Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
Scaled 15 hours ago [-]
You can also file a comment at the Federal Register for the next 16 days -- It looks like the proposal is 2026-10407
What I find most concerning is that this isn't a bill or law. Unelected government officials at the FCC can apparently just decide to do this.
forshaper 14 hours ago [-]
It's been this way at least since the Administrative Procedure Act. Solidified later with Chevron. Chevron is struck down, but in effect not too much has changed.
tantalor 11 hours ago [-]
[Loper Bright intensifies]
10 hours ago [-]
rdiddly 13 hours ago [-]
They badly need to be checked and/or balanced.
unethical_ban 5 hours ago [-]
I have some skepticism of the administrative branch but it makes sense to have a nimble government. When they make bad decisions it is Congress prerogative to write law to guide these bureaucracies. The problem is the US Congress is broken.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 11 hours ago [-]
The ATF does this all the time, too.
IAmBroom 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, that is the way federal agencies work. Details of complex systems are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest.
One alternative is that Trump can do it at will. Or, to add a few more steps, Trump can fire the FCC head at will, replace him with a lackey, and then do it at will.
JumpCrisscross 15 hours ago [-]
> Details of complex systems are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest
And according to the Administrative Procedures Act, which provides substantial guardrails and checks on agency authority.
Ajedi32 15 hours ago [-]
> [Laws] are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest
This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function. It feels like you're describing China rather than the US.
> Trump can do it at will.
Which is also not how our constitution is supposed to work. The executive branch (which includes both the president and his appointees) is not supposed to be able to make laws, only execute on existing law.
Yes, I know this is how the system works these days. I'm just lamenting how it went so wrong...
jerf 15 hours ago [-]
"This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function."
There is a family of interesting theories, or perhaps if you prefer, simply a way of looking at history in which you don't consider the "United States" as a single governance structure that has existed back to 1776, but as a series of related, but distinct entities with distinct "social contracts" (a term laden with some philosophical baggage, here I just use it in a very general sense of what people expect from each other in various roles), and distinct theories of governance. While the later entities wrap themselves in the 1776 flag the current ruling structure is quite different from that era. From this point of view you can even go back and include the Continental Congress as the starting point of the "United States" and gain some insight into the way governance can fail as well.
I mention this because it may help free your mind up to consider how the systems really work today beyond the at-times jingoistic "Democracy!". There's a lot of flexibility in how you approach this because it's all opinion anyhow, but there is a strong case to be made that this is the "technocrat" era, in which the executive branch has been given a lot more power both by design and by the stresses of history to give more power to "experts" to deal with the radical changes the world has undergone. I think I can say something generally politically agreeable by pointing out that Congress doesn't seem to be particularly good at handling the world right now; how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
The de facto rules haven't really matched the de jure of the 1776 governance in a long time.
I am trying to keep this as neutral as possible. I have as many opinions as anyone else, but I'm just bringing up the general idea. I think it's probably good to initially just ponder based on one's own understanding of history and match it against your own ideas before you find other people handing you a theory on a platter. There's time enough for that.
AnthonyMouse 14 hours ago [-]
> how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
Isn't that actually a major cause of the trouble? You expect Congress to deal with more and more complexities but limit the number of people (i.e. experts) who are members of it, causing them all to be generalists and moreover to have to spend more of their time campaigning rather than debating because the value of each seat is higher and correspondingly so is the effort someone will put in to take it from you and the proportion of your time you have to spend merely defending it.
Meanwhile people feel that their vote doesn't matter because a member of Congress now represents almost a million people and then ordinary people can neither affect the campaign nor get the ear of their own representative.
Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people. The members who are doctors would understand both medicine and medical bureaucracy. The members who are engineers would understand technology. Instead of them being lawyers whose first job is campaigning.
throw-the-towel 11 hours ago [-]
This sounds like what the Soviet/Chinese Congresses of People's Deputies were supposed to be.
cucumber3732842 13 hours ago [-]
>What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
Why must congress do more? Most of this stuff would be state issues if not for the absurdity that is current commerce clause interpretation.
degamad 3 hours ago [-]
Making it a state issue does not answer the question of should everything be decided by laws, or should some be decided by regulations?
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law. It's pretty normal for Congress to sketch the general outline of regulation and require the relevant bureaucracy to fill in the details.
Though in this particular case, unless this is based on a change to the law it seems like an overreach by the FCC.
AnthonyMouse 14 hours ago [-]
> There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law.
Isn't this the argument against unelected rulemaking?
Suppose administrative agencies worked like this: They draft rules and then periodically submit them to Congress who decides whether to enact them. For uncontroversial changes this is essentially a rubber stamp, Congress defers to the experts' recommendations and passes the proposed rules. But now if the administrative agency tries to make a major policy change, it can't go through without Congressional approval, and Congress is fully within their authority to reject or amend the proposal.
What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
laughing_man 13 hours ago [-]
Realistically, in this case, you're moving decision-making from unelected bureaucrats to unelected Congressional staff. It's an invitation for corruption without really improving the process.
cyberax 13 hours ago [-]
Congresspeople (or local legislators) do not have the expertise to evaluate the rules. Or even bandwidth. For example, the NEC is around 800 pages and is extremely technical.
That's why these minutiae are delegated to agencies. But Congress can step in at _any_ point and override the decisions of individual agencies. The rulemaking process is also _extremely_ slow on purpose, giving Congress plenty of time to act.
mcmcmc 15 hours ago [-]
Administrative law is the (suboptimal) answer to congressional gridlock, which is the real problem. If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow. Regardless the overturning of Chevron deference makes administrative rules like this more susceptible to challenge. Assuming the telcos have the backbone to do so of course.
Ajedi32 14 hours ago [-]
Congress passes plenty of laws. 95 so far just since the last election: https://www.congress.gov/public-laws/119th-congress Last congress passed 274. It's really only the controversial stuff that gets gridlocked.
The problem is that our government is now so large and complicated that it's simply no longer possible for Congress to effectively set policy for all of it. (This would be true even if they weren't so polarized.) So instead they just keep delegating more and more power to the executive branch.
The Administrative Procedures Act, Congressional Review Act, and the recent overturning of Chevron are all good checks on executive/agency power here, but I don't think any of them solves the fundamental issue that the executive branch was simply never designed to wield this kind of power. I'm not really sure what the right solution is.
sdellis 13 hours ago [-]
Two-party politics promotes gridlock. Multi-party systems, as long as they don't have veto players, don't have as much stagnation and do a better job of citizen representation.
deaux 7 hours ago [-]
Do they? 79% of Australians and 73% of Germans have an unfavorable view of Israel, in Germany's case 49% of all being "very" unfavorable [0]. Don't see much representation of that in their politics. Both very much multi-party systems. Australia's system in particular has aspects that are often held up as one of the best in the world. Even on important other topics, it doesn't seem to reflect things much.
Another example, if you survey basically any multi-party European state such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and so on purely on economic policies, you'll overwhelmingly find people supporting much more progressive taxation and in general more socialist economic policies. I'm talking large majorities. Including nationalization of many institutions and so on. Yet their governments have done the direct opposite for decades. Not very representative.
The better representation you're talking about is very surface level, for everything that matters the outcome is that favored by big capital.
> If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow.
Do we though? When there is a lack of consensus on what federal law should be, those are exactly the times the federal apparatus should be silent and leave it to the states.
mcmcmc 13 hours ago [-]
So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?
This is just dodging the question of why can’t Congress do its job.
tzs 8 hours ago [-]
The US is a large country with a large economy and a very diverse economy. It is probably not feasible for Congress to deal with the low level details of managing all that.
Terr_ 15 hours ago [-]
Hold up: Parent-poster is obviously talking about federal regulations, not federal laws, and there are important differences between them... so why have you altered the quote to say [Laws]?
That's false. You've put your own words into their mouth to create a "sounds like China" strawman.
mothballed 15 hours ago [-]
The regulations are [often] binding as law. When they change the regulations they are changing the law, under the fiction they're merely changing the interpretation of the law.
An example that comes to mind is the prosecution of Tate Adamiak. One of his machine gun charges was for having an improperly demilled machine gun parts. The parts were demilled under pre-2001 import standards, and the parts were imported pre-2001, and legally imported and sold through a licensed FFL on gun broker. Magically at some point the rule changed and the letter of law never did, and magically the parts weren't parts but actually a machine gun... this bound as law. I think he'll be released in about 15 years.
Ajedi32 15 hours ago [-]
Ah yes I forgot, they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break. Silly me.
JumpCrisscross 15 hours ago [-]
> they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break
If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)
mothballed 15 hours ago [-]
I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not. It's literally the same damn thing but with a different sized cartridge. Nothing in the statute would allow this, yet executive 'delegation' mumbo-jumbo and magically one is basically unregulated and the other is felonies out the ass if you start commercially selling them without a host of licensing and checks.
The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.
JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago [-]
> I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not
Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it.
We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.
wahern 9 hours ago [-]
The president has a large degree of control over the agencies and their output, so in practice agency delegation granted presidents immense power. This power went largely unexercised due to norms. But that has been slowly changing, and under Trump radically changing. And if SCOTUS adopts the Unitary Executive Theory, as they seem poised to do, then we'll have something very close to a king, difficult to distinguish from 18th century Great Britain.
I don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now. Currently the primary checks are procedural limitations; but were Trump a better, more well organized leader these procedural checks wouldn't pose much of a hurdle at all.
If you want a more technocratic administrative state, the agencies would require more autonomy from the president than they have now, but things are moving in the opposite direction both as a practical matter and constitutionally.
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now
A modern economy has a million small emergencies every day. Given the choice between dysfunction and autocracy, humans routinely choose the latter. So every time an emergency emerges that Congress takes too long to act on, and where the President steps in, the window shifts power to the executive.
cucumber3732842 14 hours ago [-]
>If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail
That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.
Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.
JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago [-]
> That's a distinction without a difference
Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
> Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures
Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction.
>Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
And the sky is purple. See, we can both make baseless assertions. You can say it all day long. Doesn't make it true. At the end of the day the executive agencies are unilaterally costing people money that's on the same order as real deal criminal fines for comparable conduct. The word "civil" doesn't change that anymore than it changes the true nature of civil asset forfieture.
