FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs

Posted by berlianta 12 hours ago

Comments

Comment by bsimpson 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by Scaled 9 hours ago

You can also file a comment at the Federal Register for the next 16 days -- It looks like the proposal is 2026-10407

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/26/2026-10...

Comment by mcmcmc 10 hours ago

This is the specific proposed rule to reference: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-seeks-comment-enhanced-know...

Comment by Ajedi32 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by forshaper 7 hours ago

It's been this way at least since the Administrative Procedure Act. Solidified later with Chevron. Chevron is struck down, but in effect not too much has changed.

Comment by tantalor 5 hours ago

[Loper Bright intensifies]

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by rdiddly 6 hours ago

They badly need to be checked and/or balanced.

Comment by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4 hours ago

The ATF does this all the time, too.

Comment by IAmBroom 9 hours ago

Yes, that is the way federal agencies work. Details of complex systems are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest.

One alternative is that Trump can do it at will. Or, to add a few more steps, Trump can fire the FCC head at will, replace him with a lackey, and then do it at will.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago

> Details of complex systems are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest

And according to the Administrative Procedures Act, which provides substantial guardrails and checks on agency authority.

Comment by Ajedi32 9 hours ago

> [Laws] are decided by (hopefully apolitical, public-good-oriented) specialists in the field of interest

This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function. It feels like you're describing China rather than the US.

> Trump can do it at will.

Which is also not how our constitution is supposed to work. The executive branch (which includes both the president and his appointees) is not supposed to be able to make laws, only execute on existing law.

Yes, I know this is how the system works these days. I'm just lamenting how it went so wrong...

Comment by jerf 8 hours ago

"This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function."

There is a family of interesting theories, or perhaps if you prefer, simply a way of looking at history in which you don't consider the "United States" as a single governance structure that has existed back to 1776, but as a series of related, but distinct entities with distinct "social contracts" (a term laden with some philosophical baggage, here I just use it in a very general sense of what people expect from each other in various roles), and distinct theories of governance. While the later entities wrap themselves in the 1776 flag the current ruling structure is quite different from that era. From this point of view you can even go back and include the Continental Congress as the starting point of the "United States" and gain some insight into the way governance can fail as well.

I mention this because it may help free your mind up to consider how the systems really work today beyond the at-times jingoistic "Democracy!". There's a lot of flexibility in how you approach this because it's all opinion anyhow, but there is a strong case to be made that this is the "technocrat" era, in which the executive branch has been given a lot more power both by design and by the stresses of history to give more power to "experts" to deal with the radical changes the world has undergone. I think I can say something generally politically agreeable by pointing out that Congress doesn't seem to be particularly good at handling the world right now; how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?

The de facto rules haven't really matched the de jure of the 1776 governance in a long time.

I am trying to keep this as neutral as possible. I have as many opinions as anyone else, but I'm just bringing up the general idea. I think it's probably good to initially just ponder based on one's own understanding of history and match it against your own ideas before you find other people handing you a theory on a platter. There's time enough for that.

Comment by AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago

> how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?

Isn't that actually a major cause of the trouble? You expect Congress to deal with more and more complexities but limit the number of people (i.e. experts) who are members of it, causing them all to be generalists and moreover to have to spend more of their time campaigning rather than debating because the value of each seat is higher and correspondingly so is the effort someone will put in to take it from you and the proportion of your time you have to spend merely defending it.

Meanwhile people feel that their vote doesn't matter because a member of Congress now represents almost a million people and then ordinary people can neither affect the campaign nor get the ear of their own representative.

Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people. The members who are doctors would understand both medicine and medical bureaucracy. The members who are engineers would understand technology. Instead of them being lawyers whose first job is campaigning.

Comment by throw-the-towel 4 hours ago

This sounds like what the Soviet/Chinese Congresses of People's Deputies were supposed to be.

Comment by cucumber3732842 7 hours ago

>What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?

Why must congress do more? Most of this stuff would be state issues if not for the absurdity that is current commerce clause interpretation.

Comment by laughing_man 8 hours ago

There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law. It's pretty normal for Congress to sketch the general outline of regulation and require the relevant bureaucracy to fill in the details.

Though in this particular case, unless this is based on a change to the law it seems like an overreach by the FCC.

Comment by AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago

> There is a level of detail that isn't practical to include in law.

Isn't this the argument against unelected rulemaking?

Suppose administrative agencies worked like this: They draft rules and then periodically submit them to Congress who decides whether to enact them. For uncontroversial changes this is essentially a rubber stamp, Congress defers to the experts' recommendations and passes the proposed rules. But now if the administrative agency tries to make a major policy change, it can't go through without Congressional approval, and Congress is fully within their authority to reject or amend the proposal.

What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?

Comment by laughing_man 7 hours ago

Realistically, in this case, you're moving decision-making from unelected bureaucrats to unelected Congressional staff. It's an invitation for corruption without really improving the process.

Comment by cyberax 7 hours ago

Congresspeople (or local legislators) do not have the expertise to evaluate the rules. Or even bandwidth. For example, the NEC is around 800 pages and is extremely technical.

That's why these minutiae are delegated to agencies. But Congress can step in at _any_ point and override the decisions of individual agencies. The rulemaking process is also _extremely_ slow on purpose, giving Congress plenty of time to act.

Comment by mcmcmc 8 hours ago

Administrative law is the (suboptimal) answer to congressional gridlock, which is the real problem. If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow. Regardless the overturning of Chevron deference makes administrative rules like this more susceptible to challenge. Assuming the telcos have the backbone to do so of course.

Comment by Ajedi32 8 hours ago

Congress passes plenty of laws. 95 so far just since the last election: https://www.congress.gov/public-laws/119th-congress Last congress passed 274. It's really only the controversial stuff that gets gridlocked.

The problem is that our government is now so large and complicated that it's simply no longer possible for Congress to effectively set policy for all of it. (This would be true even if they weren't so polarized.) So instead they just keep delegating more and more power to the executive branch.

The Administrative Procedures Act, Congressional Review Act, and the recent overturning of Chevron are all good checks on executive/agency power here, but I don't think any of them solves the fundamental issue that the executive branch was simply never designed to wield this kind of power. I'm not really sure what the right solution is.

Comment by sdellis 7 hours ago

Two-party politics promotes gridlock. Multi-party systems, as long as they don't have veto players, don't have as much stagnation and do a better job of citizen representation.

Comment by deaux 42 minutes ago

Do they? 79% of Australians and 73% of Germans have an unfavorable view of Israel, in Germany's case 49% of all being "very" unfavorable [0]. Don't see much representation of that in their politics. Both very much multi-party systems. Australia's system in particular has aspects that are often held up as one of the best in the world. Even on important other topics, it doesn't seem to reflect things much.

Another example, if you survey basically any multi-party European state such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and so on purely on economic policies, you'll overwhelmingly find people supporting much more progressive taxation and in general more socialist economic policies. I'm talking large majorities. Including nationalization of many institutions and so on. Yet their governments have done the direct opposite for decades. Not very representative.

The better representation you're talking about is very surface level, for everything that matters the outcome is that favored by big capital.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/04/most-peop...

Comment by AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by mcmcmc 7 hours ago

So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?

This is just dodging the question of why can’t Congress do its job.

