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The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

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Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#101

Post by trollbridge »

tzs wrote: post #79
trollbridge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids can get government IDs. In my state, it's free for anyone under the age of 17. It's also free for anyone who can provide adequate proof they can't afford the $15.

What about people who can't afford the costs to get the documentation required in order to get the ID?

A birth certificate is $25. My state has a programme for people who can't afford that to get a grant to pay for that, too.

I used to be quite anti-"comrade, your ID, please", but now that it's required anyway to function, we might as well get some benefits from it. Such as attestation of phone numbers being "this is from a real person who is an ordinary consumer".

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#102

Post by therealpygon »

aspbee555 wrote: post #41

spam/phishing/malicious calls do not come from individuals. How about they start with preventing caller ID spoofing/requiring proper caller ID? the spam calls come from call farms that rotate numbers. they should be required to present a unified and verifiable caller ID Phone systems can put whatever they want in caller ID, there should be verifiable reverse lookup to a valid registered number along with fines for vi…

It has nothing to do with that. It’s to positively identify all of your collected data as absolutely having come from you before being fed into Palantir/whatever AI systems and data collection they can use. It’s just an extension of the forced ID in states under the guise of “protect the children” which is always the thing used to take away rights of adults. Anonymity is a check on power, hence the reason all systems of government eventually seek to take it away and criminalize it. You can’t threaten who you don’t know, but you can absolutely silence someone you do.

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#103

Post by tzs »

trollbridge wrote: post #101
tzs wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people who can't afford the costs to get the documentation required in order to get the ID?

A birth certificate is $25. My state has a programme for people who can't afford that to get a grant to pay for that, too. I used to be quite anti-"comrade, your ID, please", but now that it's required anyway to function, we might as well get some benefits from it. Such as attestation of phone numbers being "this is from a real person who is an ordinary consumer".

Getting a certified copy of a birth certificate requires proof of identity. If you don't have a government issued photo ID states typically require multiple forms of secondary documentation (some of which themselves require photo ID to obtain). The secondary documentation can be expensive to obtain (fees for the documents themselves plus the effort to locate the documents).

The secondary documentation that can be easily and cheaply obtained without a photo ID, such as a copy of a utility bill, can fail because of name match problems--if your birth certificate is for "Bartholomew Jo-Jo Simpson" and your electricity bill is for "Bart Simpson" that might not be accepted.

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#104

Post by rationalist »

iamnothere wrote: post #95
rationalist wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggeat for preperations?

Stock up on old computers, maybe small cheap SFF/NUC models. You will want replacements on hand as well as some to hand out to trusted friends. Don’t forget to get spare drives, used is fine considering the price right now. Download and archive (on durable media) ISO, source code, and documentation of simple, durable operating systems that can be easily maintained and modified. I would suggest OpenBSD and a few Linux…

Thank you

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#105

Post by mattmaroon »

Cider9986 wrote: post #56
mattmaroon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I strongly suspect this will allow them to use it in court considerably more frequently. But still, I know they know who I am. Anyone with a cell phone in their pocket has no privacy. It’s the best tracking device ever. Anyone who thinks anything at all can make that problem worse simply doesn’t understand that they have none. I’d rather have zero privacy and zero spam calls than zero privacy and lots of spam ca…

We have a constitutional amendment–the 4th amendment. They ignore it. You can have privacy on a phone using GrapheneOS.

The 4th amendment has been interpreted by the courts to not be a broad right to privacy, and the overturning of Roe specifically stated this. Even if you think it should be interpreted as a broad right to privacy, it is clearly capable of being interpreted otherwise and is in no way adequate in today’s world.

You can only have SOME privacy on a phone with Graphene if you don’t really use the phone the way people use theirs most of the time. You’ve still got a SIM card talking to cell towers owned by a company who sells your information. You’re still presumably using apps and websites that require authentication. The government can still find where you were and what you were searching for unless you take extraordinary measures. That’s not privacy.

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#106

Post by mattmaroon »

iamnothere wrote: post #75
mattmaroon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I strongly suspect this will allow them to use it in court considerably more frequently. But still, I know they know who I am. Anyone with a cell phone in their pocket has no privacy. It’s the best tracking device ever. Anyone who thinks anything at all can make that problem worse simply doesn’t understand that they have none. I’d rather have zero privacy and zero spam calls than zero privacy and lots of spam ca…

> I’d rather have zero privacy and zero spam calls than zero privacy and lots of spam calls. Obviously I’d prefer privacy and I think we need a constitutional amendment to that effect, but as far as showing our ID to eliminate spam in a world where zero privacy exists, sign me up. Thanks for demonstrating that the end goal of privacy doomerism is passive acceptance. Whether this is your real opinion or you’re astrotu…

Oh no, random people on the internet who don’t understand simple logic and can somehow take “we need a constitutional right to privacy” as not caring about privacy are judging me. Whatever shall I do?

If you’re worrying about a light rain while you’re drowning in the flood, that was the end goal and you fell for it. My life is materially impacted by spam calls, as a small business owner, it is far beyond an annoyance, so I’m going to enjoy the rainbow until I figure out what to do about the flood

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#107

Post by Cider9986 »

HNisCIS wrote: post #88
Cider9986 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is not an anonymity tool–it is a privacy tool. It is not anonymous in any way. If you need anonymity you should use SimpleX over Tor.