>Most civil monetary penalties are for....
They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for.
You list broad categories because when people dig into the nitty gritty of it they find it unconscionable. Municipalities threatening landowners hundreds of dollars per day multiplied by years for not having the proper permit to clear vegetation on their own land. OSHA fining businesses thousands because unsupervised line employees were doing dumb shit they were told not to that only endangers themselves. And then these people have to lawyer up and defend themselves for more thousands because the fines are always way higher if you don't. All at the literal whim of an enforcement official.
All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have. The government, federal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to meaningfully punish people (even corporate people) without the consent of the people (i.e. a jury). The way civil process cuts the judiciary out entirely is worse still.
Just declaring "well it's civil" because the accused's name isn't going on a naughty list and jail isn't a potential penalty doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit to argue in front of the arbitrary kangaroo process owned by the same agency that issued the fine (of course you can sue if you want but the enforcement agencies avoid creating situations where that's practical).
JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago [-]
> They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for
Juries don't determine sentencing, either. The Seventh Amendment has broadly been interpreted to preserve jury trials for most civil liability, including from the federal government.
> Municipalities...
Not federal!
> All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have
Not a federal issue!
...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
> doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued
> without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit
...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
This is a wild conversation. I've gone from being somewhat sympathetic to your argument to now wondering if that entire platform is baseless. (I'm increasingly convinced we need a principles of law course mandated in high school. It doesn't even need to be a full year. But our republic suffers when folks don't understand the basics.)
mothballed 15 hours ago [-]
The intellectual-academic class are having an existential crisis that they've lost the reigns of the unelected bureaucratic apparatus and it is now being wielded against them. They are still confused at how to respond to this as they're certain they couldn't have been wrong about deferring (uh, 'delegate regulatory authority') the power vested in congress and elected representation to themselves. Surprise pikachu when it turns out the "apolitical, public goal oriented specialists' were useful idiots in the process of handing power from congress to the executive.
If you thought the political apparatus was willingly going to leave the reigns to "apolitical specialists" rather than ruthlessly consolidating it toward the hands of the most power hungry self-dealing monsters that can command the executive branch then obviously you have not been living in in reality. Of course by the time the blindfold has been removed, the power is already largely consolidated.
15 hours ago [-]
JumpCrisscross 15 hours ago [-]
> unelected bureaucratic apparatus
Unelected—often unappointed—bureaucrats have never had more power in the U.S. government than they have today.
ChoGGi 14 hours ago [-]
You want to have to vote for every single decision maker in the government?
skinfaxi 14 hours ago [-]
Being able to is different from being obligated.
TJSomething 13 hours ago [-]
I mean I feel obligated. I'd feel bad if I skipped voting in an election where I found out after the fact that one of the candidates kicked puppies.
fsckboy 12 hours ago [-]
... and won by 1 vote
14 hours ago [-]
bsimpson 13 hours ago [-]
There's a whole big conversation to have about the bureaucratic state.
One of the things that appeals to voters is the argument that too many decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats. Trump has been as effective at fixing this as with "drain the damp," and our elected officials clearly haven't been great about writing policy either. But one of the grievances that gets people to vote is "look at all this shit that some guy in Washington just decided."
redsocksfan45 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Hnrobert42 7 hours ago [-]
I think the filing number is 17-59.
user3939382 17 hours ago [-]
Open to the possibility that I’m just cynical but my faith is very low that these comment processes are anything more than a regulatory requirement for the illusion of due diligence which legitimizes the actual corporate lobbying and security state actually making the policy.
JumpCrisscross 16 hours ago [-]
You’re wrong. Even if the regulator ignores them, they allow third parties to bring a suit under the APA.
firefax 14 hours ago [-]
The real issue is that it's a perpetual problem -- there are NGOs that literally pull out the same one pager, an endless dance of having some 1L repeat the same points over and over and over.
(Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.)
I made a grand total of one hill visit.
I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns come back here ever again, I'll see to it if you're lucky you only lose your seat, not face a mob outside your window, and when that happens lose my fucking number because I'll be sitting by the TV with popcorn.
Exactly that happened, a few years later.
Whether you're a public interest lobbyist or just another activist, we need to be more willing to TELL congress things. Not ask. Not lobby. TELL THEM.
We need to remind them that the Soviets raced to Berlin to seize brains like ours, that we will flourish whatever regime is in power, and that you can ignore us at your but we, the hackers, will no longer grovel before narcistic neurotypicals to stop misunderstanding on purpose.
Politics is like poker -- soft play is unethical.
Play to win.
Because the pushback works, for a spell.
firefax 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
firefax 9 hours ago [-]
For the third time, I normally don't cry to the admins, but if you can't respond to my points but respond to my points, it's my understanding such behavior is a violation of the site rules.
You are not anonymous. Please behave accordingly if you cannot summon intrinsic motivation.
pickleglitch 17 hours ago [-]
They require your name and address, so they will have a nice database of anyone who dares voice an objection.
Hnrobert42 7 hours ago [-]
Do you have any examples of the government exploiting that?
tartoran 5 hours ago [-]
Do you have any examples of the government NOT exploiting that? It's hard to know for sure how data is being used or sold out for others to exploit it.
Scaled 16 hours ago [-]
It lets politicians see how unpopular something is and how many votes they will lose.
It'll only stop when the people hiring those companies to spam the FCC end up behind bars.
mothballed 17 hours ago [-]
I'm nearly certain commenting, at least from my monitoring of commenting on ATF rulemaking, achieves the opposite of what the commenters hope.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
Hnrobert42 7 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure they don't need comments on the federal site for that. They could get the same from reddit or here for that matter.
kogasa240p 17 hours ago [-]
Thank you
toast0 17 hours ago [-]
Great. As if telecoms can be trusted with customers' id. AT&T left my name, address, social security etc in an improperly secured database for others to have, and they tried to open accounts with it; they had retained the information after I closed my account, and they denied the information was coming from them for years before they finally admitted it and gave us all a quarter to call someone who cares and a year of credit monitoring.
ToucanLoucan 16 hours ago [-]
I have heard very little about AT&T's actual telecom services, but my god have I heard about their billing department. I daresay the only departments in more of a shambles than their billing one is... well. A lot of Microsoft lately.
flerchin 11 hours ago [-]
Telecom billing is seemingly designed to stochastically fail in favor of the telecom. This is not a shambles, but excellent system performance, from their perspective.
SilverElfin 16 hours ago [-]
T-Mobile also has had numerous breaches. And Verizon sells your location data as I recall.
downrightmike 17 hours ago [-]
And your pin is 1234
garciasn 16 hours ago [-]
Same as their, Samsonite I was way off, luggage.
grishka 15 hours ago [-]
As a Russian: huh, you guys could still just buy a sim card without any kind of identification? Impressive. We had that ID requirement introduced way back in the 00s.
Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.
rconti 15 hours ago [-]
It seems to depend a lot. It's kind of hard in Germany - they wanted my permanent address. I didn't find France as difficult. Iceland didn't care. Italy wanted my passport. Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
grishka 14 hours ago [-]
> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
throw-the-towel 10 hours ago [-]
But of course, the public Wifi also requires authentication. With, you guessed it, a phone number.
grishka 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's another law they have. Can't access the internet anonymously, basically. And yes, foreign phone numbers do work.
Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...
pezezin 6 hours ago [-]
The first and last time I was in Russia was in 2019, passing by Moscow airport, and you already required a phone number to use the public WiFi, but any foreign number was OK.
codedokode 13 hours ago [-]
Foreigners must provide their biometric data to buy a local SIM card. They better just use a tourist SIM card.
sva_ 5 hours ago [-]
Btw you can still buy an anonymous SIM card with cash in the Netherlands in pretty much any supermarket/kiosk/whatever. And if you just need Internet, I haven't had any eSIM provider try to verify my ID so far. Although those can't easily be paid in cash.
MrDrMcCoy 5 hours ago [-]
Are there services in the EU similar to Privacy.com? They along with US arm of Revolut lets you use disposable digital cards to buy things, but I don't know if such functionality is legal in the EU.
tartoran 5 hours ago [-]
That will likely change too if it becomes the last bastion of anonymous SIM cards.
kalleboo 6 hours ago [-]
In Japan you need to ID as a resident to get a phone number that can make calls, but anyone can get an anonymous data-only SIM
lokar 10 hours ago [-]
South Korea is also hard
throw-the-towel 10 hours ago [-]
FWIW I bought my Chilean SIM without any problems whatsoever.
TFNA 10 hours ago [-]
Situation circa 2019 at least was that foreign tourists in Chile could purchase a SIM card, but it would be automatically disconnected after some amount of time without registering the phone in a way few foreign tourists would do.
SepiaSapient 2 hours ago [-]
Not quite, the requirement is that phones not bought locally need to be registered after 30 days, regardless if someone is a tourist or a Chilean citizen. It's a mix of deterring tax evasion, importing stolen phones, and regulatory homologation. The government delegates responsibility to various telecom companies to have portals to self-register the IMEI with ID, which can be a foreign passport.
I'm sure the cops can get that info, but its mostly to enforce the "only one free register per year". Anyone can buy a phone with cash and use a prepaid sim with zero ID needed.
throw-the-towel 10 hours ago [-]
I got mine in 2024. Maybe the shop clerk activated it for me, I don't remember.
mrtksn 2 hours ago [-]
In Bulgaria the ID requirement was introduced in recent years as it has been abused to run scam networks. It was big problem in Turkey, as Bulgarian scam networks were pulling the bride scam to such an extent that the scammers started scamming classes for wannabe scammers.
cge 15 hours ago [-]
Different EU countries seem to heavily vary on this point. I’ve seen everything from requirements for id scans and addresses to esims that accept cryptocurrency as payment.
riffraff 15 hours ago [-]
yeah I think in Italy this was introduced in the security push after 9/11, and in other EU countries I also had to provide an id to get a sim card, tho I'm not sure it's all of them.