Comment by tzs 1 hour ago

The US is a large country with a large economy and a very diverse economy. It is probably not feasible for Congress to deal with the low level details of managing all that.

Comment by Terr_ 8 hours ago

Hold up: Parent-poster is obviously talking about federal regulations, not federal laws, and there are important differences between them... so why have you altered the quote to say [Laws]?

That's false. You've put your own words into their mouth to create a "sounds like China" strawman.

Comment by mothballed 8 hours ago

The regulations are [often] binding as law. When they change the regulations they are changing the law, under the fiction they're merely changing the interpretation of the law.

An example that comes to mind is the prosecution of Tate Adamiak. One of his machine gun charges was for having an improperly demilled machine gun parts. The parts were demilled under pre-2001 import standards, and the parts were imported pre-2001, and legally imported and sold through a licensed FFL on gun broker. Magically at some point the rule changed and the letter of law never did, and magically the parts weren't parts but actually a machine gun... this bound as law. I think he'll be released in about 15 years.

Comment by Ajedi32 8 hours ago

Ah yes I forgot, they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break. Silly me.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago

> they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break

If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)

Comment by mothballed 8 hours ago

I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not. It's literally the same damn thing but with a different sized cartridge. Nothing in the statute would allow this, yet executive 'delegation' mumbo-jumbo and magically one is basically unregulated and the other is felonies out the ass if you start commercially selling them without a host of licensing and checks.

The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago

> I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not

Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it.

We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.

Comment by wahern 3 hours ago

The president has a large degree of control over the agencies and their output, so in practice agency delegation granted presidents immense power. This power went largely unexercised due to norms. But that has been slowly changing, and under Trump radically changing. And if SCOTUS adopts the Unitary Executive Theory, as they seem poised to do, then we'll have something very close to a king, difficult to distinguish from 18th century Great Britain.

I don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now. Currently the primary checks are procedural limitations; but were Trump a better, more well organized leader these procedural checks wouldn't pose much of a hurdle at all.

If you want a more technocratic administrative state, the agencies would require more autonomy from the president than they have now, but things are moving in the opposite direction both as a practical matter and constitutionally.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago

> don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now

A modern economy has a million small emergencies every day. Given the choice between dysfunction and autocracy, humans routinely choose the latter. So every time an emergency emerges that Congress takes too long to act on, and where the President steps in, the window shifts power to the executive.

Comment by cucumber3732842 7 hours ago

>If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail

That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.

Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago

> That's a distinction without a difference

Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.

> Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures

Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction.

[1] https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/types-of-civil-monetar...:

Comment by cucumber3732842 2 hours ago

>Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.

And the sky is purple. See, we can both make baseless assertions. You can say it all day long. Doesn't make it true. At the end of the day the executive agencies are unilaterally costing people money that's on the same order as real deal criminal fines for comparable conduct. The word "civil" doesn't change that anymore than it changes the true nature of civil asset forfieture.

>Most civil monetary penalties are for....

They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for.

You list broad categories because when people dig into the nitty gritty of it they find it unconscionable. Municipalities threatening landowners hundreds of dollars per day multiplied by years for not having the proper permit to clear vegetation on their own land. OSHA fining businesses thousands because unsupervised line employees were doing dumb shit they were told not to that only endangers themselves. And then these people have to lawyer up and defend themselves for more thousands because the fines are always way higher if you don't. All at the literal whim of an enforcement official.

All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have. The government, federal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to meaningfully punish people (even corporate people) without the consent of the people (i.e. a jury). The way civil process cuts the judiciary out entirely is worse still.

Just declaring "well it's civil" because the accused's name isn't going on a naughty list and jail isn't a potential penalty doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit to argue in front of the arbitrary kangaroo process owned by the same agency that issued the fine (of course you can sue if you want but the enforcement agencies avoid creating situations where that's practical).

Comment by JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago

> They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for

Juries don't determine sentencing, either. The Seventh Amendment has broadly been interpreted to preserve jury trials for most civil liability, including from the federal government.

> Municipalities...

Not federal!

> All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have Not a federal issue!

...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?

> doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued

Straw man. Nobody argued civil penalties aren't serious.

> without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit

...how do you think criminal proceedings work?

This is a wild conversation. I've gone from being somewhat sympathetic to your argument to now wondering if that entire platform is baseless. (I'm increasingly convinced we need a principles of law course mandated in high school. It doesn't even need to be a full year. But our republic suffers when folks don't understand the basics.)

Comment by mothballed 9 hours ago

The intellectual-academic class are having an existential crisis that they've lost the reigns of the unelected bureaucratic apparatus and it is now being wielded against them. They are still confused at how to respond to this as they're certain they couldn't have been wrong about deferring (uh, 'delegate regulatory authority') the power vested in congress and elected representation to themselves. Surprise pikachu when it turns out the "apolitical, public goal oriented specialists' were useful idiots in the process of handing power from congress to the executive.

If you thought the political apparatus was willingly going to leave the reigns to "apolitical specialists" rather than ruthlessly consolidating it toward the hands of the most power hungry self-dealing monsters that can command the executive branch then obviously you have not been living in in reality. Of course by the time the blindfold has been removed, the power is already largely consolidated.

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago

> unelected bureaucratic apparatus

Unelected—often unappointed—bureaucrats have never had more power in the U.S. government than they have today.

Comment by ChoGGi 8 hours ago

You want to have to vote for every single decision maker in the government?

Comment by skinfaxi 8 hours ago

Being able to is different from being obligated.

Comment by TJSomething 6 hours ago

I mean I feel obligated. I'd feel bad if I skipped voting in an election where I found out after the fact that one of the candidates kicked puppies.

Comment by fsckboy 5 hours ago

... and won by 1 vote

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by bsimpson 6 hours ago

There's a whole big conversation to have about the bureaucratic state.

One of the things that appeals to voters is the argument that too many decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats. Trump has been as effective at fixing this as with "drain the damp," and our elected officials clearly haven't been great about writing policy either. But one of the grievances that gets people to vote is "look at all this shit that some guy in Washington just decided."

Comment by redsocksfan45 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by Hnrobert42 41 minutes ago

I think the filing number is 17-59.

Comment by user3939382 11 hours ago

Open to the possibility that I’m just cynical but my faith is very low that these comment processes are anything more than a regulatory requirement for the illusion of due diligence which legitimizes the actual corporate lobbying and security state actually making the policy.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago

You’re wrong. Even if the regulator ignores them, they allow third parties to bring a suit under the APA.

Comment by firefax 7 hours ago

The real issue is that it's a perpetual problem -- there are NGOs that literally pull out the same one pager, an endless dance of having some 1L repeat the same points over and over and over.

(Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.)

I made a grand total of one hill visit.

I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns come back here ever again, I'll see to it if you're lucky you only lose your seat, not face a mob outside your window, and when that happens lose my fucking number because I'll be sitting by the TV with popcorn.

Exactly that happened, a few years later.

Whether you're a public interest lobbyist or just another activist, we need to be more willing to TELL congress things. Not ask. Not lobby. TELL THEM.

We need to remind them that the Soviets raced to Berlin to seize brains like ours, that we will flourish whatever regime is in power, and that you can ignore us at your but we, the hackers, will no longer grovel before narcistic neurotypicals to stop misunderstanding on purpose.

