{"id":45450,"date":"2021-08-04T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-04T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/robocall-rebellion\/"},"modified":"2021-08-04T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-04T11:00:00","slug":"robocall-rebellion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/robocall-rebellion\/","title":{"rendered":"Robocall rebellion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gail
Gail Collins(CREDIT: Earl Wilson\/The New York Times)<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let\u2019s find something fun to talk about.<\/p>\n

Really, we need a little break. The top topics for civic discussion right now are the pandemic, climate change and collapsing infrastructure. It\u2019s summer, but baseball games keep getting postponed when somebody tests positive for the coronavirus. There\u2019s nothing much on TV except the Olympics, and the Olympics are kind of depressing.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s complain about \u2026 robocalls!<\/p>\n

Among the nonlethal problems currently facing the nation, robocalling looms large just for raw irritation. Really large. According to the call-blocking company YouMail, Americans got about 4.4 billion robocalls in June \u2013 seriously. This is up from a mere 4 billion in May.<\/p>\n

The government has been trying to rein in robocalling, one way or another, since the 1990s. But with little success. Any chance you remember the birth of the National Do Not Call Registry in 2003? Ten million people signed up in the first few days.<\/p>\n

We felt like such an \u201cin\u201d crowd. Unfortunately, the Federal Trade Commission found enforcement impossible and being a Do Not Caller seemed like it made no practical difference whatsoever. Still, maybe we could all get together in a couple of years for our 20th reunion.<\/p>\n

Plus Congress had passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which limited the use of automatic dialing systems, prerecorded messages and all the things you\u2019ve come to hate in an unsolicited phone call.<\/p>\n

But this spring \u2013 in a decision one critic claimed \u201creads like a brief from a telemarketers\u2019 trade association\u201d \u2013 the Supreme Court decided the act didn\u2019t really hold up. The decision was, unsurprisingly, pretty complicated. But the bottom line was that nobody needs your permission to put your phone number on an automatic dialer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey used grammatical gymnastics to create an opening for Americans to be bombarded with unwanted calls on their cellphones,\u201d Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., complained in a phone interview. Markey, who\u2019s one of Congress\u2019 anti-robocall crusaders, expects to come up with a bipartisan bill to undo what the court has done. Even in an era when Republicans and Democrats can\u2019t agree on whether to hold a hearing about the assault on the nation\u2019s Capitol, they\u2019re pretty much in accord on robocall reform.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are no red robocalls or blue robocalls,\u201d Markey intoned. \u201cOnly obnoxious robocalls.\u201d<\/p>\n

The industry\u2019s ability to work around barriers would be inspiring if it weren\u2019t \u2026 about calling everyone. I\u2019ve been on the Do Not Call list for ages, and while I\u2019ve been typing this paragraph I got two phone calls. One was from \u201cDave,\u201d who wanted me to show my support for our veterans by giving him a commitment for a modest check combined with the sharing of my personal information.<\/p>\n

The other was a recorded message urging me to \u201cpress 1\u201d if I\u2019d ever gotten sick from taking Xanax.<\/p>\n

(You know that you should never press 1, right, people? Never pressing any number during a telephone pitch is a generational law similar to the one your parents or grandparents had about not inviting door-to-door salesmen to come into the house.)<\/p>\n

The robocalls are just part of a vast web of workers trying to sell you stuff over the phone. There are, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 117,000 Americans who do that kind of work for a living, at an average wage of just under $15 an hour.<\/p>\n

And a darned efficient operation it is.<\/p>\n

It included an estimated 45.9 billion robocalls in 2020. That\u2019s about 1,455 a second. In the time it takes you to blink, 1,455 people are going to be robo-ed.<\/p>\n

So the beat goes on, folks. But there\u2019s hope for the future. Markey\u2019s working on his bill. And as of June 30, the major phone companies were supposed to start using a technology called Stir\/Shaken to make it harder to trick you into believing a call from Pakistan is actually coming from, say, a neighbor with the same area code.<\/p>\n

We will stop right here to note that \u201cStir\u201d stands for \u201csecure telephone identity revisited\u201d and \u201cShaken\u201d is \u201csignature-based handling of asserted information using tokens.\u201d<\/p>\n

How can anything with a name like that fail to succeed?<\/p>\n

Gail Collins is a columnist for<\/em> The New York Times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Collins(CREDIT: Earl Wilson\/The New York Times)du1-i-syn Let\u2019s find something fun to talk about. Really, we need a little break. The top topics for civic discussion right now are the pandemic, climate change and collapsing infrastructure. It\u2019s summer, but baseball games keep getting postponed when somebody tests positive for the coronavirus. There\u2019s nothing much on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-45450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45450"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=45450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}