14 hours ago [-]
darepublic 9 hours ago [-]
if you've ever watched the wire (season 1 2002) you will know that burner phones were very much a thing.
iamtheworstdev 13 hours ago [-]
In the US it gets fought hard because Wall St uses it to dodge state income taxes. Everyone thinks it's drug dealer related for us, but it's actually Finance bros driving into NYC from out of state (NJ or CT) but trying to hide it.
t1234s 16 hours ago [-]
This is probably part of the larger scope of the system wanting to require ID to even boot a computer let alone connect to the internet.
EasyMark 3 hours ago [-]
It is. They want to monitor every second of our lives and put it through current computer systems and salivating on what they can glean from it in future generations of AI. All the bureaucrats and politicians crave is control over everything. No privacy is valued other than their own, and they will always use "think of the children" as an excuse.
x-complexity 2 hours ago [-]
> No privacy is valued other than their own, and they will always use "think of the children" as an excuse.
Until they lose an election using "think of the children", they'll always continue to use it. In terms of political weaponry, it's currently unstoppable.
matheusmoreira 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Looks like the future they want is complete marginalization of free computers, of free people. The machines will have to be corporation and government owned in order to network and participate in society. If we own the machine, we're excluded. Ostracized. Even the language they use is disgusting. They say we're "tampering" with the system, as though it wasn't ours to begin with. It makes me really sad that this is what we're heading towards.
skinfaxi 14 hours ago [-]
The thing about networks is that we can create our own.
TFNA 10 hours ago [-]
Citizens creating informal horizontal networks between themselves is threatening to social harmony, and as more states around the world learn from the highly successful Chinese model, they are unlikely to permit the Wild West à la the old-school internet you are thinking about.
matheusmoreira 14 hours ago [-]
The thing about governments is they are just as tyrannical as the corporations. "Any network we cannot surveil and dominate is banned" is absolutely within the realm of possibility.
skinfaxi 14 hours ago [-]
Then the government would be banning the gathering of people. At that point we're pretty fucked.
13 hours ago [-]
sathackr 14 hours ago [-]
The Mark of the Beast
deadbabe 14 hours ago [-]
More than that, a ban on all general purpose computing.
You can only use specific applications downloaded from walled gardens. You cannot write and execute arbitrary code.
If you are an engineer, all code must be generated via LLM and it passes through some verification through a centralized security and compliance authority on the way to you. You must be fully licensed.
This will be, the end of malware.
hnav 13 hours ago [-]
There are zero days in every piece of software, but malware is already mostly a state-actor-only thing.
simulator5g 6 hours ago [-]
This is a hilarious take
dkdbejwi383 19 hours ago [-]
This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go on your way to the taxi or train like most other places.
MarkusWandel 16 hours ago [-]
Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing was with a Canadian credit card number. Whoops. This was only for a month, so I put in mine and he reimbursed me in cash. Other carriers may still let you buy one-time payment cards for cash at retail; this one didn't.
willhslade 16 hours ago [-]
I think this is where Airalo shines. I've used it while travelling and I think eSIMs, as annoying as they are, are the way.
hinata08 14 hours ago [-]
these "travel sims" are pricey !
You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch !
Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip
Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...
Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person
buellerbueller 15 hours ago [-]
I just tried a GigSky eSim on my Samsung Galaxy and it was an epic fail of an experience.
hinata08 14 hours ago [-]
Having a friend who lends you their credit card so that you pay it off at the end of your trip is such a premium !
Canada isn't the only country in which foreign cards don't work everywhere, and it seems like it's rarely tested
naturalmovement 18 hours ago [-]
> like most other places
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
ivanmontillam 17 hours ago [-]
Argentina doesn't also, you can just buy a SIM card off the newsstand.
ajot 11 hours ago [-]
In my experience, you then need to activate it using real data from real people. I lent my data to a colombian colleague a couple of years ago, as he did not have a DNI yet.
joxdosba 18 hours ago [-]
Huh? At least in Germany, Spain and France all of the smaller shops fill in fake info without even asking.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
naturalmovement 18 hours ago [-]
I wasn't taking blatant fraud into account. I'm sure that's possible everywhere. I'd bet you can buy cigarettes without the tax stamps in the same shop too.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
joxdosba 18 hours ago [-]
Sure, but if you’re a tourist in e.g. Barcelona trying to get a prepaid SIM, odds are the shopkeeper will not ask you for your ID despite being required to.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
naturalmovement 18 hours ago [-]
I would think most tourists would trust a carrier-branded store over Honest Jochen's Tobacco Emporium where you may or may not get a working SIM after paying cash.
joxdosba 17 hours ago [-]
Trust? Sure. They’re still more likely to buy their prepaid SIM from the shop that also sells bongs, they are on every corner after all.
lifestyleguru 18 hours ago [-]
Not a good example. In Spain they notoriously demand id/passport and make photo or copy of it, they do it "for the police".
joxdosba 18 hours ago [-]
That’s the legal requirement yes, I’ve never seen a shop insist on it. Most of them have autofill scripts for the KYC forms.
naturalmovement 17 hours ago [-]
Isn't the main topic of discussion here a legal requirement?
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
joxdosba 17 hours ago [-]
I’m just pointing out that in Europe the equivalent legal requirement is widely ignored, the same won’t necessarily repeat in the US, but it might.
wan23 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
IAmBroom 15 hours ago [-]
No one implied it was.
LawnGnome 17 hours ago [-]
Has this changed recently? I thought I heard about this several years ago, but the last 2-3 times I've visited (in the last couple of years) I've been able to pick up a prepaid SIM from Colesworth without any ID check.
ibejoeb 17 hours ago [-]
It has been like that for at least 8 years, and probably longer. There are still stalls at airports, but you must provide ID.
LawnGnome 17 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Seems like this isn't very consistently enforced, then.
ibejoeb 16 hours ago [-]
You may have bought the sim card but never activated it. It's not the device itself that is restricted, just using it.
timando 11 hours ago [-]
It used to be that you did the ID check when you bought the SIM, but now you have to do the ID check when you activate it.
byhemechi 11 hours ago [-]
You can buy the SIM but can’t activate it without going through ID checks.
tarinedier 9 hours ago [-]
It's been like this since at least the late 90s, I remember having to fill out the paperwork manually when working at Target
thaumasiotes 15 hours ago [-]
> This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go
I don't see the connection. This is also how it works in China, which means... when you grab a SIM card at an airport kiosk, they take a picture of your passport. You obviously have your passport with you, because you just arrived in China and haven't left the airport yet.
What part of that isn't also true of Australia?
dgellow 18 hours ago [-]
I mean. It’s the same, you just have to show your passport and fill a form. It takes 1minute to get it done, you can do it on your way to the taxi if you want. Though e-sim are more practical now
mothballed 18 hours ago [-]
I wonder what exactly are they hoping to achieve then? Anything that can be filled out in 1 minute in a taxi can be spoofed with an extra 30 seconds on the dark net buying dark IDs. So this does less than zero for crime, actually encourages more of it, while doing what exactly? It's madness.
nemomarx 18 hours ago [-]
Who says anything about crime? the goal is just so they can associate phone numbers with id cards in some fashion right?
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
voakbasda 18 hours ago [-]
Like so many laws, nothing to do with stopping crime, but an obvious push to strip the populace of its rights.
philistine 16 hours ago [-]
You do not have the right to a phone number without providing ID. If you're an American, those unwritten rights that come from other firm rights written down in laws and constitutions can always be argued, they're always being whittled down.
Rights for everyone are achieved through blood and toil, and if you truly want a right to anonymity and the digital tools necessary to achieve it, you will need blood and toil. Until then, we'll have to squeeze through fast developments that governments have yet to address.
mothballed 17 hours ago [-]
"Law enforcement" and national security is given as the verbatim headline justification when you reference Australia's Communication and Media Authority[] for rules on ID collection.
Carriers and carriage service providers (CSPs) must help law enforcement and national security agencies.
...
You must verify a customer's identity before you activate a prepaid mobile phone service. You can do this when the customer buys the service or when they try to activate it. The Determination on identity checks for prepaid mobiles lists the ways you can check a customer's identity.
Unfortunately I can't dig up the original debate from 1997 on the Telecommunications Act when the requirement appears to have been introduced. Would be shocked if it did not include similar language from the representatives shilling the requirement, though.
Can you tell me more about how to order and receive a fake ID on the dark net in less than 30 seconds? It does sound rather implausible.
koyote 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
NoMoreNicksLeft 18 hours ago [-]
What problem were they hoping to solve with that legislation?
stackskipton 17 hours ago [-]
Most of time it's billed as law enforcement fighting tool. If people can't have anonymous cell phones, once you capture one criminal phone number, you can quickly look at who they call and since they can't be burners, you figure out the criminal network.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
Gigachad 10 hours ago [-]
Any situation you can imagine wanting a burner phone for, that's what the government wants to crack down on.
logicchains 18 hours ago [-]
The problem of citizens having anonymous internet connectivity.
chopin 17 hours ago [-]
That's an illusion. Two days of location data and you can pin down the owner pretty well.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
tbrownaw 10 hours ago [-]
There a significant difference between "the user can be identified fairly well if you can get access to sensitive stuff" and "the owner is always explicitly recorded in a searchable database".
NoMoreNicksLeft 3 hours ago [-]
My burner would only be powered on for the duration of the call and the time to spin up gsm connectivity.
rusk 18 hours ago [-]
The free anonymous internet was only ever a ruse to get people to use it so the CIA could spy on them. DARPA, folks, created a “free as in beer” global surveillance network and we all bought it.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
mrexroad 6 hours ago [-]
Huh? DARPA created something to help retain communication and coordination capabilities for our government in event of nuclear attack.
rusk 4 hours ago [-]
Indeed they did, at great expense and gave it away for free!
redsocksfan45 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mc32 18 hours ago [-]
Don’t eSIMs solve this problem for tourists?
naturalmovement 18 hours ago [-]
Apple — and now Google — have "solved" this problem for the government by removing physical SIM slots in US iPhones.