Politics is like poker -- soft play is unethical.

Play to win.

Because the pushback works, for a spell.

Comment by firefax 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by firefax 2 hours ago

For the third time, I normally don't cry to the admins, but if you can't respond to my points but respond to my points, it's my understanding such behavior is a violation of the site rules.

You are not anonymous. Please behave accordingly if you cannot summon intrinsic motivation.

Comment by pickleglitch 11 hours ago

They require your name and address, so they will have a nice database of anyone who dares voice an objection.

Comment by Hnrobert42 43 minutes ago

Do you have any examples of the government exploiting that?

Comment by Scaled 9 hours ago

It lets politicians see how unpopular something is and how many votes they will lose.

Comment by autoexec 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by mothballed 11 hours ago

I'm nearly certain commenting, at least from my monitoring of commenting on ATF rulemaking, achieves the opposite of what the commenters hope.

While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.

Comment by Hnrobert42 42 minutes ago

I'm pretty sure they don't need comments on the federal site for that. They could get the same from reddit or here for that matter.

Comment by kogasa240p 10 hours ago

Thank you

Comment by toast0 10 hours ago

Great. As if telecoms can be trusted with customers' id. AT&T left my name, address, social security etc in an improperly secured database for others to have, and they tried to open accounts with it; they had retained the information after I closed my account, and they denied the information was coming from them for years before they finally admitted it and gave us all a quarter to call someone who cares and a year of credit monitoring.

Comment by ToucanLoucan 9 hours ago

I have heard very little about AT&T's actual telecom services, but my god have I heard about their billing department. I daresay the only departments in more of a shambles than their billing one is... well. A lot of Microsoft lately.

Comment by flerchin 4 hours ago

Telecom billing is seemingly designed to stochastically fail in favor of the telecom. This is not a shambles, but excellent system performance, from their perspective.

Comment by SilverElfin 9 hours ago

T-Mobile also has had numerous breaches. And Verizon sells your location data as I recall.

Comment by downrightmike 10 hours ago

And your pin is 1234

Comment by garciasn 10 hours ago

Same as their, Samsonite I was way off, luggage.

Comment by grishka 9 hours ago

As a Russian: huh, you guys could still just buy a sim card without any kind of identification? Impressive. We had that ID requirement introduced way back in the 00s.

Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.

Comment by rconti 8 hours ago

It seems to depend a lot. It's kind of hard in Germany - they wanted my permanent address. I didn't find France as difficult. Iceland didn't care. Italy wanted my passport. Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.

Comment by grishka 8 hours ago

> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.

I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).

Comment by throw-the-towel 4 hours ago

But of course, the public Wifi also requires authentication. With, you guessed it, a phone number.

Comment by codedokode 6 hours ago

Foreigners must provide their biometric data to buy a local SIM card. They better just use a tourist SIM card.

Comment by lokar 4 hours ago

South Korea is also hard

Comment by throw-the-towel 4 hours ago

FWIW I bought my Chilean SIM without any problems whatsoever.

Comment by TFNA 4 hours ago

Situation circa 2019 at least was that foreign tourists in Chile could purchase a SIM card, but it would be automatically disconnected after some amount of time without registering the phone in a way few foreign tourists would do.

Comment by throw-the-towel 4 hours ago

I got mine in 2024. Maybe the shop clerk activated it for me, I don't remember.

Comment by cge 9 hours ago

Different EU countries seem to heavily vary on this point. I’ve seen everything from requirements for id scans and addresses to esims that accept cryptocurrency as payment.

Comment by darepublic 2 hours ago

if you've ever watched the wire (season 1 2002) you will know that burner phones were very much a thing.

Comment by riffraff 9 hours ago

yeah I think in Italy this was introduced in the security push after 9/11, and in other EU countries I also had to provide an id to get a sim card, tho I'm not sure it's all of them.

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by iamtheworstdev 6 hours ago

In the US it gets fought hard because Wall St uses it to dodge state income taxes. Everyone thinks it's drug dealer related for us, but it's actually Finance bros driving into NYC from out of state (NJ or CT) but trying to hide it.

Comment by t1234s 10 hours ago

This is probably part of the larger scope of the system wanting to require ID to even boot a computer let alone connect to the internet.

Comment by matheusmoreira 9 hours ago

Yeah. Looks like the future they want is complete marginalization of free computers, of free people. The machines will have to be corporation and government owned in order to network and participate in society. If we own the machine, we're excluded. Ostracized. Even the language they use is disgusting. They say we're "tampering" with the system, as though it wasn't ours to begin with. It makes me really sad that this is what we're heading towards.

Comment by skinfaxi 7 hours ago

The thing about networks is that we can create our own.

Comment by TFNA 4 hours ago

Citizens creating informal horizontal networks between themselves is threatening to social harmony, and as more states around the world learn from the highly successful Chinese model, they are unlikely to permit the Wild West à la the old-school internet you are thinking about.

Comment by matheusmoreira 7 hours ago

The thing about governments is they are just as tyrannical as the corporations. "Any network we cannot surveil and dominate is banned" is absolutely within the realm of possibility.

Comment by skinfaxi 7 hours ago

Then the government would be banning the gathering of people. At that point we're pretty fucked.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by deadbabe 8 hours ago

More than that, a ban on all general purpose computing.

You can only use specific applications downloaded from walled gardens. You cannot write and execute arbitrary code.

If you are an engineer, all code must be generated via LLM and it passes through some verification through a centralized security and compliance authority on the way to you. You must be fully licensed.

This will be, the end of malware.

Comment by hnav 6 hours ago

There are zero days in every piece of software, but malware is already mostly a state-actor-only thing.

Comment by simulator5g 24 minutes ago

This is a hilarious take

Comment by sathackr 8 hours ago

The Mark of the Beast

Comment by jollymonATX 4 hours ago

We at some point will have to stop complying. Not because we are doing anything at all wrong, but because we cannot trust our govt and the corporations they are beholden to.

Comment by pizzly 2 hours ago

Having multiple needless laws is another way to control the population. Everyone will be violating at least one law. The government will then just enforce the laws on the people they don't like.

Comment by tw04 4 hours ago

If there’s one thing this administration has shown, it’s that they believe laws are just suggestions for other people and that ultimately nobody will stop them.

They’re essentially daring the public to resort to violence and frankly, it’s getting exhausting.

Why follow the law when the president will pardon you and the Supreme Court has said he also won’t be held accountable for basically anything.

I welcome the reasoned responses that think this administration isn’t actively flaunting our laws. How’s that war powers act coming along?

Comment by owenpalmer 2 hours ago

A law that is not enforced is ultimately a suggestion

Comment by dkdbejwi383 12 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.

Comment by MarkusWandel 9 hours ago

Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing was with a Canadian credit card number. Whoops. This was only for a month, so I put in mine and he reimbursed me in cash. Other carriers may still let you buy one-time payment cards for cash at retail; this one didn't.

Comment by willhslade 9 hours ago

I think this is where Airalo shines. I've used it while travelling and I think eSIMs, as annoying as they are, are the way.

Comment by hinata08 7 hours ago

these "travel sims" are pricey !

You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch ! Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip

Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...

Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person

Comment by buellerbueller 9 hours ago

I just tried a GigSky eSim on my Samsung Galaxy and it was an epic fail of an experience.

