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Comment by martian | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't these kinds of calls straight up illegal in the first place? Telecom companies who hand out numbers to spammers should get fined like crazy, and the burden of proof goes on them for dealing with the people they give US phone numbers to.

But for now, I use the iPhone's Do Not Disturb option and allow calls only from contacts. I used to get harassed daily by shit companies selling me stuff, and I'd report them to the FTC, and it was a huge annoyance. Now I have to see the missed call from an unknown number, but at least my phone doesn't ring.

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Why aren't these kinds of calls straight up illegal in the first place?

I believe they are. I believe they are using hacked PBX's and they move from location to location, so they authorities have a hard time catching them.

I talked with a lawyer who litigated against a company that did this, back in the the early 00's, and he indicated they are criminal organizations setup purely for the purpose of defrauding the people that play along with their pitches. What I don't understand is why the trail of money is so hard to follow and prosecute. I think the barrier to catching them is just too high. I once tried to get AT&T to help me catch someone that repeatedly called me and wouldn't stop. The process they had in place was so onerous that after a few days in I just gave up. It's clear they do NOT want to help catch them.

Is the problem then that telephone network was designed to be too trusting and lacks robust authentication methods?

It seems that way to me. It seems there's simply no way to know who is calling, from where etc. It would be great if you could just see there caller's number but it seems just about anyone is able to spoof calls from anywhere. So how are these calls getting paid for? I guess the mail problem is that if all these phone calls are stopped, the phone companies stand to lose millions.

It won't get fixed now because $privacy. While the crime argument is used way too much to promote surveillance, it is also true that privacy-enchancing methods help criminals more than ordinary people. AT&T being able to track down some spammers is equivalent to them being able to track down everyone.

In my country, the spammers started to work around the law by saying the number they're calling was randomly generated by a machine, and thus does not come from any database. It's utter bullshit, and AFAIR it got addressed by the government very recently, but no doubt they'll find something else.

In the domain of e-mail spam, we have a law against unsolicited business offers. So what do companies do? They send you their offer, write below something that amounts to "we do stuff like that; if you want to learn more and get our offer, contact us", and then add a disclaimer at the bottom: "this e-mail is NOT a business offer, but only a question whether or not the recipent is interested in receiving one; as so, it does not fall under the regulation #somenumber....".

I get robocalls that call for one second, hang up, and then call again. I believe that this is to intentionally bypass the Do Not Disturb feature on iOS -- the default setting is to allow Repeated Calls to ring through.

Life will find a way.

Ditto that. This just started up again a week or two ago and it's driving me mad!

Amazing it took so long to evolve that step.

How do we know it's the phone companies handing out numbers, rather than simple wardialing?

I meant: the companies are giving numbers to the spammers so their calls show up as local numbers.

> Why aren't these kinds of calls straight up illegal in the first place?

Free speech.

You may not agree, but that is at least the reason.

Do automated systems / robots have first amendment rights? (Honestly curious if this has been brought up in the courts)

The companies that run them do.

Commercial speech is not protected under the 1st amendment. However, political and religious speech, which makes up most of the robocalls during the election season isn't covered.

It amazes me that this completely nonsensical distinction passed muster in the courts.

There is no meaningfuk distinction between political, commerce, and religion, and the First Amendment specifically prohibits granting special legal status to religious activity.

What are you talking about?

CAN-SPAM laws dictate and prevent e-mail communications that are distinctly for marketing purposes.

That's not quite true. Restrictions on commercial speech are subject to intermediate scrutiny, whereas the default for most other restrictions speech is strict scrutiny. That's not nearly the same as totally unprotected, like obscenity for example.

Read the article. They are illegal, but callers get around it by setting up shop outside the US.

That is the same justification used by junk mailers, and the USPS actively courts them - because they are the customer, not you. I only check my mailbox once a week, and only because it quickly gets stuffed with junk and then the USPS starts holding the mail at the PO. Once I actually went down there with a copy of "Penny Saver", the worst offender, and declared that I found the coupon rag sexually stimulating and demanded that they halt the flow of the pornography. That is the only way to find relief, but it only works for the specific mailer that you complain about - and it is a best effort sort of filtering (and since they don't care, they don't put in much effort).

You can unsubscribe from the DMA junk mail list, and it works for most generic mailers.

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try. I'll honestly be surprised if it makes a perceivable dent though, the root cause of the problem being carrier route level sortation discounts. They blast apartment complexes indiscriminately (most stuff addressed to "Our friend", "Valued customer"), because the cost per mail piece is pennies.

>When you register with this service, your name will be put on a "delete" file and made available to direct-mail marketers and organizations.

Yeah, I'm not super trusting that sending my name and address to marketing companies isn't going to somehow result in that same information getting passed on to companies who don't give a shit.

Nope - Freedom of speech isn't a blank check for communication.

It only protects from government censorship, and even then, situations deemed harmful (such as death threats against individuals) are exempt.

It is a lot more complicated than that unfortunately:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of...

The consideration of a "captive audience" is relevant to the topic under discussion, prior restraint (in general) as well.

That's not complicated at all. That's people censoring what they receive, not the government.

"people" aren't "censoring", they don't have the power to do so. In this specific case the state acts at the behest of those who fill out a USPS Form 1500. It is complicated when you consider what is actually happening, the rationale behind it, and the convoluted exceptions. To say otherwise would be like saying that the internet is uncomplicated, as it is simply a series of tubes.

>In this specific case the state acts at the behest of those who fill out a USPS Form 1500.

That is "people" "censoring". This really isn't as complex or difficult as you're trying to make it be.

I'll give it one more shot. You are a child at the store and you ask your mommy for a lollipop, she hands you one and pays the cashier... who bought the lollipop?

Hahah, nothing in what you just said adds up to censorship. Since the direct marketers are paying for it, I guess they're the mother? Is the government the lollipop? Is censorship the grocery store?

Ahem - "You have a duck in a pond with a frog, and an elderly couple is throwing bread... Who threw the bread?" Lol.

While trying to understand what attribution means to you I accidentally tested your skills in reading comprehension.

But who threw the bread, woodman? You still haven't passed your reading comprehension test.

This is very important for the discussion of human-selected censorship.

A: Why aren't these kinds of calls straight up illegal in the first place?

B: Free speech.

A: Freedom of speech isn't a blank check for communication. It only protects from government censorship.

B: Um...yeah, "illegal".

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