TylerE 18 hours ago [-]
Thus eSIM
izacus 16 hours ago [-]
In what way? Activating it still needs KYC.
ezfe 16 hours ago [-]
eSIM doesn't change local laws around cell phones - it's not magic.
lmz 8 hours ago [-]
It can if it's a roaming eSIM. I'm sure all the countries mentioned here e.g. Australia still handles US SIMs roaming there fine even when the US SIM dossn't have ID tied to it.
ezfe 7 hours ago [-]
A roaming eSIM would work the same way as a roaming SIM. Just because it's easier to set up (no need to get a physical SIM) doesn't change the regulations around it.
lmz 5 hours ago [-]
I suppose this depends on how the law is written, but are roaming users subject to local SIM regulations for network use? I can't imagine asking for ID from tourists using their existing SIMs is going to work.
I believe some travel eSIMs are actually issued from outside the country you're going to.
morpheuskafka 42 minutes ago [-]
Typically not. Because they don't have local phone numbers nor IP addresses, so they cannot be used for scams or fake identities domestically. In China, roaming SIMs also bypass all internet filtering, it's basically a built in VPN back to your home telecom.
And as you said, ones marketed as "China travel SIMs" are typically issued from Hong Kong. Interestingly, Hong Kong also has an ID rule (though it allows self upload of ID anyway), but it exempts these roaming-only cards. If you want the card to work in HK, and it is issued from there, you must scan your passport to activate it.
RankingMember 16 hours ago [-]
Yep, they'll still prompt for the info.
vfclists 17 hours ago [-]
Doesn't an eSIM link the SIM to the phone's IMEI which is usually logged somewhere?
ezfe 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, eSIM doesn't really change this conversation
nickphx 18 hours ago [-]
Only if you do not require voice service.
jollymonATX 11 hours ago [-]
We at some point will have to stop complying. Not because we are doing anything at all wrong, but because we cannot trust our govt and the corporations they are beholden to.
pizzly 9 hours ago [-]
Having multiple needless laws is another way to control the population. Everyone will be violating at least one law. The government will then just enforce the laws on the people they don't like.
themafia 5 hours ago [-]
> The government will then just enforce the laws on the people they don't like.
Which is explicitly against the 14th amendment.
nerdyadventurer 3 hours ago [-]
These things are signs of surveillance economy which benefit very few.
tw04 11 hours ago [-]
If there’s one thing this administration has shown, it’s that they believe laws are just suggestions for other people and that ultimately nobody will stop them.
They’re essentially daring the public to resort to violence and frankly, it’s getting exhausting.
Why follow the law when the president will pardon you and the Supreme Court has said he also won’t be held accountable for basically anything.
I welcome the reasoned responses that think this administration isn’t actively flaunting our laws. How’s that war powers act coming along?
owenpalmer 9 hours ago [-]
A law that is not enforced is ultimately a suggestion
> I'm always surprised how bad ideas spread faster than good ideas among our rulers.
it's not a bad idea from the POV of said "rulers" - more surveillance and control on the population is desirable (to them).
tim333 12 hours ago [-]
If you want anonymous eSIM, Silent Link is pretty good. Pay with crypto, works nearly all countries/networks, quite reasonably priced.
iammrpayments 18 hours ago [-]
Had to buy one of these SMS activation services from a guy in Nigeria using a memecoin because claude decided to ban my account because they didn’t like my credit card brand and Claude requires sms activation for new accounts.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
An SMS activation price is about $0.13 btw, there are several sites that do this commercially with hundreds of thousands of numbers. Not going to name any since that'd be advertising for them.
OsrsNeedsf2P 8 hours ago [-]
I thought I was the only one!
Not because Claude banned my account (but they did that too), but because OpenAI one day decided I needed a phone number to login, and then proceeded to reject my real one.
15 hours ago [-]
throwaway85825 16 hours ago [-]
Wants to kill burner phones but somehow foreign phone scams are still rampant.
rtkwe 15 hours ago [-]
Disjoint issues really. Phone scams mostly rely on the shoddy/lack of verification of caller id info as calls transit the network where it's not verified so they are unblockable (because they just use a different fake number every time). They're actually calling from one or a pool of numbers but you can't block and report them on the receiving end because the number your phone thinks it's blocking isn't theirs. This will do nothing to fix spam/scam without patching the issues with caller id.
throwaway85825 14 hours ago [-]
Hardly disjoint. Most of the scams come from foreign networks.
rtkwe 13 hours ago [-]
It is actually because you can't do anything with the source phone number being tied to an identity if the scammers are freely able to spoof the number that the end networks and users see. Even if every network in the world adopted this it wouldn't matter if caller id isn't fixed so that you can actually see the source number to go ask who it is!
miohtama 3 hours ago [-]
You can. Finland forces operators to stop routing non-verified and spoofed numbers. Spam gone.
As finn. I can verify scam calls are non-existent lately few do occasinally popup, but its like 2000 times better than before. When i learned about this originally, i was shocked like how this is not default?
codedokode 13 hours ago [-]
They can also use VoIP. So just banning calls from abroad is not enough, you need to better regulate VoIP services.
XYen0n 17 hours ago [-]
After the implementation of SIM card real-name registration in China, scam calls can accurately state your personal information.
codedokode 13 hours ago [-]
In Russia you need an ID to buy a phone number, and almost every site or app requires it to sign up. As a nice bonus, you or any scammer can buy personal data on everyone for cheap in Telegram bots, because everytime there is a PII leak, these bots update their vast databases.
a34729t 16 hours ago [-]
We should allow privateers to go after spammers, and get the seized assets. And spammer is then tortured appropriately. Satan could run a successful single issue campaign on this in the most religious state in the US.
dec0dedab0de 15 hours ago [-]
How about we start by forcing telecoms to not allow any fake caller ID from their network?
simulator5g 6 hours ago [-]
How about we not form our society into a jail?
giancarlostoro 18 hours ago [-]
I wish they would kill spam calling and texting instead.
dawnerd 16 hours ago [-]
Been getting two a day, clearly some ai voice robo call. We have all this technology yet these spam calls still persist.
giancarlostoro 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
sschueller 3 hours ago [-]
This has been the case for a long time in Switzerland. If you want a mobile phone SIM, you need to provide your ID. Of course easy if you have a national ID...
I don't see the issue here and I am surprised that this wasn't the case in the United States.
However since it is now trivial to communicate encrypted with so many other devices, I don't see the point now. This would have been a "good" thing back in the 90'.
OptionOfT 16 hours ago [-]
This was the case in Belgium a couple of years ago.
Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.
Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.
Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
BuildTheRobots 15 hours ago [-]
> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled.
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
tgrowazay 15 hours ago [-]
> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones
That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims.
Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.
Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.
thaumasiotes 15 hours ago [-]
But... what does your comment have to do with burner phones?
A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.
A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.
You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
There are phone farms that exclusively use burner phones and do not need to spoof caller ID.
thaumasiotes 4 hours ago [-]
Let's recall the claim here:
>>> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
>> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
> That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones
This is total nonsense. A phone farm that doesn't spoof caller ID isn't presenting false caller ID.
rtkwe 15 hours ago [-]
Probably not the issue isn't knowing who owns a number it's that the actual number for the call is just a data field that's not validated or required to be correct. Spam calls would be a lot less annoying if they had to come from real numbers that could be blocked instead of being able to spoof as many numbers as they want.
jldugger 15 hours ago [-]
Wish I could recall the podcast I listened to a few years ago that was telling the history of robo-dialers and caller ID spoofing. The general gist was that AT&T was making money off it from 1-900 operators so they weren't eager to self-regulate. So even though ending spam calling is a bipartisan issue, feet were dragged on the implementation.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.
of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!
I am. I couldn't get into it. I'll give it another shot. Maybe I didn't try long enough.
iamnothere 15 hours ago [-]
Spam calls are a different issue (spam is usually VOIP). Spammers also often use spoofed numbers since STIR/SHAKEN is somehow still not properly implemented.
singpolyma3 14 hours ago [-]
All carrier interconnects use VoIP protocols since forever anyway. So this is pretty much a distinction without a difference. STIR/SHAKEN affects both
codedokode 13 hours ago [-]
This is unrelated to spam calls. Business will register thousands of phone numbers for "surveys" and will continue spamming with AI calls.
J0nL 2 hours ago [-]
This is one of those rules/laws that is worse than useless, without fixing the protocol shortcomings that make spoofing trivial the only people who will be affected by this rule are regular people.
KellyCriterion 3 hours ago [-]
True for most EU countries since a while - at the premium Telcos shops.
Not true in most EU countries if you just go into one of those shady shops nearby train station and ask friendly, while the shop is empty, if he could sell you a SIM thats already verified.
ZedZark 5 hours ago [-]
A voluntary model would be nice - what X (more or less) does currently. You can elect to be verified by X, and it will show the badge, or you can opt out and not get the badge, but you can still use it.
If phones could reliably tag an incoming call as "ID provided" or not, then people who cared could screen calls appropriately, and people who wanted to protect their identity could still have a phone.
everdrive 15 hours ago [-]
And people will keep carrying their phones with them. And keep using them. And keep installing apps. Yes, ideally we'd have laws against government infringement, but the capability to not use your phone is in your hands.
tumult 14 hours ago [-]
More and more things require having a smartphone. Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border. Install the app to use the street parking in this city. Install the app to board the bus. Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz. I admire your spirit of rebellion, but avoiding using a smartphone in daily life in most places will result in a lifestyle contorted specifically to avoid using a smartphone, and will cut you off from activities that were previously doable without smartphones 20 years ago.
everdrive 14 hours ago [-]
This is not meant as an argument or a counterpoint, I'm just not familiar with some of your examples. Would you be able to elaborate?
>Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border.
Would this be a national border? I haven't traveled internationally for a while, but this would be quite troubling.
>Install the app to board the bus.
Is there no option to pay without an app?
>Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz.
Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
TFNA 10 hours ago [-]
> Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
Government offices in many developed countries don't realistically answer the phone any more. You either use the official app on your phone, or you log into the official website using strong authentication that requires a phone. A luddite workaround might be a registered letter by post, but you might wait a long time for an answer.
brewdad 10 hours ago [-]
I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines. To my knowledge there was no other way to get the required approvals.
My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone, credit card tap or with a reloadable transit card. To my knowledge, the only way to reload the card is to use their app or travel to a handful of authorized agents to have them reload your card.