Comment by hinata08 7 hours ago

Having a friend who lends you their credit card so that you pay it off at the end of your trip is such a premium !

Canada isn't the only country in which foreign cards don't work everywhere, and it seems like it's rarely tested

Comment by naturalmovement 11 hours ago

> like most other places

Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.

The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.

Comment by ivanmontillam 11 hours ago

Argentina doesn't also, you can just buy a SIM card off the newsstand.

Comment by ajot 5 hours ago

In my experience, you then need to activate it using real data from real people. I lent my data to a colombian colleague a couple of years ago, as he did not have a DNI yet.

Comment by joxdosba 11 hours ago

Huh? At least in Germany, Spain and France all of the smaller shops fill in fake info without even asking.

EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.

Comment by naturalmovement 11 hours ago

I wasn't taking blatant fraud into account. I'm sure that's possible everywhere. I'd bet you can buy cigarettes without the tax stamps in the same shop too.

Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.

Comment by joxdosba 11 hours ago

Sure, but if you’re a tourist in e.g. Barcelona trying to get a prepaid SIM, odds are the shopkeeper will not ask you for your ID despite being required to.

> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.

Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.

Comment by naturalmovement 11 hours ago

I would think most tourists would trust a carrier-branded store over Honest Jochen's Tobacco Emporium where you may or may not get a working SIM after paying cash.

Comment by joxdosba 11 hours ago

Trust? Sure. They’re still more likely to buy their prepaid SIM from the shop that also sells bongs, they are on every corner after all.

Comment by lifestyleguru 11 hours ago

Not a good example. In Spain they notoriously demand id/passport and make photo or copy of it, they do it "for the police".

Comment by joxdosba 11 hours ago

That’s the legal requirement yes, I’ve never seen a shop insist on it. Most of them have autofill scripts for the KYC forms.

Comment by naturalmovement 11 hours ago

Isn't the main topic of discussion here a legal requirement?

If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?

Comment by joxdosba 11 hours ago

I’m just pointing out that in Europe the equivalent legal requirement is widely ignored, the same won’t necessarily repeat in the US, but it might.

Comment by wan23 9 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by IAmBroom 9 hours ago

No one implied it was.

Comment by LawnGnome 10 hours ago

Has this changed recently? I thought I heard about this several years ago, but the last 2-3 times I've visited (in the last couple of years) I've been able to pick up a prepaid SIM from Colesworth without any ID check.

Comment by timando 4 hours ago

It used to be that you did the ID check when you bought the SIM, but now you have to do the ID check when you activate it.

Comment by ibejoeb 10 hours ago

It has been like that for at least 8 years, and probably longer. There are still stalls at airports, but you must provide ID.

Comment by LawnGnome 10 hours ago

Interesting. Seems like this isn't very consistently enforced, then.

Comment by ibejoeb 10 hours ago

You may have bought the sim card but never activated it. It's not the device itself that is restricted, just using it.

Comment by tarinedier 3 hours ago

It's been like this since at least the late 90s, I remember having to fill out the paperwork manually when working at Target

Comment by byhemechi 4 hours ago

You can buy the SIM but can’t activate it without going through ID checks.

Comment by thaumasiotes 8 hours ago

> This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go

I don't see the connection. This is also how it works in China, which means... when you grab a SIM card at an airport kiosk, they take a picture of your passport. You obviously have your passport with you, because you just arrived in China and haven't left the airport yet.

What part of that isn't also true of Australia?

Comment by dgellow 11 hours ago

I mean. It’s the same, you just have to show your passport and fill a form. It takes 1minute to get it done, you can do it on your way to the taxi if you want. Though e-sim are more practical now

Comment by mothballed 11 hours ago

I wonder what exactly are they hoping to achieve then? Anything that can be filled out in 1 minute in a taxi can be spoofed with an extra 30 seconds on the dark net buying dark IDs. So this does less than zero for crime, actually encourages more of it, while doing what exactly? It's madness.

Comment by nemomarx 11 hours ago

Who says anything about crime? the goal is just so they can associate phone numbers with id cards in some fashion right?

If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.

Comment by voakbasda 11 hours ago

Like so many laws, nothing to do with stopping crime, but an obvious push to strip the populace of its rights.

Comment by philistine 9 hours ago

You do not have the right to a phone number without providing ID. If you're an American, those unwritten rights that come from other firm rights written down in laws and constitutions can always be argued, they're always being whittled down.

Rights for everyone are achieved through blood and toil, and if you truly want a right to anonymity and the digital tools necessary to achieve it, you will need blood and toil. Until then, we'll have to squeeze through fast developments that governments have yet to address.

Comment by mothballed 10 hours ago

"Law enforcement" and national security is given as the verbatim headline justification when you reference Australia's Communication and Media Authority[] for rules on ID collection.

  Carriers and carriage service providers (CSPs) must help law enforcement and national security agencies.

  ...

  You must verify a customer's identity before you activate a prepaid mobile phone service. You can do this when the customer buys the service or when they try to activate it. The Determination on identity checks for prepaid mobiles lists the ways you can check a customer's identity.

Unfortunately I can't dig up the original debate from 1997 on the Telecommunications Act when the requirement appears to have been introduced. Would be shocked if it did not include similar language from the representatives shilling the requirement, though.

[] https://www.acma.gov.au/support-law-enforcement-and-security...

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

Can you tell me more about how to order and receive a fake ID on the dark net in less than 30 seconds? It does sound rather implausible.

Comment by koyote 5 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft 11 hours ago

What problem were they hoping to solve with that legislation?

Comment by stackskipton 11 hours ago

Most of time it's billed as law enforcement fighting tool. If people can't have anonymous cell phones, once you capture one criminal phone number, you can quickly look at who they call and since they can't be burners, you figure out the criminal network.

Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.

Comment by Gigachad 4 hours ago

Any situation you can imagine wanting a burner phone for, that's what the government wants to crack down on.

Comment by logicchains 11 hours ago

The problem of citizens having anonymous internet connectivity.

Comment by chopin 11 hours ago

That's an illusion. Two days of location data and you can pin down the owner pretty well.

I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.

Comment by tbrownaw 4 hours ago

There a significant difference between "the user can be identified fairly well if you can get access to sensitive stuff" and "the owner is always explicitly recorded in a searchable database".

Comment by rusk 11 hours ago

The free anonymous internet was only ever a ruse to get people to use it so the CIA could spy on them. DARPA, folks, created a “free as in beer” global surveillance network and we all bought it.

Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.

Comment by mrexroad 8 minutes ago

Huh? DARPA created something to help retain communication and coordination capabilities for our government in event of nuclear attack.

Comment by redsocksfan45 11 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by mc32 12 hours ago

Don’t eSIMs solve this problem for tourists?

Comment by naturalmovement 11 hours ago

Apple — and now Google — have "solved" this problem for the government by removing physical SIM slots in US iPhones.

Comment by TylerE 11 hours ago

Thus eSIM

Comment by izacus 9 hours ago

In what way? Activating it still needs KYC.

Comment by ezfe 10 hours ago

eSIM doesn't change local laws around cell phones - it's not magic.

Comment by lmz 1 hour ago

It can if it's a roaming eSIM. I'm sure all the countries mentioned here e.g. Australia still handles US SIMs roaming there fine even when the US SIM dossn't have ID tied to it.

