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.
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.
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."
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.
> [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...
"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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am once again asking that if you have a specific complaint, to please reply rather than silently downvote.
It's odd that I can repeatedly jump from +2 into the negative, and not once when I've begun calling out this pattern have I had anyone willing to engage.
I don't particularly care about my points, but the pattern is telling and tiresome, and feels like one set of people is reacting genuinely, another is trying to use the voting system as a disagreement button.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
Here's the link to submit a comment to the FCC:
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.
You can also file a comment at the Federal Register for the next 16 days -- It looks like the proposal is 2026-10407
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/26/2026-10...
This is the specific proposed rule to reference: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-seeks-comment-enhanced-know...
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.
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.
[Loper Bright intensifies]
They badly need to be checked and/or balanced.
You want to have to vote for every single decision maker in the government?
Being able to is different from being obligated.
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.
... and won by 1 vote
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."
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.
> 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.
> [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...
"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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah yes I forgot, they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break. Silly me.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
[1] https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/types-of-civil-monetar...:
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.
> unelected bureaucratic apparatus
Unelected—often unappointed—bureaucrats have never had more power in the U.S. government than they have today.
Thank you
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.
You’re wrong. Even if the regulator ignores them, they allow third parties to bring a suit under the APA.
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.
I am once again asking that if you have a specific complaint, to please reply rather than silently downvote.
It's odd that I can repeatedly jump from +2 into the negative, and not once when I've begun calling out this pattern have I had anyone willing to engage.
I don't particularly care about my points, but the pattern is telling and tiresome, and feels like one set of people is reacting genuinely, another is trying to use the voting system as a disagreement button.
They require your name and address, so they will have a nice database of anyone who dares voice an objection.
It lets politicians see how unpopular something is and how many votes they will lose.
Exactly. Often they're not even real https://www.kcra.com/article/more-sacramento-victims-discove...
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.
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.
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.
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.
T-Mobile also has had numerous breaches. And Verizon sells your location data as I recall.
And your pin is 1234
Same as their, Samsonite I was way off, luggage.
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.
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.
> 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).
Foreigners must provide their biometric data to buy a local SIM card. They better just use a tourist SIM card.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are zero days in every piece of software, but malware is already mostly a state-actor-only thing.
The Mark of the Beast
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.
The thing about networks is that we can create our own.
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.
Then the government would be banning the gathering of people. At that point we're pretty fucked.
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.
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.
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.
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
I just tried a GigSky eSim on my Samsung Galaxy and it was an epic fail of an experience.
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
> 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.
Argentina doesn't also, you can just buy a SIM card off the newsstand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not a good example. In Spain they notoriously demand id/passport and make photo or copy of it, they do it "for the police".
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.
Isn't the main topic of discussion here a legal requirement?
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
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.
> Much of EU requires ID for some time now
The US isn't in the EU
No one implied it was.
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.
It has been like that for at least 8 years, and probably longer. There are still stalls at airports, but you must provide ID.
Interesting. Seems like this isn't very consistently enforced, then.
You may have bought the sim card but never activated it. It's not the device itself that is restricted, just using it.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
Like so many laws, nothing to do with stopping crime, but an obvious push to strip the populace of its rights.
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.
"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.
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.[] https://www.acma.gov.au/support-law-enforcement-and-security...
What problem were they hoping to solve with that legislation?
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.
The problem of citizens having anonymous internet connectivity.
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.
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.
Don’t eSIMs solve this problem for tourists?
Apple — and now Google — have "solved" this problem for the government by removing physical SIM slots in US iPhones.
Thus eSIM
eSIM doesn't change local laws around cell phones - it's not magic.
Yep, they'll still prompt for the info.
In what way? Activating it still needs KYC.
Doesn't an eSIM link the SIM to the phone's IMEI which is usually logged somewhere?
Yes, eSIM doesn't really change this conversation
Only if you do not require voice service.
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.
Wants to kill burner phones but somehow foreign phone scams are still rampant.
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.
Hardly disjoint. Most of the scams come from foreign networks.
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!
They can also use VoIP. So just banning calls from abroad is not enough, you need to better regulate VoIP services.
I'm always surprised how bad ideas spread faster than good ideas among our rulers. Here is a map of countries where an ID is required (or not) https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/sim-card-regist...
If you want anonymous eSIM, Silent Link is pretty good. Pay with crypto, works nearly all countries/networks, quite reasonably priced.
Regwall / archive: <https://archive.is/ZobUQ>
(NB: the notion of having to register to read content strikes me as equally reprehensible as requiring KYC for access to the telephone network.)