I can call my government office and wait on hold for an hour, ultimately probably needing to schedule an appointment in person to handle my issue or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
Ritewut 14 hours ago [-]
This comment is so divorced from reality. It is very difficult to live life in the modern world without a phone unless you want to go Amish.
autoexec 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not Amish, but if I walk into a restaurant where they won't show me a menu without scanning a QR code, I walk right out.
doubled112 8 hours ago [-]
I’m with you there, I probably would too.
But when your child is late to school but they won’t allow you in until you scan the QR code and fill in a form? Do you stand and wait hoping to be noticed? Hoping to tailgate somebody with a phone? Just head home?
The school also sends general communications only by app.
autoexec 8 hours ago [-]
That should be brought up to the school board and parents should be up in arms about it. I don't see how it's even acceptable to require you to do paperwork every time you kid is late to school. If on the day I couldn't get a human at a school to talk to me and a phone call to the office didn't work either I absolutely would go home. People let others get away with this way too often. Sometimes you can't fight it (good luck fighting parking meters in your city that require an app once contracts are signed and the infrastructure is in place), but often you can demand reasonable accommodation if not a change of policy.
Gigachad 10 hours ago [-]
I've been thinking about it as an experiment lately. Not fully throwing my smartphone in the bin, but considering leaving it at home for a day.
If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them. Public wifi these days has almost vanished so it's difficult to connect to the internet without cellular access now.
protocolture 10 hours ago [-]
>If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them.
I left prime running a bunch of 80s comedy films in the background as I cleaned my house on the weekend. And so much of the "situation" end of sitcom relies on people having prearranged things beforehand and just happening to arrive on time.
A couple of SMS's and every situation would be resolved.
Gigachad 10 hours ago [-]
I could get by on just an SMS/Call only device, the problem is these days everyone moved to internet based apps which require an android/ios app. In theory you could use some kind of bridge server to convert it in to a simple text protocol for a dumb device, but I'm always worried you'd get flagged as a bot and have your account deleted.
khat 14 hours ago [-]
Not really. Rural America you don't need a mobile phone. I can go days without ever touching my phone. And if it wasn't for my bank, I wouldn't need it at all. Even then I could just go to the bank but I'm too lazy to do that.
cguess 10 hours ago [-]
Even in NYC you could get by pretty much just fine without a phone (a credit or debit card is pretty much required though). The hardest part would be losing contact since expectations of how people organize and meet up are completely mobile phone centric, and plans are almost expected to be modified in real time.
everdrive 14 hours ago [-]
I'm with you. On my list of things to do is seek out a a local credit union so I'm not reliant on a banking app.
3stacks 4 hours ago [-]
This is essentially already a reality in Australia. I had to email identity documents + a photo of my face holding an ID to two separate companies just to shift eSIMs to my new phone.
They have to have your residential address for "emergency reasons" which is fairly defensible at least
brushfoot 17 hours ago [-]
No more anonymous driving, thanks to Flock. Soon, no more anonymous calls, thanks to the FCC.
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
grim_io 17 hours ago [-]
Worse, we are becoming a burden.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
EasyMark 3 hours ago [-]
They want us replaced by machines that are 100% compliant slaves, they're hoping for AI with human capabilities (or better) and no will to pushback at their tyrannical natures.
mystraline 17 hours ago [-]
It was a terrible scattered movie, but they want Elysium.
No, Elysium still had all the desperate poor people. That's not the end goal.
EasyMark 3 hours ago [-]
right, they definitely want depopulation down to the levels their paid hacks tell them is sustainable for a compliant population, "saving the earth", and continue to lives out as gods.
They want the future setting of Unanimity in Cloud Atlas. Even that might be too much of an underclass.
nosioptar 17 hours ago [-]
Can even go to the bodega on foot anonymously, too many of my neighbors have ring cameras pointed at the street.
markstos 17 hours ago [-]
Flock is being rejected in a number of cities, thanks to citizens.
burner000333 14 hours ago [-]
How data-driven policing is sold, spoke to someone who set it up once, good odds FLock is doing it, or in the spirit of the below, Flock doesn't have to do it:
- There are networked webcams everywhere: DoT cameras, 18 wheeler fleet cameras, traffic cams, etc.
- Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
- For average jane and joe citizenry: great, no Flock in town!
- For ongoing negotiations with Flock and the PD: ok, sure, kick us out of town. But we'll just pull the 18wheeler feeds with the vendor we have an agreement with, as they roll through town. Or the DoT feeds via the State contract we have or the...
- As such, negotiations could land as does local PD at least want the control of the feeds already going through their town with each Sysco big rig delivery?
Very, very tricky terrain to solve.
chickensong 5 hours ago [-]
> Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
Except, they totally want to make a deal with Flock. If not Flock, another similar vendor.
roysting 17 hours ago [-]
I am quite confident that there will eventually in any of those cities be some kind of major mass casualty type event that will be attributed to that rejection. I don’t hope for it and am sorry for all of humanity for what we are allowing to seemingly inevitably come about, but here we are; like cattle being herded to the feed lot. “But they’re saying they’ll feed you”, you will hear, “they don’t mean you ill. You should stop being a conspiracy theorists. This food is good.”
collinmcnulty 16 hours ago [-]
We’ll see how it goes, but we also have suits like this that push back on that narrative as if you’re going to say your tech protects against a certain kind of tragedy, and that tragedy actually happens and you didn’t protect against it, maybe you bear some liability.
Every step of the way enabled by useful idiots who think that because each incremental step applies more/cheaper government violence to some class of petty deviants they don't like that it is worth doing even if the overall trajectory created by the sum total of the steps is bad. Selfish jerks.
clint 17 hours ago [-]
> We should also abolish cash while we're at it.
Why do you think all the rich people (and by extension the oligarchy running this country) are pushing Crypto?
Cider9986 12 hours ago [-]
Monero is the best alternative to cash. And any crypto acceptance helps you pay with Monero because crypto-->crypto is 10x easier than crypto-->fiat.
roysting 16 hours ago [-]
I don’t think pointing that out will get very far. People didn’t notice when “democracy” was pushed by the same people, in direct contradiction to the Constitution. “Democracy” was the lynchpin to neutralize the Constitution and usher in oligarchic control again, just like digital/programmable currency will complete the pivot of slavery into a total and global system. Why only enslave a few people when you can enslave all people with smoke and mirrors that will make them cheer on their own deception with amusement.
rirze 18 hours ago [-]
Fundamentally un-American.
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
rockskon 18 hours ago [-]
Well - it's not exactly a surprise that all these non-American countries engage in un-American practices.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
cwillu 17 hours ago [-]
American exceptionalism was always a lie; name an “un-American” practice, and I'll show you a piece of American foreign policy.
brightball 17 hours ago [-]
Violations of the US Bill of Rights.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
It's hardly un-American if America does it the most, is it?
mindslight 17 hours ago [-]
A lie, or an ideal to try and live up to, depending on the context. In the context of discussing liberty-destroying privacy invasions it's an ideal, and we should not be so quick to dismiss it.
11 hours ago [-]
cucumber3732842 17 hours ago [-]
>Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S.
I need to know whether these other countries are rich western europe before I know whether to agree with you or to cook up some snide rebuttal.
Joking, obviously. And by "joking" I mean mocking a specific type of person and set of beliefs that is who is a) bad b) too common around here.
axus 17 hours ago [-]
Free, anonymous political speech is the bedrock of American freedom. Also, guns
IAmBroom 15 hours ago [-]
America, where the Amendments to the Constitution start counting at "2".
Also, apparently ends there, too.
15 hours ago [-]
em-bee 17 hours ago [-]
there still are a bunch of viable messaging apps/services that work without a phone number:
matrix, wire, deltachat, threema, maybe jabber/xmpp (depends on their support of encryption). any others?
kgwxd 17 hours ago [-]
> many messaging apps require a phone number
But not all, so what's the actual point?
rirze 17 hours ago [-]
If a messaging app ever gets the attention of government regulators, it must succumb to this verification.
I don't know any way to avoid this.
kgwxd 13 hours ago [-]
How would they enforce that on a decentralized communication platform?
hnav 13 hours ago [-]
outlawing the platform
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
Did you ever read about how the creator of Session was forced to flee Australia and move to Switzerland?
rapidaneurism 4 hours ago [-]
I do not understand the outrage, law abiting users have nothing to fear (TM) and criminally minded users (or undocumented) can always pay a homeless person, a few bucks to register their burner.
atum47 9 hours ago [-]
And phone companies are enabling telecoms by manufacturing devices that don't take physical sim cards anymore. I recently migrate from pixel 8 to 10, it only supports eSim. In order to migrate my sim to an eSim I had to provide voice, image, documents and info of the phone I was installing the eSim on. One of the worse companies in Brazil, Vivo, now have everything about me. I bet they keep it in a big excel file accessible via a secret but public link
tonetegeatinst 9 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure that this would just encourage privacy minded folks to find a loophole.
Or if you get fed up enough you just start blasting FM transmissions without a license..... Keep the burst short enough while your mobile and don't make the transmitter obvious and you could probably get away with it for short SMS comms.
Or just use something like lora or meshtastic/meshcore
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
The loophole is to use a homeless person's ID for $20.
Wait. In the US don't they not even have an ID standard? The homeless person probably doesn't have any valid ID and neither do members of several other disenfranchised groups, right? So now they're not allowed to have cellphone service?
functionmouse 17 hours ago [-]
does nothing to fight spam; only polices lawful users
they call that "anarcho-tyranny"
loloquwowndueo 12 hours ago [-]
This has been tried in Mexico at least twice - crooks are still finding ways to have burners and smuggle anonymous phones into jails etc.
simulator5g 6 hours ago [-]
It's not about stopping crime, it's about control.
c2h5oh 12 hours ago [-]
This is already the case in most (all?) EU countries. Government-issued photo ID is required to activate a SIM card.
If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country
hocuspocus 11 hours ago [-]
I was a teenager when Switzerland introduced the mandatory ID check, in 2003 or 2004 iirc.
My carrier added 10 CHF credit to my prepaid plan for the trouble.
It's still fairly easy to buy a Lycamobile SIM/number that was enabled with a fake or stolen ID. Consequently some banks and services ban entire number ranges, which is not only ineffective but also affects people who committed the sin of keeping their first phone number even after moving to a proper postpaid plan...