Comment by ezfe 48 minutes ago

A roaming eSIM would work the same way as a roaming SIM. Just because it's easier to set up (no need to get a physical SIM) doesn't change the regulations around it.

Comment by RankingMember 10 hours ago

Yep, they'll still prompt for the info.

Comment by vfclists 11 hours ago

Doesn't an eSIM link the SIM to the phone's IMEI which is usually logged somewhere?

Comment by ezfe 10 hours ago

Yes, eSIM doesn't really change this conversation

Comment by nickphx 12 hours ago

Only if you do not require voice service.

Comment by Keyb0ardWarri0r 11 hours ago

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...

Comment by tim333 5 hours ago

If you want anonymous eSIM, Silent Link is pretty good. Pay with crypto, works nearly all countries/networks, quite reasonably priced.

Comment by iammrpayments 11 hours ago

Had to buy one of these SMS activation services from a guy in Nigeria using a memecoin because claude decided to ban my account because they didn’t like my credit card brand and Claude requires sms activation for new accounts.

Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

An SMS activation price is about $0.13 btw, there are several sites that do this commercially with hundreds of thousands of numbers. Not going to name any since that'd be advertising for them.

Comment by OsrsNeedsf2P 2 hours ago

I thought I was the only one!

Not because Claude banned my account (but they did that too), but because OpenAI one day decided I needed a phone number to login, and then proceeded to reject my real one.

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by throwaway85825 9 hours ago

Wants to kill burner phones but somehow foreign phone scams are still rampant.

Comment by rtkwe 8 hours ago

Disjoint issues really. Phone scams mostly rely on the shoddy/lack of verification of caller id info as calls transit the network where it's not verified so they are unblockable (because they just use a different fake number every time). They're actually calling from one or a pool of numbers but you can't block and report them on the receiving end because the number your phone thinks it's blocking isn't theirs. This will do nothing to fix spam/scam without patching the issues with caller id.

Comment by throwaway85825 7 hours ago

Hardly disjoint. Most of the scams come from foreign networks.

Comment by rtkwe 6 hours ago

It is actually because you can't do anything with the source phone number being tied to an identity if the scammers are freely able to spoof the number that the end networks and users see. Even if every network in the world adopted this it wouldn't matter if caller id isn't fixed so that you can actually see the source number to go ask who it is!

Comment by codedokode 6 hours ago

They can also use VoIP. So just banning calls from abroad is not enough, you need to better regulate VoIP services.

Comment by a34729t 10 hours ago

We should allow privateers to go after spammers, and get the seized assets. And spammer is then tortured appropriately. Satan could run a successful single issue campaign on this in the most religious state in the US.

Comment by XYen0n 10 hours ago

After the implementation of SIM card real-name registration in China, scam calls can accurately state your personal information.

Comment by dec0dedab0de 9 hours ago

How about we start by forcing telecoms to not allow any fake caller ID from their network?

Comment by simulator5g 23 minutes ago

How about we not form our society into a jail?

Comment by giancarlostoro 11 hours ago

I wish they would kill spam calling and texting instead.

Comment by dawnerd 10 hours ago

Been getting two a day, clearly some ai voice robo call. We have all this technology yet these spam calls still persist.

Comment by giancarlostoro 8 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by OptionOfT 9 hours ago

This was the case in Belgium a couple of years ago.

Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.

Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.

Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.

Comment by BuildTheRobots 9 hours ago

> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled.

This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.

~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.

Comment by tgrowazay 8 hours ago

> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones

That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims. Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.

Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.

Comment by thaumasiotes 8 hours ago

But... what does your comment have to do with burner phones?

A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.

A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.

You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

There are phone farms that exclusively use burner phones and do not need to spoof caller ID.

Comment by rtkwe 8 hours ago

Probably not the issue isn't knowing who owns a number it's that the actual number for the call is just a data field that's not validated or required to be correct. Spam calls would be a lot less annoying if they had to come from real numbers that could be blocked instead of being able to spoof as many numbers as they want.

Comment by jldugger 8 hours ago

Wish I could recall the podcast I listened to a few years ago that was telling the history of robo-dialers and caller ID spoofing. The general gist was that AT&T was making money off it from 1-900 operators so they weren't eager to self-regulate. So even though ending spam calling is a bipartisan issue, feet were dragged on the implementation.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.

of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!

Comment by OptionOfT 8 hours ago

https://archive.org/details/3f25eeb8affc11e6892a43edc8087050

~~I _think_ this is the one.~~

God I miss this podcast.

Edit: this IS the one.

Comment by jldugger 5 hours ago

Are you familiar with the Search Engine podcast?

Comment by OptionOfT 2 hours ago

I am. I couldn't get into it. I'll give it another shot. Maybe I didn't try long enough.

Comment by iamnothere 9 hours ago

Spam calls are a different issue (spam is usually VOIP). Spammers also often use spoofed numbers since STIR/SHAKEN is somehow still not properly implemented.

Comment by singpolyma3 7 hours ago

All carrier interconnects use VoIP protocols since forever anyway. So this is pretty much a distinction without a difference. STIR/SHAKEN affects both

Comment by codedokode 6 hours ago

This is unrelated to spam calls. Business will register thousands of phone numbers for "surveys" and will continue spamming with AI calls.

Comment by codedokode 6 hours ago

In Russia you need an ID to buy a phone number, and almost every site or app requires it to sign up. As a nice bonus, you or any scammer can buy personal data on everyone for cheap in Telegram bots, because everytime there is a PII leak, these bots update their vast databases.

Comment by atum47 3 hours ago

And phone companies are enabling telecoms by manufacturing devices that don't take physical sim cards anymore. I recently migrate from pixel 8 to 10, it only supports eSim. In order to migrate my sim to an eSim I had to provide voice, image, documents and info of the phone I was installing the eSim on. One of the worse companies in Brazil, Vivo, now have everything about me. I bet they keep it in a big excel file accessible via a secret but public link

Comment by everdrive 8 hours ago

And people will keep carrying their phones with them. And keep using them. And keep installing apps. Yes, ideally we'd have laws against government infringement, but the capability to not use your phone is in your hands.

Comment by tumult 8 hours ago

More and more things require having a smartphone. Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border. Install the app to use the street parking in this city. Install the app to board the bus. Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz. I admire your spirit of rebellion, but avoiding using a smartphone in daily life in most places will result in a lifestyle contorted specifically to avoid using a smartphone, and will cut you off from activities that were previously doable without smartphones 20 years ago.

Comment by everdrive 7 hours ago

This is not meant as an argument or a counterpoint, I'm just not familiar with some of your examples. Would you be able to elaborate?

>Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border.

Would this be a national border? I haven't traveled internationally for a while, but this would be quite troubling.

>Install the app to board the bus.

Is there no option to pay without an app?

>Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz.

Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?

Comment by TFNA 4 hours ago

> Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?

Government offices in many developed countries don't realistically answer the phone any more. You either use the official app on your phone, or you log into the official website using strong authentication that requires a phone. A luddite workaround might be a registered letter by post, but you might wait a long time for an answer.

Comment by brewdad 4 hours ago

I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines. To my knowledge there was no other way to get the required approvals.

