No more anonymous driving, thanks to Flock. Soon, no more anonymous calls, thanks to the FCC.
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
grim_io 5 minutes ago [-]
Worse, we are becoming a burden.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
mystraline 44 seconds ago [-]
It was a terrible scattered movie, but they want Elysium.
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.
user3939382 14 minutes ago [-]
Open to the possibility that I’m just cynical but my faith is very low that these comment processes are anything more than a regulatory requirement for the illusion of due diligence which legitimizes the actual corporate lobbying and security state actually making the policy.
pickleglitch 2 minutes ago [-]
They require your name and address, so they will have a nice database of anyone who dares voice an objection.
mothballed 6 minutes ago [-]
I'm nearly certain commenting, at least from my monitoring of commenting on ATF rulemaking, achieves the opposite of what the commenters hope.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
rirze 36 minutes ago [-]
Fundamentally un-American.
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
rockskon 29 minutes ago [-]
Well - it's not exactly a surprise that all these non-American countries engage in un-American practices.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
cwillu 13 minutes ago [-]
American exceptionalism was always a lie; name an “un-American” practice, and I'll show you a piece of American foreign policy.
brightball 6 minutes ago [-]
Violations of the US Bill of Rights.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
axus 3 minutes ago [-]
Free, anonymous political speech is the bedrock of American freedom. Also, guns
kgwxd 15 minutes ago [-]
> many messaging apps require a phone number
But not all, so what's the actual point?
iammrpayments 22 minutes ago [-]
Had to buy one of these SMS activation services from a guy in Nigeria using a memecoin because claude decided to ban my account because they didn’t like my credit card brand and Claude requires sms activation for new accounts.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
dkdbejwi383 1 hours ago [-]
This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go on your way to the taxi or train like most other places.
naturalmovement 36 minutes ago [-]
> like most other places
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
ivanmontillam 15 minutes ago [-]
Argentina doesn't also, you can just buy a SIM card off the newsstand.
joxdosba 32 minutes ago [-]
Huh? At least in Germany, Spain and France all of the smaller shops fill in fake info without even asking.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
naturalmovement 31 minutes ago [-]
I wasn't taking blatant fraud into account. I'm sure that's possible everywhere. I'd bet you can buy cigarettes without the tax stamps in the same shop too.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
joxdosba 30 minutes ago [-]
Sure, but if you’re a tourist in e.g. Barcelona trying to get a prepaid SIM, odds are the shopkeeper will not ask you for your ID despite being required to.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
naturalmovement 17 minutes ago [-]
I would think most tourists would trust a carrier-branded store over Honest Jochen's Tobacco Emporium where you may or may not get a working SIM after paying cash.
lifestyleguru 25 minutes ago [-]
Not a good example. In Spain they notoriously demand id/passport and make photo or copy of it, they do it "for the police".
joxdosba 23 minutes ago [-]
That’s the legal requirement yes, I’ve never seen a shop insist on it. Most of them have autofill scripts for the KYC forms.
naturalmovement 14 minutes ago [-]
Isn't the main topic of discussion here a legal requirement?
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
joxdosba 7 minutes ago [-]
I’m just pointing out that in Europe the equivalent legal requirement is widely ignored, the same won’t necessarily repeat in the US, but it might.
dgellow 32 minutes ago [-]
I mean. It’s the same, you just have to show your passport and fill a form. It takes 1minute to get it done, you can do it on your way to the taxi if you want. Though e-sim are more practical now
mothballed 29 minutes ago [-]
I wonder what exactly are they hoping to achieve then? Anything that can be filled out in 1 minute in a taxi can be spoofed with an extra 30 seconds on the dark net buying dark IDs. So this does less than zero for crime, actually encourages more of it, while doing what exactly? It's madness.
nemomarx 26 minutes ago [-]
Who says anything about crime? the goal is just so they can associate phone numbers with id cards in some fashion right?
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
voakbasda 18 minutes ago [-]
Like so many laws, nothing to do with stopping crime, but an obvious push to strip the populace of its rights.
mc32 1 hours ago [-]
Don’t eSIMs solve this problem for tourists?
naturalmovement 34 minutes ago [-]
Apple — and now Google — have "solved" this problem for the government by removing physical SIM slots in US iPhones.
TylerE 30 minutes ago [-]
Thus eSIM
vfclists 12 minutes ago [-]
Doesn't an eSIM link the SIM to the phone's IMEI which is usually logged somewhere?
nickphx 1 hours ago [-]
Only if you do not require voice service.
