
About the only thing I can think of is someone who wanted to make an elaborate plan to frame me for a crime. And anyone who wanted to go through that much trouble could easily get my fingerprints anyway.
If some important information about you was leaked from a database, would you rather it be: A) Your Social Security Number B) Your fingerprint scans C) Your Iris/Retina scans D) Your picture (head only)
Iris/retina scans, then fingerprint scans, then SSN, then my picture. I think about it this way: which would I rather have released on Slashdot, and that's the order I'd put it in.
If you think you can walk down the street, go to the airport, a store, the post office, the bank or use an ATM without your face ending up recorded on some sort of analog or digital medium you're mistaken.
If you think you can do any of these things without leaving fingerprints, then you're even more mistaken.
Even my bank doesn't require biometrics
You mean you didn't need to show them a photo ID to create an account? What bank is this?
Or did you not realize that your image is biometric data?
So your gym uses biometrics too. I wonder if the slashdot crowd has a problem with this.
It's already been done. There was even a Slashdot article on it. The guy took an computer image and make a mold and use gelatin. Then he put the gelatin on his thumb and fooled almost every finger print device he could find. He could also eat the gelatin off if someone got suspicious.
So why not make a fake gelatin thumb when you sign up? Surely you can find a thumbprint image somewhere on the internet. Then the gym won't have your thumbprint, they'll have the fake one.
If anyone is collecting sensitive information from you: SSN, biometric data, etc. you need to get a data retention and privacy policy in writing.
Too late for that. The FBI already has a copy of my fingerprints. They got it when I signed up as an originator of electronic filed tax returns. Pretty much any other part of the federal or state government could get it if they wanted it, it's probably already in databases accessible to all of the federal government. If the government already has it, I don't see who's left to worry about. Anyone who knows me well can easily get it from something I've touched. I just don't see a potential harm.
Exactly, the problem with a thumbprint is that it's insecure as a sole method of authentication. But for something like a gym membership, who cares?
But that doesn't seem to be the problem people have with this. Instead I think they're concerned about some sort of "privacy issue". I'm not sure how you can consider your fingerprint to be private information, since it's trivial for your gym to get a copy of your fingerprint anyway (surely you touch some of the equipment), but that seems to be the knee-jerk slashdot reaction.
Once they've got your biometric data, how secure are they going to keep it?
Umm, why would they need to keep it secure in the first place?
Unlike a password, it's not possible to change your biometric data if someone steals the gym's files and uses it to spoof other systems.
And also unlike a password, it's not a password. What system could you spoof by knowing what someone's fingerprint looks like?
Would You Submit Biometric Data to Join a Gym?
Sure, why not? I submitted biometric data to join Busch Gardens. They measured the distance between my fingers or something. See the story about it. Sure, it's not fingerprints, but what's the difference?
If you have a Phase 2 phone, the dispatcher should get lat/long coordinates for the phone, though I'm not sure exactly how accurate it has to be.
Does that work for all 911 call centers? Because last time I heard, about a year ago, the call center where I lived in was just in the process of being upgraded.
Yes. Make it into something that does not look like a phone.
And you'll still have people who hook something that does look like a phone up to it. In fact, you'll probably have the VoIP companies make it as easy as possible to hook up a normal phone to it, and then tell you not to hook up a normal phone to it, because some idiot in Congress made it illegal.
Or better still, provide as much 911 service as you can.
Those two ideas are contradictory though. Having a half-assed 911 service is worse than having no 911 service at all. If you have a half-assed service, then people will grow to rely on it. If you just tell people they won't have 911, then they can easily plan for this, by having a land line (maybe without any other service), by having a cell phone, by having a two-way radio, etc.
It seems to me you don't understand how 911 dispatchers work. If you call in to report your house on fire, for instance, you don't get connected to the fire station, you get connected to the 911 call center. They then contact the fire station to relay the message. They might do this by phone, but more likely they do it through radio. You call from somewhere in the jurisdiction next to them, and they can easily radio that jurisdiction and give them the message. You call from somewhere 1000 miles away and the best they can do is tell you to hang up and call XXX-XXXX (the phone number of the 911 center you're located at, which they probably don't even have easy access to, since they weren't designed to handle this situation, and there might not even be an outside accessible number in which case they'd have to figure out the number of the fire/police/whatever where you live).
You'd have been much better off just calling your local police emergency number in the first place. In fact, that'd be a quick solution. The VoIP companies could let you remap 911 to your local police emergency number. At least these numbers are designed to allow calls from anywhere in the world, even if they don't generally receive calls from all over.