My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone, credit card tap or with a reloadable transit card. To my knowledge, the only way to reload the card is to use their app or travel to a handful of authorized agents to have them reload your card.

I can call my government office and wait on hold for an hour, ultimately probably needing to schedule an appointment in person to handle my issue or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?

Comment by Ritewut 8 hours ago

This comment is so divorced from reality. It is very difficult to live life in the modern world without a phone unless you want to go Amish.

Comment by autoexec 7 hours ago

I'm not Amish, but if I walk into a restaurant where they won't show me a menu without scanning a QR code, I walk right out.

Comment by doubled112 2 hours ago

I’m with you there, I probably would too.

But when your child is late to school but they won’t allow you in until you scan the QR code and fill in a form? Do you stand and wait hoping to be noticed? Hoping to tailgate somebody with a phone? Just head home?

The school also sends general communications only by app.

Comment by autoexec 1 hour ago

That should be brought up to the school board and parents should be up in arms about it. I don't see how it's even acceptable to require you to do paperwork every time you kid is late to school. If on the day I couldn't get a human at a school to talk to me and a phone call to the office didn't work either I absolutely would go home. People let others get away with this way too often. Sometimes you can't fight it (good luck fighting parking meters in your city that require an app once contracts are signed and the infrastructure is in place), but often you can demand reasonable accommodation if not a change of policy.

Comment by Gigachad 4 hours ago

I've been thinking about it as an experiment lately. Not fully throwing my smartphone in the bin, but considering leaving it at home for a day.

If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them. Public wifi these days has almost vanished so it's difficult to connect to the internet without cellular access now.

Comment by protocolture 3 hours ago

>If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them.

I left prime running a bunch of 80s comedy films in the background as I cleaned my house on the weekend. And so much of the "situation" end of sitcom relies on people having prearranged things beforehand and just happening to arrive on time.

A couple of SMS's and every situation would be resolved.

Comment by Gigachad 3 hours ago

I could get by on just an SMS/Call only device, the problem is these days everyone moved to internet based apps which require an android/ios app. In theory you could use some kind of bridge server to convert it in to a simple text protocol for a dumb device, but I'm always worried you'd get flagged as a bot and have your account deleted.

Comment by khat 7 hours ago

Not really. Rural America you don't need a mobile phone. I can go days without ever touching my phone. And if it wasn't for my bank, I wouldn't need it at all. Even then I could just go to the bank but I'm too lazy to do that.

Comment by cguess 3 hours ago

Even in NYC you could get by pretty much just fine without a phone (a credit or debit card is pretty much required though). The hardest part would be losing contact since expectations of how people organize and meet up are completely mobile phone centric, and plans are almost expected to be modified in real time.

Comment by everdrive 7 hours ago

I'm with you. On my list of things to do is seek out a a local credit union so I'm not reliant on a banking app.

Comment by tonetegeatinst 3 hours ago

Pretty sure that this would just encourage privacy minded folks to find a loophole.

Or if you get fed up enough you just start blasting FM transmissions without a license..... Keep the burst short enough while your mobile and don't make the transmitter obvious and you could probably get away with it for short SMS comms.

Or just use something like lora or meshtastic/meshcore

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

The loophole is to use a homeless person's ID for $20.

Wait. In the US don't they not even have an ID standard? The homeless person probably doesn't have any valid ID and neither do members of several other disenfranchised groups, right? So now they're not allowed to have cellphone service?

Comment by brushfoot 11 hours ago

No more anonymous driving, thanks to Flock. Soon, no more anonymous calls, thanks to the FCC.

Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?

Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.

We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.

Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.

What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.

Comment by grim_io 11 hours ago

Worse, we are becoming a burden.

The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.

They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.

Comment by mystraline 11 hours ago

It was a terrible scattered movie, but they want Elysium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)

Comment by ceejayoz 11 hours ago

No, Elysium still had all the desperate poor people. That's not the end goal.

Comment by gslepak 10 hours ago

They want to scan your soul. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v5HLLkgo5A

Comment by xerox13ster 10 hours ago

They want the future setting of Unanimity in Cloud Atlas. Even that might be too much of an underclass.

Comment by nosioptar 10 hours ago

Can even go to the bodega on foot anonymously, too many of my neighbors have ring cameras pointed at the street.

Comment by markstos 10 hours ago

Flock is being rejected in a number of cities, thanks to citizens.

Comment by burner000333 7 hours ago

How data-driven policing is sold, spoke to someone who set it up once, good odds FLock is doing it, or in the spirit of the below, Flock doesn't have to do it:

- There are networked webcams everywhere: DoT cameras, 18 wheeler fleet cameras, traffic cams, etc.

- Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock

- For average jane and joe citizenry: great, no Flock in town!

- For ongoing negotiations with Flock and the PD: ok, sure, kick us out of town. But we'll just pull the 18wheeler feeds with the vendor we have an agreement with, as they roll through town. Or the DoT feeds via the State contract we have or the...

- As such, negotiations could land as does local PD at least want the control of the feeds already going through their town with each Sysco big rig delivery?

Very, very tricky terrain to solve.

Comment by roysting 10 hours ago

I am quite confident that there will eventually in any of those cities be some kind of major mass casualty type event that will be attributed to that rejection. I don’t hope for it and am sorry for all of humanity for what we are allowing to seemingly inevitably come about, but here we are; like cattle being herded to the feed lot. “But they’re saying they’ll feed you”, you will hear, “they don’t mean you ill. You should stop being a conspiracy theorists. This food is good.”

Comment by collinmcnulty 10 hours ago

We’ll see how it goes, but we also have suits like this that push back on that narrative as if you’re going to say your tech protects against a certain kind of tragedy, and that tragedy actually happens and you didn’t protect against it, maybe you bear some liability.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-...

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by cucumber3732842 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by clint 11 hours ago

> We should also abolish cash while we're at it.

Why do you think all the rich people (and by extension the oligarchy running this country) are pushing Crypto?

Comment by Cider9986 6 hours ago

Monero is the best alternative to cash. And any crypto acceptance helps you pay with Monero because crypto-->crypto is 10x easier than crypto-->fiat.

Comment by roysting 10 hours ago

I don’t think pointing that out will get very far. People didn’t notice when “democracy” was pushed by the same people, in direct contradiction to the Constitution. “Democracy” was the lynchpin to neutralize the Constitution and usher in oligarchic control again, just like digital/programmable currency will complete the pivot of slavery into a total and global system. Why only enslave a few people when you can enslave all people with smoke and mirrors that will make them cheer on their own deception with amusement.

Comment by rirze 11 hours ago

Fundamentally un-American.

That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.

Comment by rockskon 11 hours ago

Well - it's not exactly a surprise that all these non-American countries engage in un-American practices.

It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.

Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.

Comment by cwillu 11 hours ago

American exceptionalism was always a lie; name an “un-American” practice, and I'll show you a piece of American foreign policy.

Comment by brightball 11 hours ago

Violations of the US Bill of Rights.

Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

It's hardly un-American if America does it the most, is it?

Comment by mindslight 11 hours ago

A lie, or an ideal to try and live up to, depending on the context. In the context of discussing liberty-destroying privacy invasions it's an ideal, and we should not be so quick to dismiss it.

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by cucumber3732842 10 hours ago

>Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S.