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.
How about we start by forcing telecoms to not allow any fake caller ID from their network?
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
After the implementation of SIM card real-name registration in China, scam calls can accurately state your personal information.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
https://archive.org/details/3f25eeb8affc11e6892a43edc8087050
~~I _think_ this is the one.~~
God I miss this podcast.
Edit: this IS the one.
Are you familiar with the Search Engine podcast?
This is unrelated to spam calls. Business will register thousands of phone numbers for "surveys" and will continue spamming with AI calls.
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.
All carrier interconnects use VoIP protocols since forever anyway. So this is pretty much a distinction without a difference. STIR/SHAKEN affects both
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish they would kill spam calling and texting instead.
Been getting two a day, clearly some ai voice robo call. We have all this technology yet these spam calls still persist.
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.
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.
It was a terrible scattered movie, but they want Elysium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
No, Elysium still had all the desperate poor people. That's not the end goal.
They want to scan your soul. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v5HLLkgo5A
They want the future setting of Unanimity in Cloud Atlas. Even that might be too much of an underclass.
Can even go to the bodega on foot anonymously, too many of my neighbors have ring cameras pointed at the street.
Flock is being rejected in a number of cities, thanks to citizens.
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.
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.”
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.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-...
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
This has been tried in Mexico at least twice - crooks are still finding ways to have burners and smuggle anonymous phones into jails etc.
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.
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.
American exceptionalism was always a lie; name an “un-American” practice, and I'll show you a piece of American foreign policy.
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.
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.
>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.
Free, anonymous political speech is the bedrock of American freedom. Also, guns
America, where the Amendments to the Constitution start counting at "2".
Also, apparently ends there, too.
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?
> many messaging apps require a phone number
But not all, so what's the actual point?
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.
How would they enforce that on a decentralized communication platform?
outlawing the platform
does nothing to fight spam; only polices lawful users
they call that "anarcho-tyranny"
Seems pointless to do this without also doing something about phone number spoofing.
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.
I hope you're right. I am not informed - is this typically how these decisions get challenged?
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.
I’m surprised it’s taken this long to go after this.
In the name of “national security” and “protecting the children” and all.
This will kill so many movie plots.
Maybe a way around this is for intermediary companies to own the phone that happens to have service and then lease the phone.
And with that suggestion, a clause is being added to close that loophole….
So it would be illegal to lend a phone to anyone, even just for one call?
My work can’t provide a cellphone now?
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.
Can't read the article without an account.
Anything about the 10 spam phone calls I get a day? no I didn't think so.
Something about no taxes without representation
Isn’t this already a requirement? Can you really buy a burner phone/sim without providing identifying information?
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.
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
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.
T-Mobile prepaid accounts for example
You can just walk in there with cash and walk out with a fully activated SIM without them asking for ID?
Correct
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.
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.
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
Why were you surprised?
Because I’m from Europe, and we need to provide an ID to get a SIM card
Not who you were responding to, but most of the western world requires IDs already. The US is an outlier on this issue.
I don't think that's true. At least not in the European countries I visit.
It’s a EU wide requirement
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.
Nordics, Baltics and a couple of other countries are the places this still works. The rest of Europe is locked down.
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!
They'll just add regulation that requires KYC for roaming agreements.
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.
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.
They are not using cell phones, they are using VOIP.
I'm aware; I'm referring to their priorities.
And yet, for some reason, it is impossible to stop spam calls and texts.
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").
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...>.
They want perpetual monitoring of everyone. Same with age sniffing.
Anyone still has any doubts? Or is it to ... protect the children?
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.
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.
They don't have that right, that's why Ben Franklin set up the USPS
good for bitcoin
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.
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.
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.
<https://theconversation.com/young-people-hate-making-phone-c...>
This is essentially requiring ID for IP connectivity.
US of A’s Chinafication letsgooooooo
Can't read the article without an account. Just sayin.
This sounds like a great thing for people that beat their domestic partners. Make it harder for their victims to escape.
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.
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.
They’ll get around to guns eventually …
They're already trying to regulate the shape of guns to effectively outlaw everything but the bullet.
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”
Chris Rock. And honestly probably the easiest way for gun control
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.
They'll just push it to activation time and require you to upload ID.
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.
Spoiler: They were never against it, just biding their time.
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
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.)
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.
Seems like classic regulatory overreach.
Good. Telecoms should have a duty to know who uses their networks.
Let’s have your name and address then, citizen. Posters have a right to know who is commenting.
The person using the network is the one who put a quarter in the payphone.