9cb14c1ec0 17 hours ago [-]
I expect the FCC to adopt this rule, and I also expect it to be challenged in court, on the basis that there are many other approaches to fighting spam calls that the FCC has not tried, but are much less intrusive.
ryanisnan 17 hours ago [-]
I hope you're right. I am not informed - is this typically how these decisions get challenged?
9cb14c1ec0 16 hours ago [-]
There are two ways to challenge FCC decisions. There is the upfront approach where a business whose operations are harmed by an FCC decision sues to block the decision. Then there is the approach where said business announces their non-compliance and dares the FCC to sue them. The FCC does not have criminal charging authority, so it has to rely on courts to enforce compliance. See the Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T case that just wrapped up at the Supreme Court.
lbcadden3 15 hours ago [-]
I’m surprised it’s taken this long to go after this.
In the name of “national security” and “protecting the children” and all.
MyMemoryfails 2 hours ago [-]
so instead of burnerphones, they will steal phones and keep phone awake until they have accomplished the crime they gonna do.
This is what always happens when governments enforce laws like this, victims and innoncents always suffer as result.
Its happening in finance where criminals groom dumb teengers for laundering money, or eldery's bank accounts they obtain via installing remote software.
So lets add 1 more reason for criminals to steal phone.
Edit: This is also happening in crypto world where criminals perform fake KYC. I guess with age verifications, this crime will increase in demand multiplefold and the last defense ID will be obsolete after data leaks and the fraud happening around it.
WatchDog 10 hours ago [-]
Lot's of countries already require this but it's trivially by-passable just by using a roaming capable SIM from a country that does not require it.
giantg2 18 hours ago [-]
Maybe a way around this is for intermediary companies to own the phone that happens to have service and then lease the phone.
voakbasda 18 hours ago [-]
And with that suggestion, a clause is being added to close that loophole….
giantg2 17 hours ago [-]
So it would be illegal to lend a phone to anyone, even just for one call?
zmgsabst 15 hours ago [-]
My work can’t provide a cellphone now?
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
Seems pointless to do this without also doing something about phone number spoofing.
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
It's not about controlling them, it's about controlling you and me
Beestie 10 hours ago [-]
Well dangit - there go all my favorite crime solving shows.
aaomidi 18 hours ago [-]
This is the pathway Iran is using to provide tiered internet btw.
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
trumpdong 9 hours ago [-]
This is already a thing in most countries btw
OsrsNeedsf2P 9 hours ago [-]
Which is depressing
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
Fun fact: in India, it is a crime to connect the IP network to the telephone network in any way whatsoever that allows calls originating in IP to terminate at telephones. This is because IP network users don't have to provide ID. (It does not prohibit calling from telephones to IP networks, or IP apps calling other instances of themselves)
garyfirestorm 18 hours ago [-]
Isn’t this already a requirement? Can you really buy a burner phone/sim without providing identifying information?
tracedddd 18 hours ago [-]
not at all, it’s easy to buy cash only tracphone, mint, boost, etc. and there are plenty of explicit anonymous providers such as phreeli.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
downrightmike 16 hours ago [-]
the only solution is to upgrade the phone system to require ID, but that would cost billions to AT&T, so that ain't gonna happen
autoexec 14 hours ago [-]
I had reason to pick up a couple cheap pre-paid phones at a gas station once. I wasn't asked to give an ID to anyone to buy them, but once I had them I needed to call a company to activate the phone and they were very particular about what phone number it would work from. It had to be a landline. Payphone wouldn't work. My work phone didn't work. It was difficult to track down a phone line they'd accept and even then one of the phones refused to register.
It seemed to me like they wanted to make sure they could tie the phones to an individual through activation.
hstaab 18 hours ago [-]
T-Mobile prepaid accounts for example
olyjohn 18 hours ago [-]
You can just walk in there with cash and walk out with a fully activated SIM without them asking for ID?
dgellow 18 hours ago [-]
Correct
sgt 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, I recall doing that. I'm a foreigner but I was in the US on vacation. Went to T-Mobile, so easy to get a SIM card.
Zigurd 17 hours ago [-]
I used to buy test phones for software testing at a bodega where they had a laundry basket full of phones, and they would sell prepaid SIMs no questions asked.
dgellow 18 hours ago [-]
In the US you can buy a SIM card and activate without providing any information at the airport. At least in NYC. I was really surprised the first time
kgwxd 17 hours ago [-]
Why were you surprised?
dgellow 15 hours ago [-]
Because I’m from Europe, and we need to provide an ID to get a SIM card
ImJamal 17 hours ago [-]
Not who you were responding to, but most of the western world requires IDs already. The US is an outlier on this issue.
kayo_20211030 16 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's true. At least not in the European countries I visit.
dgellow 15 hours ago [-]
It’s a EU wide requirement
kayo_20211030 14 hours ago [-]
I dunno. I can go to Tesco in Ireland and the UK (fine, UK is not EU no more, but still Europe) and get a sim without ID.
hnav 13 hours ago [-]
Nordics, Baltics and a couple of other countries are the places this still works. The rest of Europe is locked down.
kotaKat 18 hours ago [-]
Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
hnav 13 hours ago [-]
They'll just add regulation that requires KYC for roaming agreements.
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
So basically people from Africa won't be allowed to use their phones in the USA by order of the government? (If they can even get into the country without ending up in an ICE camp, of course)
3 hours ago [-]
catigula 16 hours ago [-]
I get over 10 scam calls a day. I'm forced to pay a company to block them because the free methods don't work. There's no way to work around it because they refuse to enforce the law on these companies cycling through burner numbers.
iamnothere 15 hours ago [-]
They are not using cell phones, they are using VOIP.
catigula 14 hours ago [-]
I'm aware; I'm referring to their priorities.
17 hours ago [-]
ncrc74 14 hours ago [-]
Can't read the article without an account.
amelius 12 hours ago [-]
This will kill so many movie plots.
neuroelectron 12 hours ago [-]
Anything about the 10 spam phone calls I get a day? no I didn't think so.
Something about no taxes without representation
zoom6628 8 hours ago [-]
Straight out of China playbook. Every SIM must be registered with government issued/recognised ID. Yes combats fraud. Yes means govt can track you thru IMEI 24x7 anywhere in the world.
phantomathkg 7 hours ago [-]
While Trump can travel to the China with his burn phone, the citizens of the US cannot. Surely everyone is equal.
bigbuppo 17 hours ago [-]
This sounds like a great thing for people that beat their domestic partners. Make it harder for their victims to escape.
p0w3n3d 5 hours ago [-]
But this is for the sake of the children safety... And terrorism... Whatever you want to have it wrapped in
zzgo 3 hours ago [-]
> “We never thought that would happen here.”
I guess a lot of people weren't around to see civil libertarians screaming about the effect of the USA Patriot act in 2001.
> Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project
Oh, come on, Jay, this should have been on your radar for 25 years.
bondolo 15 hours ago [-]
And yet, for some reason, it is impossible to stop spam calls and texts.
dredmorbius 12 hours ago [-]
Having looked into the history of call tracking / blocking, it's pretty evident that major US telcos have very little interest in making marketing calls difficult. However tenuous the association between "marketing" and the actual practice of the scammers, harassers, abusers, and worse generating literally billions of such calls monthly (see: <https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/ringing-in-our-fears-2025-...>, "The monthly average of scam and telemarketing calls increased from 2.14 billion a month in 2024 to 2.56 billion a month through September, according to YouMail").
I probably said it dozens of times in here, phone numbers are the link between your IRL identity and digital one, that’s why a lot of services still require a phone number to “prevent spam”, yeah right, it’s just to get to you if ever needed.
nisegami 16 hours ago [-]
This is standard in my country. Seemingly as a consequence, eSIMs require physically going to a store to be activated (on the telco side), which has always seemed insane to me.
vfclists 17 hours ago [-]
It was only a matter of time.
The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.
Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.
downrightmike 17 hours ago [-]
They don't have that right, that's why Ben Franklin set up the USPS
mrsssnake 18 hours ago [-]
Regardless of this, I see phone network as a legacy thing that in perfect world should already be replaced with lightweight upgradeable calling protocol over IPv6.
fc417fc802 17 hours ago [-]
This would apply equally to said IP calling network since you'd need a SIM card to access the tower interesting strewn across the country either way.
dredmorbius 12 hours ago [-]
WiFi / pure-VOIP based calling should be able to disambiguate between the network and the messaging layers. This means that a given cellular modem wouldn't be traceable to a specific contact, or call history. The modems could be swapped amongst individuals readily.
This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.
Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.
I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.
This is essentially requiring ID for IP connectivity.
colinsane 16 hours ago [-]
good for bitcoin
ncrc74 14 hours ago [-]
Can't read the article without an account. Just sayin.
shevy-java 15 hours ago [-]
They want perpetual monitoring of everyone. Same with age sniffing.
Anyone still has any doubts? Or is it to ... protect the children?
jewdus 6 hours ago [-]
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greenavocado 15 hours ago [-]
I've got my popcorn and lawn chair out to watch the "voter id is racist" crowd to take a stand on this issue.
Context: Voter ID Laws may seem like a good idea, but they’re actually pretty terrible! On the surface, these laws appear to be a reasonable way to stop people from pretending to be someone else when they vote. But the reality is that this kind of voter fraud almost never happens!!! Instead Voter ID Laws primarily prevent the poor, the elderly, and people of color from voting. They way they’ve disenfranchised people of color is part of a very long history of voter suppression and is a classic example of structural racism.
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
Isn't this the exact same thing? If you don't have a valid ID to vote, now you don't have a valid ID to use a cellphone either. And if you wanted to go and get one, too bad because you probably need a cellphone to do that.
moate 15 hours ago [-]
So by "Voter ID is racist" crowd you more broadly mean "people who understand that requiring identification in order to exist in society is a burden on the citizens with little benefit to them but of great value to authoritarians who wish to use these laws for nefarious means".