I need to know whether these other countries are rich western europe before I know whether to agree with you or to cook up some snide rebuttal.

Joking, obviously. And by "joking" I mean mocking a specific type of person and set of beliefs that is who is a) bad b) too common around here.

Comment by axus 11 hours ago

Free, anonymous political speech is the bedrock of American freedom. Also, guns

Comment by IAmBroom 9 hours ago

America, where the Amendments to the Constitution start counting at "2".

Also, apparently ends there, too.

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by em-bee 11 hours ago

there still are a bunch of viable messaging apps/services that work without a phone number:

matrix, wire, deltachat, threema, maybe jabber/xmpp (depends on their support of encryption). any others?

Comment by kgwxd 11 hours ago

> many messaging apps require a phone number

But not all, so what's the actual point?

Comment by rirze 11 hours ago

If a messaging app ever gets the attention of government regulators, it must succumb to this verification.

I don't know any way to avoid this.

Comment by kgwxd 7 hours ago

How would they enforce that on a decentralized communication platform?

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

Did you ever read about how the creator of Session was forced to flee Australia and move to Switzerland?

Comment by hnav 6 hours ago

outlawing the platform

Comment by c2h5oh 5 hours ago

This is already the case in most (all?) EU countries. Government-issued photo ID is required to activate a SIM card.

If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country

Comment by hocuspocus 4 hours ago

I was a teenager when Switzerland introduced the mandatory ID check, in 2003 or 2004 iirc.

My carrier added 10 CHF credit to my prepaid plan for the trouble.

It's still fairly easy to buy a Lycamobile SIM/number that was enabled with a fake or stolen ID. Consequently some banks and services ban entire number ranges, which is not only ineffective but also affects people who committed the sin of keeping their first phone number even after moving to a proper postpaid plan...

Comment by loloquwowndueo 6 hours ago

This has been tried in Mexico at least twice - crooks are still finding ways to have burners and smuggle anonymous phones into jails etc.

Comment by simulator5g 14 minutes ago

It's not about stopping crime, it's about control.

Comment by functionmouse 10 hours ago

does nothing to fight spam; only polices lawful users

they call that "anarcho-tyranny"

Comment by WatchDog 4 hours ago

Lot's of countries already require this but it's trivially by-passable just by using a roaming capable SIM from a country that does not require it.

Comment by 9cb14c1ec0 11 hours ago

I expect the FCC to adopt this rule, and I also expect it to be challenged in court, on the basis that there are many other approaches to fighting spam calls that the FCC has not tried, but are much less intrusive.

Comment by ryanisnan 10 hours ago

I hope you're right. I am not informed - is this typically how these decisions get challenged?

Comment by 9cb14c1ec0 9 hours ago

There are two ways to challenge FCC decisions. There is the upfront approach where a business whose operations are harmed by an FCC decision sues to block the decision. Then there is the approach where said business announces their non-compliance and dares the FCC to sue them. The FCC does not have criminal charging authority, so it has to rely on courts to enforce compliance. See the Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T case that just wrapped up at the Supreme Court.

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

This is already a thing in most countries btw

Comment by OsrsNeedsf2P 2 hours ago

Which is depressing

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

Fun fact: in India, it is a crime to connect the IP network to the telephone network in any way whatsoever that allows calls originating in IP to terminate at telephones. This is because IP network users don't have to provide ID. (It does not prohibit calling from telephones to IP networks, or IP apps calling other instances of themselves)

Comment by lbcadden3 9 hours ago

I’m surprised it’s taken this long to go after this.

In the name of “national security” and “protecting the children” and all.

Comment by laughing_man 8 hours ago

Seems pointless to do this without also doing something about phone number spoofing.

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

It's not about controlling them, it's about controlling you and me

Comment by giantg2 11 hours ago

Maybe a way around this is for intermediary companies to own the phone that happens to have service and then lease the phone.

Comment by voakbasda 11 hours ago

And with that suggestion, a clause is being added to close that loophole….

Comment by giantg2 10 hours ago

So it would be illegal to lend a phone to anyone, even just for one call?

Comment by zmgsabst 8 hours ago

My work can’t provide a cellphone now?

Comment by Beestie 4 hours ago

Well dangit - there go all my favorite crime solving shows.

Comment by phantomathkg 1 hour ago

While Trump can travel to the China with his burn phone, the citizens of the US cannot. Surely everyone is equal.

Comment by aaomidi 11 hours ago

This is the pathway Iran is using to provide tiered internet btw.

Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.

Comment by zoom6628 2 hours ago

Straight out of China playbook. Every SIM must be registered with government issued/recognised ID. Yes combats fraud. Yes means govt can track you thru IMEI 24x7 anywhere in the world.

Comment by garyfirestorm 12 hours ago

Isn’t this already a requirement? Can you really buy a burner phone/sim without providing identifying information?

Comment by tracedddd 12 hours ago

not at all, it’s easy to buy cash only tracphone, mint, boost, etc. and there are plenty of explicit anonymous providers such as phreeli.

That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.

Comment by downrightmike 10 hours ago

the only solution is to upgrade the phone system to require ID, but that would cost billions to AT&T, so that ain't gonna happen

Comment by autoexec 7 hours ago

I had reason to pick up a couple cheap pre-paid phones at a gas station once. I wasn't asked to give an ID to anyone to buy them, but once I had them I needed to call a company to activate the phone and they were very particular about what phone number it would work from. It had to be a landline. Payphone wouldn't work. My work phone didn't work. It was difficult to track down a phone line they'd accept and even then one of the phones refused to register.

It seemed to me like they wanted to make sure they could tie the phones to an individual through activation.

Comment by hstaab 12 hours ago

T-Mobile prepaid accounts for example

Comment by olyjohn 11 hours ago

You can just walk in there with cash and walk out with a fully activated SIM without them asking for ID?

Comment by dgellow 11 hours ago

Correct

Comment by sgt 10 hours ago

Yes, I recall doing that. I'm a foreigner but I was in the US on vacation. Went to T-Mobile, so easy to get a SIM card.

Comment by Zigurd 10 hours ago

I used to buy test phones for software testing at a bodega where they had a laundry basket full of phones, and they would sell prepaid SIMs no questions asked.

Comment by dgellow 11 hours ago

In the US you can buy a SIM card and activate without providing any information at the airport. At least in NYC. I was really surprised the first time

Comment by kgwxd 11 hours ago

Why were you surprised?

Comment by dgellow 8 hours ago

Because I’m from Europe, and we need to provide an ID to get a SIM card

Comment by ImJamal 10 hours ago

Not who you were responding to, but most of the western world requires IDs already. The US is an outlier on this issue.

Comment by kayo_20211030 9 hours ago

I don't think that's true. At least not in the European countries I visit.

Comment by dgellow 8 hours ago

It’s a EU wide requirement

Comment by kayo_20211030 8 hours ago

I dunno. I can go to Tesco in Ireland and the UK (fine, UK is not EU no more, but still Europe) and get a sim without ID.

Comment by hnav 6 hours ago

Nordics, Baltics and a couple of other countries are the places this still works. The rest of Europe is locked down.

Comment by kotaKat 11 hours ago

Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.

Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.

When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.

And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!

Comment by hnav 6 hours ago

They'll just add regulation that requires KYC for roaming agreements.