Simplex is run by borderline grifters and Tor isn't a messenger. I don't understand why this is so controversial. If you follow the news on the slightest the game right now is feds raiding journalists, taking their devices and then trying to unmask their sources. It doesn't matter what XYZ is "for" , when the stakes are this high we need to be protecting people full stop.

You are using an Ad hominem ("Simplex is run by borderline grifters"), Straw man ("Tor isn't a messenger"), appeal to consequences ("It doesn't matter what XYZ is "for", when the stakes are this high we need to be protecting people full stop."), and an implicit no true Scotsman ("defeats the entire use case").

>Simplex is run by borderline grifters

The developers' character is irrelevant—the code is open source (agpl) and trustless. The whole point of e2ee is that it doesn't matter what the server is running.

>Tor isn't a messenger

I never claimed it is—Tor is an anonymity network that helps make SimpleX the most anonymous messenger. You run Orbot on your phone routing your SimpleX traffic through it. SimpleX has no identifiers, and Tor protects the network level so you have no traffic that can be correlated.

>I don't understand why this is so controversial. If you follow the news on the slightest the game right now is feds raiding journalists, taking their devices and then trying to unmask their sources. It doesn't matter what XYZ is "for", when the stakes are this high we need to be protecting people full stop.

You aren't addressing my point. You can't make a great service with a threat model that encompasses every threat. Signal is a great option for everyday messaging—its architecture was never designed to be anonymous, it is centralized and mainstream. High stakes don't change what a tool was built to do; recommending it to journalists as though it provides anonymity is the wrong thing to do. Signal sacrifices anonymity in order to gain popularity.

I will say Signal is fine for 99% of journalists and their sources. The only metadata that Signal provides to law enforcement is account creation date[1].

[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/district-of-columbia/

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#108

Post by Cider9986 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #105
Cider9986 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a constitutional amendment–the 4th amendment. They ignore it. You can have privacy on a phone using GrapheneOS.

The 4th amendment has been interpreted by the courts to not be a broad right to privacy, and the overturning of Roe specifically stated this. Even if you think it should be interpreted as a broad right to privacy, it is clearly capable of being interpreted otherwise and is in no way adequate in today’s world. You can only have SOME privacy on a phone with Graphene if you don’t really use the phone the way people use…

You're conflating 'complete anonymity from everybody' with 'privacy.' GrapheneOS doesn't claim to be anonymous.

They're not the same thing. GrapheneOS reduces what apps, the OS, and Google can collect about you. That's where the vast majority of privacy issues occur.

Cell tower metadata is a separate, narrower issue at the baseband layer, and it's addressable if you care to. 'It's not privacy unless it defeats every adversary at once' is a standard nothing meets. If you took that standard to dismiss real improvements you'd never use any privacy tool.

Is it that crazy that a cell network can know where you are? Of course it knows where you are—you couldn't connect to it without being in range.

Also, we don't have to hold phones to a higher standard than computers. It is your choice to use them with a Sim card, just like it is your choice to use a hotspot for your computer.

Authentication is not dependant on the phone and is the exact same no matter what device you are using. Saying that "using apps and websites that require authentication" makes your phone not have privacy is ridiculous. You can remove privacy from any device by streaming it's screen to youtube. GrapheneOS is private by default, and let's you make it less private.

ps you should blog again, even if it was very cynical from what I can find ;) (https://archive.is/Xx7uR)

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#109

Post by m463 »

rationalist wrote: post #93
rolph wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"phone number?" "i dont have a phone" "emergency contact?" "911, no one else is better suited to respond to an emergency?"

Medical establishments are notorious for asking for lots of information they do not need. For example, every hospital and office I've been to asks for my Social Security Number, yet none have said anything when I leave it blank.

I found myself in front of the hospital representative and they started asking for marital status and religion. I had to shake it off and say, "What? I'm not giving you that information"

(I can see for if you die / etc but still)

Re: The FCC wants your ID before you get a phone number

#110

Post by mattmaroon »

Cider9986 wrote: post #108
mattmaroon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 4th amendment has been interpreted by the courts to not be a broad right to privacy, and the overturning of Roe specifically stated this. Even if you think it should be interpreted as a broad right to privacy, it is clearly capable of being interpreted otherwise and is in no way adequate in today’s world. You can only have SOME privacy on a phone with Graphene if you don’t really use the phone the way people use…

You're conflating 'complete anonymity from everybody' with 'privacy.' GrapheneOS doesn't claim to be anonymous. They're not the same thing. GrapheneOS reduces what apps, the OS, and Google can collect about you. That's where the vast majority of privacy issues occur. Cell tower metadata is a separate, narrower issue at the baseband layer, and it's addressable if you care to. 'It's not privacy unless it defeats every…

We were specifically discussing privacy from government as that’s what the original post is about. The FCC making cell providers check IDs like a bank will have no privacy ramifications in any other regard. My provider knows who I am, gives my government any info they want (probably all of it without even having to be asked, possibly without their knowledge), and sells it “anonymized” to all sorts of people. Graphene won’t help with any of that. I’m sure it is wonderful in other ways, but they’re just not ones that rank on my list of concerns.

And you’re right I should.

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