A better solution, though quite expensive, would be to start a national emergency call center. You'd have to train the operators to answer calls from all over the country, and then work with the 911 calling centers from the jurisdiction they're located. This would be very expensive, and would only benefit a very small portion of the population. But if you really really want to let people call 911 from their laptop, that's the only reasonable way to do it. Of course you could then add in location information on top of that, and you could set up a whole system where you train operators on how IP addresses work, etc. In the end it could be almost as good as just using a land line, and probably would cost so much and raise VoIP costs so much that it would kill the systems completely.
It isn't impossible to provide location at least most of the time anyway.
Maybe, but incorrect information is much much worse than no information at all.
Sure you can't come up with a single mechanism that covers all cases, but the same is true of cellphone triangualtion etc too.
I can access the cell site from ~15 miles away with a regular phone (ie something like 150sq mile of searching for where I might be.
I don't think you understand why you need location information. It mainly isn't so that the emergency workers can find out where you are if you can call 911 and can't speak. That's nice, but 911 service is at least useful without that. The problem is when you live in Los Angeles and get sent to a 911 service in New York City. It's going to take a very long time to sort things out when that happens. 911 centers were not designed to take calls from all over the world. 15, 30 miles away, they can handle that. Even if it's not in their jurisdiction it's in one nearby and you can bet the operators have been trained on handling that situation. If you hit the 911 center 1500 miles away, they
Well, sure, if you're going to redesign the whole internet, of course if you're going to do that, and you're the government, why not just require telcos and cablecos to provide address location for all IP addresses. I'm sure the slashdot crowd would just love that one.
So let people set up 911 as a speed dial to the local police emergency number. Then if their 4 year old or guide dog picks up the phone and calls 911, at least they'll get somewhere useful.
If it looks like a phone, and for 99% of use behaves like a phone, then in an emergency (== time when people are not thinking), it should also act like a phone.
Whatever, if that were the rule, I'd just create a VoIP service with devices that don't look like phones.
You seem to be missing the point that it's inherently impossible to accomplish what you're requesting. In essence you're saying that VoIP should not exist.
And don't give me some bullshit that it is possible, because it just isn't. You can use GPS, but that won't work in locations that can't access the GPS signals. You can require people to set their address every time their IP address changes, but people will forget. What do you do then, shut off the phones completely? That's great, now they not only can't call 911, they can't call the police station either.
This is a problem which can only be solved with the help of the end user. If the end user wants 911 access to work, they're going to have to *gasp* do something to make it work.
How long have phones been required to work with 911 anyway? I thought just a few years ago there were areas of the country without any 911 service at all.
It depends. The old system gave the 911 operator the telephone number and address of the cell tower. They're supposed to change this, but they probably haven't gotten that far. I called 911 a couple years ago from my cell phone and I remember the operator asked me my phone number, which absolutely shocked me that she didn't already know.
What if you don't get GPS reception? Oh well, no 911 for you?
At least with a cell phone they'll have a general idea of where you are based on the tower. And it's a lot more likely you have GPS reception if you already have cell phone reception.
What does it matter where you are specifically?
It's not so much a matter of where you are specifically, as a matter of where you are generally. 911 centers are run by state and local governments, not the federal government. People answering the phones are not trained in the procedures of centers half way across the country, and there really isn't a reasonable way to do this. Sure, if you can tell the dispatcher in New York that you are located in California and your house is on fire they could eventually figure out how to get in contact with the local fire department, somehow, but this would likely take a very long time, because the systems just aren't set up to support that. Basically, the dispatcher would probably have to ask you your area code and then talk to a telephone operator in that area code, who might be able to look up your address and correlate it to a 911 dispatch center, which you could then call and relay the message. Not only would it slow down the response greatly, it'd also waste a lot of the dispatcher's time which would increase the chances of running out of dispatchers due to simultaneous calls.
In my opinion the only reasonable way to mandate 911 service for VoIP is to create a completely separate national dispatch system to handle those calls. You'd have to create expert systems to guide the operators through all the different procedures of all the different jurisdictions, and in the end you'd probably still wind up adding a layer of delay to anyone using the national system (the only reasonable way to do it would be to have the national dispatcher relay to the local dispatcher who would then relay to the local fire/police/ambulance station, there are just too many procedural differences to let the national operators dispatch directly, beside the fact that local dispatch frequently uses radio waves which wouldn't be feasible to send across the entire country).