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

So basically people from Africa won't be allowed to use their phones in the USA by order of the government? (If they can even get into the country without ending up in an ICE camp, of course)

Comment by catigula 9 hours ago

I get over 10 scam calls a day. I'm forced to pay a company to block them because the free methods don't work. There's no way to work around it because they refuse to enforce the law on these companies cycling through burner numbers.

Comment by iamnothere 8 hours ago

They are not using cell phones, they are using VOIP.

Comment by catigula 8 hours ago

I'm aware; I'm referring to their priorities.

Comment by amelius 6 hours ago

This will kill so many movie plots.

Comment by ncrc74 8 hours ago

Can't read the article without an account.

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by neuroelectron 6 hours ago

Anything about the 10 spam phone calls I get a day? no I didn't think so.

Something about no taxes without representation

Comment by shevy-java 8 hours ago

They want perpetual monitoring of everyone. Same with age sniffing.

Anyone still has any doubts? Or is it to ... protect the children?

Comment by jewdus 25 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by greenavocado 9 hours ago

I've got my popcorn and lawn chair out to watch the "voter id is racist" crowd to take a stand on this issue.

Context: Voter ID Laws may seem like a good idea, but they’re actually pretty terrible! On the surface, these laws appear to be a reasonable way to stop people from pretending to be someone else when they vote. But the reality is that this kind of voter fraud almost never happens!!! Instead Voter ID Laws primarily prevent the poor, the elderly, and people of color from voting. They way they’ve disenfranchised people of color is part of a very long history of voter suppression and is a classic example of structural racism.

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

Isn't this the exact same thing? If you don't have a valid ID to vote, now you don't have a valid ID to use a cellphone either. And if you wanted to go and get one, too bad because you probably need a cellphone to do that.

Comment by moate 8 hours ago

So by "Voter ID is racist" crowd you more broadly mean "people who understand that requiring identification in order to exist in society is a burden on the citizens with little benefit to them but of great value to authoritarians who wish to use these laws for nefarious means".

Which, often, does not include exclusively people who think "Voter ID is racist" as plenty of unhinged libertarians hate make great points about why you shouldn't want the government to have access to 100% of your daily data points 100% of the time.

Comment by bigbuppo 10 hours ago

This sounds like a great thing for people that beat their domestic partners. Make it harder for their victims to escape.

Comment by tamimio 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by bondolo 8 hours ago

And yet, for some reason, it is impossible to stop spam calls and texts.

Comment by dredmorbius 5 hours ago

Having looked into the history of call tracking / blocking, it's pretty evident that major US telcos have very little interest in making marketing calls difficult. However tenuous the association between "marketing" and the actual practice of the scammers, harassers, abusers, and worse generating literally billions of such calls monthly (see: <https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/ringing-in-our-fears-2025-...>, "The monthly average of scam and telemarketing calls increased from 2.14 billion a month in 2024 to 2.56 billion a month through September, according to YouMail").

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...>.

Comment by nisegami 9 hours ago

This is standard in my country. Seemingly as a consequence, eSIMs require physically going to a store to be activated (on the telco side), which has always seemed insane to me.

Comment by vfclists 11 hours ago

It was only a matter of time.

The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.

Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.

Comment by downrightmike 10 hours ago

They don't have that right, that's why Ben Franklin set up the USPS

Comment by mrsssnake 11 hours ago

Regardless of this, I see phone network as a legacy thing that in perfect world should already be replaced with lightweight upgradeable calling protocol over IPv6.

Comment by fc417fc802 11 hours ago

This would apply equally to said IP calling network since you'd need a SIM card to access the tower interesting strewn across the country either way.

Comment by dredmorbius 5 hours ago

WiFi / pure-VOIP based calling should be able to disambiguate between the network and the messaging layers. This means that a given cellular modem wouldn't be traceable to a specific contact, or call history. The modems could be swapped amongst individuals readily.

This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.

Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.

I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.

<https://theconversation.com/young-people-hate-making-phone-c...>

Comment by danhon 9 hours ago

This is essentially requiring ID for IP connectivity.

Comment by colinsane 9 hours ago

good for bitcoin

Comment by ncrc74 8 hours ago

Can't read the article without an account. Just sayin.

Comment by rusk 11 hours ago

They’ll get around to guns eventually …

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by greenavocado 11 hours ago

They're already trying to regulate the shape of guns to effectively outlaw everything but the bullet.

Comment by rusk 11 hours ago

Hopefully they tax th bejeesus out of bullets too. Who was the comedian “imma gona pop a cap in yo ass, but first imma set up a layaway”

Comment by fridder 11 hours ago

Chris Rock. And honestly probably the easiest way for gun control

Comment by reaperducer 11 hours ago

Good luck with this.

You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.

I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.

Comment by trumpdong 2 hours ago

Don't those clerks go to jail?

Comment by hnav 6 hours ago

They'll just push it to activation time and require you to upload ID.

Comment by standardUser 11 hours ago

The Trump administration has been working overtime trying to build databases of people in this country. Leaving no stone unturned, legal or otherwise. I vaguely remember a time when American conservatives were against precisely this, often as a first principle. Maybe that's just an idealized memory on my part.

Comment by ethagnawl 11 hours ago

The American conservatives who can afford to be are effectively exempted. When they're not flying around on private jets, the ownership and metadata created by their cars, phones, etc. are obfuscated by layers of shell corporations.

The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)

Comment by kgwxd 11 hours ago

Spoiler: They were never against it, just biding their time.

Comment by bl4kers 8 hours ago

Yep, just in different flavors based on ideology. For example, forced labor requires logging & tracking of pregnancies. Anti-trans folks want gender identity on the books to gatekeep who can teach in schools or enter bathrooms. Same for preventing same-sex marriage. Folks railing against voting rights want more and more checks to prove who you are and where you live

Comment by jewdus 29 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by 3vo-ai 6 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by dredmorbius 5 hours ago

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.)

Comment by throwaway27448 11 hours ago

We're already forced into the credit bureaus. Into traffic cameras. Into using credit cards and banks. The idea the state would let us actually say things online anonymously (or to each other) is completely unrealistic: we must be tagged and tracked through our lifecycle.

Comment by jhartikainen 8 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by know-how 5 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by onetokeoverthe 10 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by sonorous_sub 11 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by Terr_ 11 hours ago

I want to believe this is just a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference [0]... but I fear that might be too-optimistic.

[0] The profession of Telephone Sanitiser on planet Golgafrincham.

Comment by bebeidjdkrjrjr 11 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by josefritzishere 11 hours ago

Seems like classic regulatory overreach.

Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 11 hours ago

Good. Telecoms should have a duty to know who uses their networks.

Comment by tclancy 11 hours ago

Let’s have your name and address then, citizen. Posters have a right to know who is commenting.

Comment by nancyminusone 11 hours ago

The person using the network is the one who put a quarter in the payphone.

Comment by dredmorbius 1 hour ago

Payphones are rather seldom seen these days, friend.

Not to disagree with the principle, but it's somewhat opaque as to what your point is.

I've hazy memories as well of reports that payphones were being more surveilled (a camera placed nearby, for example), or tapped / monitored more than other phones, particularly if in areas with other known issues. Nothing that's turning up in DDG searches though...

Comment by StepBroBD 11 hours ago

US of A’s Chinafication letsgooooooo