Which, often, does not include exclusively people who think "Voter ID is racist" as plenty of unhinged libertarians hate make great points about why you shouldn't want the government to have access to 100% of your daily data points 100% of the time.
rusk 18 hours ago [-]
They’ll get around to guns eventually …
16 hours ago [-]
greenavocado 18 hours ago [-]
They're already trying to regulate the shape of guns to effectively outlaw everything but the bullet.
rusk 18 hours ago [-]
Hopefully they tax th bejeesus out of bullets too. Who was the comedian “imma gona pop a cap in yo ass, but first imma set up a layaway”
fridder 18 hours ago [-]
Chris Rock. And honestly probably the easiest way for gun control
reaperducer 17 hours ago [-]
Good luck with this.
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
hnav 13 hours ago [-]
They'll just push it to activation time and require you to upload ID.
trumpdong 8 hours ago [-]
Don't those clerks go to jail?
standardUser 18 hours ago [-]
The Trump administration has been working overtime trying to build databases of people in this country. Leaving no stone unturned, legal or otherwise. I vaguely remember a time when American conservatives were against precisely this, often as a first principle. Maybe that's just an idealized memory on my part.
ethagnawl 17 hours ago [-]
The American conservatives who can afford to be are effectively exempted. When they're not flying around on private jets, the ownership and metadata created by their cars, phones, etc. are obfuscated by layers of shell corporations.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
kgwxd 17 hours ago [-]
Spoiler: They were never against it, just biding their time.
bl4kers 15 hours ago [-]
Yep, just in different flavors based on ideology. For example, forced labor requires logging & tracking of pregnancies. Anti-trans folks want gender identity on the books to gatekeep who can teach in schools or enter bathrooms. Same for preventing same-sex marriage. Folks railing against voting rights want more and more checks to prove who you are and where you live
3vo-ai 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throwaway27448 18 hours ago [-]
We're already forced into the credit bureaus. Into traffic cameras. Into using credit cards and banks. The idea the state would let us actually say things online anonymously (or to each other) is completely unrealistic: we must be tagged and tracked through our lifecycle.
(NB: the notion of having to register to read content strikes me as equally reprehensible as requiring KYC for access to the telephone network.)
jhartikainen 15 hours ago [-]
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know-how 11 hours ago [-]
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jewdus 7 hours ago [-]
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onetokeoverthe 17 hours ago [-]
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sonorous_sub 18 hours ago [-]
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Terr_ 18 hours ago [-]
I want to believe this is just a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference [0]... but I fear that might be too-optimistic.
[0] The profession of Telephone Sanitiser on planet Golgafrincham.
bebeidjdkrjrjr 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
josefritzishere 18 hours ago [-]
Seems like classic regulatory overreach.
2OEH8eoCRo0 17 hours ago [-]
Good. Telecoms should have a duty to know who uses their networks.
tclancy 17 hours ago [-]
Let’s have your name and address then, citizen. Posters have a right to know who is commenting.
nancyminusone 17 hours ago [-]
The person using the network is the one who put a quarter in the payphone.
dredmorbius 8 hours ago [-]
Payphones are rather seldom seen these days, friend.
Not to disagree with the principle, but it's somewhat opaque as to what your point is.
I've hazy memories as well of reports that payphones were being more surveilled (a camera placed nearby, for example), or tapped / monitored more than other phones, particularly if in areas with other known issues. Nothing that's turning up in DDG searches though...
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express
Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/26/2026-10...
One alternative is that Trump can do it at will. Or, to add a few more steps, Trump can fire the FCC head at will, replace him with a lackey, and then do it at will.
And according to the Administrative Procedures Act, which provides substantial guardrails and checks on agency authority.
This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function. It feels like you're describing China rather than the US.
> Trump can do it at will.
Which is also not how our constitution is supposed to work. The executive branch (which includes both the president and his appointees) is not supposed to be able to make laws, only execute on existing law.
Yes, I know this is how the system works these days. I'm just lamenting how it went so wrong...
There is a family of interesting theories, or perhaps if you prefer, simply a way of looking at history in which you don't consider the "United States" as a single governance structure that has existed back to 1776, but as a series of related, but distinct entities with distinct "social contracts" (a term laden with some philosophical baggage, here I just use it in a very general sense of what people expect from each other in various roles), and distinct theories of governance. While the later entities wrap themselves in the 1776 flag the current ruling structure is quite different from that era. From this point of view you can even go back and include the Continental Congress as the starting point of the "United States" and gain some insight into the way governance can fail as well.
I mention this because it may help free your mind up to consider how the systems really work today beyond the at-times jingoistic "Democracy!". There's a lot of flexibility in how you approach this because it's all opinion anyhow, but there is a strong case to be made that this is the "technocrat" era, in which the executive branch has been given a lot more power both by design and by the stresses of history to give more power to "experts" to deal with the radical changes the world has undergone. I think I can say something generally politically agreeable by pointing out that Congress doesn't seem to be particularly good at handling the world right now; how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
The de facto rules haven't really matched the de jure of the 1776 governance in a long time.
I am trying to keep this as neutral as possible. I have as many opinions as anyone else, but I'm just bringing up the general idea. I think it's probably good to initially just ponder based on one's own understanding of history and match it against your own ideas before you find other people handing you a theory on a platter. There's time enough for that.
Isn't that actually a major cause of the trouble? You expect Congress to deal with more and more complexities but limit the number of people (i.e. experts) who are members of it, causing them all to be generalists and moreover to have to spend more of their time campaigning rather than debating because the value of each seat is higher and correspondingly so is the effort someone will put in to take it from you and the proportion of your time you have to spend merely defending it.
Meanwhile people feel that their vote doesn't matter because a member of Congress now represents almost a million people and then ordinary people can neither affect the campaign nor get the ear of their own representative.
Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people. The members who are doctors would understand both medicine and medical bureaucracy. The members who are engineers would understand technology. Instead of them being lawyers whose first job is campaigning.
Why must congress do more? Most of this stuff would be state issues if not for the absurdity that is current commerce clause interpretation.
Though in this particular case, unless this is based on a change to the law it seems like an overreach by the FCC.
Isn't this the argument against unelected rulemaking?
Suppose administrative agencies worked like this: They draft rules and then periodically submit them to Congress who decides whether to enact them. For uncontroversial changes this is essentially a rubber stamp, Congress defers to the experts' recommendations and passes the proposed rules. But now if the administrative agency tries to make a major policy change, it can't go through without Congressional approval, and Congress is fully within their authority to reject or amend the proposal.
What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
That's why these minutiae are delegated to agencies. But Congress can step in at _any_ point and override the decisions of individual agencies. The rulemaking process is also _extremely_ slow on purpose, giving Congress plenty of time to act.
The problem is that our government is now so large and complicated that it's simply no longer possible for Congress to effectively set policy for all of it. (This would be true even if they weren't so polarized.) So instead they just keep delegating more and more power to the executive branch.
The Administrative Procedures Act, Congressional Review Act, and the recent overturning of Chevron are all good checks on executive/agency power here, but I don't think any of them solves the fundamental issue that the executive branch was simply never designed to wield this kind of power. I'm not really sure what the right solution is.
Another example, if you survey basically any multi-party European state such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and so on purely on economic policies, you'll overwhelmingly find people supporting much more progressive taxation and in general more socialist economic policies. I'm talking large majorities. Including nationalization of many institutions and so on. Yet their governments have done the direct opposite for decades. Not very representative.
The better representation you're talking about is very surface level, for everything that matters the outcome is that favored by big capital.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/04/most-peop...
Do we though? When there is a lack of consensus on what federal law should be, those are exactly the times the federal apparatus should be silent and leave it to the states.
This is just dodging the question of why can’t Congress do its job.
That's false. You've put your own words into their mouth to create a "sounds like China" strawman.
An example that comes to mind is the prosecution of Tate Adamiak. One of his machine gun charges was for having an improperly demilled machine gun parts. The parts were demilled under pre-2001 import standards, and the parts were imported pre-2001, and legally imported and sold through a licensed FFL on gun broker. Magically at some point the rule changed and the letter of law never did, and magically the parts weren't parts but actually a machine gun... this bound as law. I think he'll be released in about 15 years.
If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)
The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.
Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it.
We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.
I don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now. Currently the primary checks are procedural limitations; but were Trump a better, more well organized leader these procedural checks wouldn't pose much of a hurdle at all.
If you want a more technocratic administrative state, the agencies would require more autonomy from the president than they have now, but things are moving in the opposite direction both as a practical matter and constitutionally.
A modern economy has a million small emergencies every day. Given the choice between dysfunction and autocracy, humans routinely choose the latter. So every time an emergency emerges that Congress takes too long to act on, and where the President steps in, the window shifts power to the executive.
That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.
Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.
Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
> Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures
Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction.
[1] https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/types-of-civil-monetar...:
And the sky is purple. See, we can both make baseless assertions. You can say it all day long. Doesn't make it true. At the end of the day the executive agencies are unilaterally costing people money that's on the same order as real deal criminal fines for comparable conduct. The word "civil" doesn't change that anymore than it changes the true nature of civil asset forfieture.
>Most civil monetary penalties are for....
They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for.
You list broad categories because when people dig into the nitty gritty of it they find it unconscionable. Municipalities threatening landowners hundreds of dollars per day multiplied by years for not having the proper permit to clear vegetation on their own land. OSHA fining businesses thousands because unsupervised line employees were doing dumb shit they were told not to that only endangers themselves. And then these people have to lawyer up and defend themselves for more thousands because the fines are always way higher if you don't. All at the literal whim of an enforcement official.
All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have. The government, federal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to meaningfully punish people (even corporate people) without the consent of the people (i.e. a jury). The way civil process cuts the judiciary out entirely is worse still.
Just declaring "well it's civil" because the accused's name isn't going on a naughty list and jail isn't a potential penalty doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit to argue in front of the arbitrary kangaroo process owned by the same agency that issued the fine (of course you can sue if you want but the enforcement agencies avoid creating situations where that's practical).
Juries don't determine sentencing, either. The Seventh Amendment has broadly been interpreted to preserve jury trials for most civil liability, including from the federal government.
> Municipalities...
Not federal!
> All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have Not a federal issue!
...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
> doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued
Straw man. Nobody argued civil penalties aren't serious.