NoMoreNicksLeft 41 minutes ago [-]
What problem were they hoping to solve with that legislation?
stackskipton 4 minutes ago [-]
Most of time it's billed as law enforcement fighting tool. If people can't have anonymous cell phones, once you capture one criminal phone number, you can quickly look at who they call and since they can't be burners, you figure out the criminal network.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
logicchains 33 minutes ago [-]
The problem of citizens having anonymous internet connectivity.
chopin 40 seconds ago [-]
That's an illusion. Two days of location data and you can pin down the owner pretty well.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
rusk 28 minutes ago [-]
The free anonymous internet was only ever a ruse to get people to use it so the CIA could spy on them. DARPA, folks, created a “free as in beer” global surveillance network and we all bought it.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
redsocksfan45 36 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
giancarlostoro 18 minutes ago [-]
I wish they would kill spam calling and texting instead.
3 minutes ago [-]
9cb14c1ec0 11 minutes ago [-]
I expect the FCC to adopt this rule, and I also expect it to be challenged in court, on the basis that there are many other approaches to fighting spam calls that the FCC has not tried, but are much less intrusive.
giantg2 25 minutes ago [-]
Maybe a way around this is for intermediary companies to own the phone that happens to have service and then lease the phone.
voakbasda 21 minutes ago [-]
And with that suggestion, a clause is being added to close that loophole….
vfclists 9 minutes ago [-]
It was only a matter of time.
The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.
Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.
bebeidjdkrjrjr 15 minutes ago [-]
It makes sense. If you are member of state supported terroeist group (antiva, mosab, alwuaide) just ask your sponsors for sims directly. Non state groups should not have access!
garyfirestorm 1 hours ago [-]
Isn’t this already a requirement? Can you really buy a burner phone/sim without providing identifying information?
tracedddd 59 minutes ago [-]
not at all, it’s easy to buy cash only tracphone, mint, boost, etc. and there are plenty of explicit anonymous providers such as phreeli.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
dgellow 28 minutes ago [-]
In the US you can buy a SIM card and activate without providing any information at the airport. At least in NYC. I was really surprised the first time
kgwxd 13 minutes ago [-]
Why were you surprised?
kotaKat 24 minutes ago [-]
Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
hstaab 1 hours ago [-]
T-Mobile prepaid accounts for example
olyjohn 39 minutes ago [-]
You can just walk in there with cash and walk out with a fully activated SIM without them asking for ID?
dgellow 28 minutes ago [-]
Correct
StepBroBD 15 minutes ago [-]
US of A’s Chinafication letsgooooooo
rusk 32 minutes ago [-]
They’ll get around to guns eventually …
greenavocado 29 minutes ago [-]
They're already trying to regulate the shape of guns to effectively outlaw everything but the bullet.
rusk 26 minutes ago [-]
Hopefully they tax th bejeesus out of bullets too. Who was the comedian “imma gona pop a cap in yo ass, but first imma set up a layaway”
fridder 16 minutes ago [-]
Chris Rock. And honestly probably the easiest way for gun control
mrsssnake 18 minutes ago [-]
Regardless of this, I see phone network as a legacy thing that in perfect world should already be replaced with lightweight upgradeable calling protocol over IPv6.
fc417fc802 3 minutes ago [-]
This would apply equally to said IP calling network since you'd need a SIM card to access the tower interesting strewn across the country either way.
aaomidi 38 minutes ago [-]
This is the pathway Iran is using to provide tiered internet btw.
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
reaperducer 10 minutes ago [-]
Good luck with this.
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
standardUser 36 minutes ago [-]
The Trump administration has been working overtime trying to build databases of people in this country. Leaving no stone unturned, legal or otherwise. I vaguely remember a time when American conservatives were against precisely this, often as a first principle. Maybe that's just an idealized memory on my part.
ethagnawl 4 minutes ago [-]
The American conservatives who can afford to be are effectively exempted. When they're not flying around on private jets, the ownership and metadata created by their cars, phones, etc. are obfuscated by layers of shell corporations.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
kgwxd 10 minutes ago [-]
Spoiler: They were never against it, just biding their time.
throwaway27448 35 minutes ago [-]
We're already forced into the credit bureaus. Into traffic cameras. Into using credit cards and banks. The idea the state would let us actually say things online anonymously (or to each other) is completely unrealistic: we must be tagged and tracked through our lifecycle.
josefritzishere 49 minutes ago [-]
Seems like classic regulatory overreach.
2OEH8eoCRo0 13 minutes ago [-]
Good. Telecoms should have a duty to know who uses their networks.
tclancy 2 minutes ago [-]
Let’s have your name and address then, citizen. Posters have a right to know who is commenting.
sonorous_sub 48 minutes ago [-]
Burner phones are a pandemic vector. They enable the spread of disease, good riddance.
Terr_ 44 minutes ago [-]
I want to believe this is just a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference [0]... but I fear that might be too-optimistic.
[0] The profession of Telephone Sanitiser on planet Golgafrincham.
Rendered at 16:51:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
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.
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.
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
But not all, so what's the actual point?
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
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.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
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!
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
[0] The profession of Telephone Sanitiser on planet Golgafrincham.