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Posted by berlianta 4 hours ago

FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs(www.404media.co)
196 points | 123 commentspage 2
brushfoot 3 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.

grim_io 3 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.

mystraline 3 hours ago||
It was a terrible scattered movie, but they want Elysium.

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

ceejayoz 2 hours ago||
No, Elysium still had all the desperate poor people. That's not the end goal.
gslepak 2 hours ago|||
They want to scan your soul. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v5HLLkgo5A
xerox13ster 2 hours ago|||
They want the future setting of Unanimity in Cloud Atlas. Even that might be too much of an underclass.
nosioptar 2 hours ago|||
Can even go to the bodega on foot anonymously, too many of my neighbors have ring cameras pointed at the street.
markstos 2 hours ago|||
Flock is being rejected in a number of cities, thanks to citizens.
roysting 2 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.”
collinmcnulty 2 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-...

cucumber3732842 2 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.
clint 2 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?

roysting 2 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.
rirze 3 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.

rockskon 3 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.

cwillu 3 hours ago|||
American exceptionalism was always a lie; name an “un-American” practice, and I'll show you a piece of American foreign policy.
brightball 3 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.

mindslight 2 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.
cucumber3732842 2 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.

axus 3 hours ago|||
Free, anonymous political speech is the bedrock of American freedom. Also, guns
IAmBroom 1 hour ago||
America, where the Amendments to the Constitution start counting at "2".

Also, apparently ends there, too.

em-bee 2 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?

kgwxd 3 hours ago||
> many messaging apps require a phone number

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

rirze 2 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.

functionmouse 2 hours ago||
does nothing to fight spam; only polices lawful users

they call that "anarcho-tyranny"

9cb14c1ec0 3 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.
ryanisnan 2 hours ago|
I hope you're right. I am not informed - is this typically how these decisions get challenged?
9cb14c1ec0 1 hour 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.
nisegami 1 hour 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.
giantg2 3 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.
voakbasda 3 hours ago|
And with that suggestion, a clause is being added to close that loophole….
giantg2 2 hours ago|||
So it would be illegal to lend a phone to anyone, even just for one call?
zmgsabst 44 minutes ago|||
My work can’t provide a cellphone now?
garyfirestorm 4 hours ago||
Isn’t this already a requirement? Can you really buy a burner phone/sim without providing identifying information?
tracedddd 3 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.

downrightmike 1 hour 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
hstaab 4 hours ago|||
T-Mobile prepaid accounts for example
olyjohn 3 hours ago||
You can just walk in there with cash and walk out with a fully activated SIM without them asking for ID?
dgellow 3 hours ago||
Correct
sgt 2 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.
Zigurd 2 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.
dgellow 3 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
kgwxd 3 hours ago||
Why were you surprised?
dgellow 47 minutes ago|||
Because I’m from Europe, and we need to provide an ID to get a SIM card
ImJamal 2 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.
kayo_20211030 1 hour ago||
I don't think that's true. At least not in the European countries I visit.
dgellow 47 minutes ago||
It’s a EU wide requirement
kotaKat 3 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!

aaomidi 3 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.

rusk 3 hours ago|
They’ll get around to guns eventually …
greenavocado 3 hours ago||
They're already trying to regulate the shape of guns to effectively outlaw everything but the bullet.
rusk 3 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”
fridder 3 hours ago||
Chris Rock. And honestly probably the easiest way for gun control
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