> without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit
...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
This is a wild conversation. I've gone from being somewhat sympathetic to your argument to now wondering if that entire platform is baseless. (I'm increasingly convinced we need a principles of law course mandated in high school. It doesn't even need to be a full year. But our republic suffers when folks don't understand the basics.)
If you thought the political apparatus was willingly going to leave the reigns to "apolitical specialists" rather than ruthlessly consolidating it toward the hands of the most power hungry self-dealing monsters that can command the executive branch then obviously you have not been living in in reality. Of course by the time the blindfold has been removed, the power is already largely consolidated.
Unelected—often unappointed—bureaucrats have never had more power in the U.S. government than they have today.
One of the things that appeals to voters is the argument that too many decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats. Trump has been as effective at fixing this as with "drain the damp," and our elected officials clearly haven't been great about writing policy either. But one of the grievances that gets people to vote is "look at all this shit that some guy in Washington just decided."
(Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.)
I made a grand total of one hill visit.
I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns come back here ever again, I'll see to it if you're lucky you only lose your seat, not face a mob outside your window, and when that happens lose my fucking number because I'll be sitting by the TV with popcorn.
Exactly that happened, a few years later.
Whether you're a public interest lobbyist or just another activist, we need to be more willing to TELL congress things. Not ask. Not lobby. TELL THEM.
We need to remind them that the Soviets raced to Berlin to seize brains like ours, that we will flourish whatever regime is in power, and that you can ignore us at your but we, the hackers, will no longer grovel before narcistic neurotypicals to stop misunderstanding on purpose.
Politics is like poker -- soft play is unethical.
Play to win.
Because the pushback works, for a spell.
You are not anonymous. Please behave accordingly if you cannot summon intrinsic motivation.
The companies paid to flood the FCC with fake comments get to do it as long as they're willing to give the government a cut of the action (https://www.engadget.com/new-york-ag-fines-companies-that-sp...)
It'll only stop when the people hiring those companies to spam the FCC end up behind bars.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...
I'm sure the cops can get that info, but its mostly to enforce the "only one free register per year". Anyone can buy a phone with cash and use a prepaid sim with zero ID needed.
Until they lose an election using "think of the children", they'll always continue to use it. In terms of political weaponry, it's currently unstoppable.
You can only use specific applications downloaded from walled gardens. You cannot write and execute arbitrary code.
If you are an engineer, all code must be generated via LLM and it passes through some verification through a centralized security and compliance authority on the way to you. You must be fully licensed.
This will be, the end of malware.
You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch ! Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip
Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...
Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person
Canada isn't the only country in which foreign cards don't work everywhere, and it seems like it's rarely tested
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
I don't see the connection. This is also how it works in China, which means... when you grab a SIM card at an airport kiosk, they take a picture of your passport. You obviously have your passport with you, because you just arrived in China and haven't left the airport yet.
What part of that isn't also true of Australia?
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
Rights for everyone are achieved through blood and toil, and if you truly want a right to anonymity and the digital tools necessary to achieve it, you will need blood and toil. Until then, we'll have to squeeze through fast developments that governments have yet to address.
[] https://www.acma.gov.au/support-law-enforcement-and-security...
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
I believe some travel eSIMs are actually issued from outside the country you're going to.
And as you said, ones marketed as "China travel SIMs" are typically issued from Hong Kong. Interestingly, Hong Kong also has an ID rule (though it allows self upload of ID anyway), but it exempts these roaming-only cards. If you want the card to work in HK, and it is issued from there, you must scan your passport to activate it.
Which is explicitly against the 14th amendment.
They’re essentially daring the public to resort to violence and frankly, it’s getting exhausting.
Why follow the law when the president will pardon you and the Supreme Court has said he also won’t be held accountable for basically anything.
I welcome the reasoned responses that think this administration isn’t actively flaunting our laws. How’s that war powers act coming along?
it's not a bad idea from the POV of said "rulers" - more surveillance and control on the population is desirable (to them).
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
Not because Claude banned my account (but they did that too), but because OpenAI one day decided I needed a phone number to login, and then proceeded to reject my real one.
https://www.tieto.com/en/cases/telecom/global-anti-fraud-mod...
I don't see the issue here and I am surprised that this wasn't the case in the United States.
However since it is now trivial to communicate encrypted with so many other devices, I don't see the point now. This would have been a "good" thing back in the 90'.
Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.
Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.
Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims. Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.
Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.
A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.
A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.
You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.
>>> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
>> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
> That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones
This is total nonsense. A phone farm that doesn't spoof caller ID isn't presenting false caller ID.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.
of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!~~I _think_ this is the one.~~
God I miss this podcast.
Edit: this IS the one.
Not true in most EU countries if you just go into one of those shady shops nearby train station and ask friendly, while the shop is empty, if he could sell you a SIM thats already verified.
If phones could reliably tag an incoming call as "ID provided" or not, then people who cared could screen calls appropriately, and people who wanted to protect their identity could still have a phone.
>Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border.
Would this be a national border? I haven't traveled internationally for a while, but this would be quite troubling.
>Install the app to board the bus.
Is there no option to pay without an app?
>Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz.
Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
Government offices in many developed countries don't realistically answer the phone any more. You either use the official app on your phone, or you log into the official website using strong authentication that requires a phone. A luddite workaround might be a registered letter by post, but you might wait a long time for an answer.
My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone, credit card tap or with a reloadable transit card. To my knowledge, the only way to reload the card is to use their app or travel to a handful of authorized agents to have them reload your card.
I can call my government office and wait on hold for an hour, ultimately probably needing to schedule an appointment in person to handle my issue or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
But when your child is late to school but they won’t allow you in until you scan the QR code and fill in a form? Do you stand and wait hoping to be noticed? Hoping to tailgate somebody with a phone? Just head home?
The school also sends general communications only by app.
If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them. Public wifi these days has almost vanished so it's difficult to connect to the internet without cellular access now.
I left prime running a bunch of 80s comedy films in the background as I cleaned my house on the weekend. And so much of the "situation" end of sitcom relies on people having prearranged things beforehand and just happening to arrive on time.
A couple of SMS's and every situation would be resolved.
They have to have your residential address for "emergency reasons" which is fairly defensible at least
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
- There are networked webcams everywhere: DoT cameras, 18 wheeler fleet cameras, traffic cams, etc.
- Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
- For average jane and joe citizenry: great, no Flock in town!
- For ongoing negotiations with Flock and the PD: ok, sure, kick us out of town. But we'll just pull the 18wheeler feeds with the vendor we have an agreement with, as they roll through town. Or the DoT feeds via the State contract we have or the...
- As such, negotiations could land as does local PD at least want the control of the feeds already going through their town with each Sysco big rig delivery?
Very, very tricky terrain to solve.
Except, they totally want to make a deal with Flock. If not Flock, another similar vendor.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-...
Why do you think all the rich people (and by extension the oligarchy running this country) are pushing Crypto?
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
I need to know whether these other countries are rich western europe before I know whether to agree with you or to cook up some snide rebuttal.
Joking, obviously. And by "joking" I mean mocking a specific type of person and set of beliefs that is who is a) bad b) too common around here.
Also, apparently ends there, too.
matrix, wire, deltachat, threema, maybe jabber/xmpp (depends on their support of encryption). any others?
But not all, so what's the actual point?
I don't know any way to avoid this.
Or if you get fed up enough you just start blasting FM transmissions without a license..... Keep the burst short enough while your mobile and don't make the transmitter obvious and you could probably get away with it for short SMS comms.
Or just use something like lora or meshtastic/meshcore
Wait. In the US don't they not even have an ID standard? The homeless person probably doesn't have any valid ID and neither do members of several other disenfranchised groups, right? So now they're not allowed to have cellphone service?
they call that "anarcho-tyranny"
If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country
My carrier added 10 CHF credit to my prepaid plan for the trouble.
It's still fairly easy to buy a Lycamobile SIM/number that was enabled with a fake or stolen ID. Consequently some banks and services ban entire number ranges, which is not only ineffective but also affects people who committed the sin of keeping their first phone number even after moving to a proper postpaid plan...
In the name of “national security” and “protecting the children” and all.
This is what always happens when governments enforce laws like this, victims and innoncents always suffer as result.
Its happening in finance where criminals groom dumb teengers for laundering money, or eldery's bank accounts they obtain via installing remote software.
So lets add 1 more reason for criminals to steal phone.
Edit: This is also happening in crypto world where criminals perform fake KYC. I guess with age verifications, this crime will increase in demand multiplefold and the last defense ID will be obsolete after data leaks and the fraud happening around it.
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
It seemed to me like they wanted to make sure they could tie the phones to an individual through activation.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
Something about no taxes without representation
I guess a lot of people weren't around to see civil libertarians screaming about the effect of the USA Patriot act in 2001.
> Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project
Oh, come on, Jay, this should have been on your radar for 25 years.
AT&T's efforts to thwart effective government regulation and mitigation stand out especially. The industry oranisation ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) has been central to blocking any effective action. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Telecommunication...>.
The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.
Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.
This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.
Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.
I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.
<https://theconversation.com/young-people-hate-making-phone-c...>
Anyone still has any doubts? Or is it to ... protect the children?
Context: Voter ID Laws may seem like a good idea, but they’re actually pretty terrible! On the surface, these laws appear to be a reasonable way to stop people from pretending to be someone else when they vote. But the reality is that this kind of voter fraud almost never happens!!! Instead Voter ID Laws primarily prevent the poor, the elderly, and people of color from voting. They way they’ve disenfranchised people of color is part of a very long history of voter suppression and is a classic example of structural racism.
Which, often, does not include exclusively people who think "Voter ID is racist" as plenty of unhinged libertarians hate make great points about why you shouldn't want the government to have access to 100% of your daily data points 100% of the time.
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
(NB: the notion of having to register to read content strikes me as equally reprehensible as requiring KYC for access to the telephone network.)
[0] The profession of Telephone Sanitiser on planet Golgafrincham.
Not to disagree with the principle, but it's somewhat opaque as to what your point is.
I've hazy memories as well of reports that payphones were being more surveilled (a camera placed nearby, for example), or tapped / monitored more than other phones, particularly if in areas with other known issues. Nothing that's turning up in DDG searches though...