[telecom] FCC grants emergency "unblocking" of CNID to Jewish Centers

This is in response to the numerous (over a hundred in the current wave) bomb threats phoned in to Jewish Community Centers and similar facilities

[FCC Press Release]

The Federal Communications Commission today issued an emergency temporary waiver to Jewish Community Centers and [the] telecom- munications carriers [which] serve them to allow these entities and law enforcement agencies to access the caller-ID information of threatening and harassing callers.

"This agency must and will do whatever it can to combat the recent wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. "I am pleased that we are taking quick action to address this issue and hope that this waiver will help Jewish Community Centers, telecommunications carriers, and law enforcement agencies track down the perpetrators of these crimes."

======= rest:

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_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

***** Moderator's Note *****

It's not exactly clear to me if the exception to caller-id blocking is being given to local law enforcement, or directly to the community centers which have been threated. If it's the former, then Mr. Pai is grabbing some free ink (police have always had that access), but if the later, then Mr. Pai is setting a bad precedent: "Jewish Community Centers [and] telecommunications carriers" are not, IMO, the appro- priate agencies to find and/or punish those making crank phone calls. IMHO, giving /any/ religious community center access to blocked caller-id info for all callers will come with the risk of inapropriate responses to peevish or rude callers.

Public safety agencies should not be allowed to subcontract their jobs to religious leaders who are neither trained in law enforcement, nor accustomed to applying the often-frustrating, but necessary, rules about which calls, exactly, rise to the level of criminal behavior.

Please ask yourself -

  1. When I call the Striar center and complain that the chemicals used for the pool could cause an explosion because I think they're stored improperly, should my call be placed in the same category as that of a threat to kill people?

  1. If I call the local mosque and voice a concern that one of the worshippers spoke inappropriately to my sister, should I be regarded as a dangerous islamophobe?

  2. When I ring the Kingdom Hall and ask that those proselytizing in my neighborhood respect my "no soliciting" sign and refrain from waking me up at three in the afternoon when I work the night shift, am I an extremist?

  1. If I should be able to call the YMCA and ask if my yoga class has been cancelled, without having to worry about being placed on some fundraising list.

Cops are schooled and experienced at evaluating both context and capability, which is why they are given the job of evaluating "threat" calls, and they should be the first line of defense, not the second.

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
danny burstein
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[snip]

I'm confused: What happened to the *57 Call Trace feature? The information gathered by that was never available to consumers, but was given to law enforcement. Also, I thought that information was the more reliable ANI, not caller-ID. Could someone elaborate on current practice?

Another question: when organizations issue "bomb threat call" directions to their employees, *57 isn't mentioned. I would think an employee should use that immediately upon receiving a threatening call.

Thanks.

P.S. Here is the Verizon customer support webpage for Call Trace:

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***** Moderator's Note *****

AFAICT, the new FCC chairman's "current practice" is to issue lots of PR notices and grab as much free ink as he can.

Of course the community centers have access to call trace features, but apparently the FCC feels that those features are inadequate to the task at hand: since only the most recent call can be traced with #57, a busy center might have another call overwrite the info before someone can use the feature. I'm still concerned at the thought that the police are sub-contracxting their jobs to untrained volunteers at community centers.

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
HAncock4

[snip]

Indeed, that "1157" ("*57") code only applies to the most recent incoming call, which could easily be a half dozen calls earlier.

An added complication is that in many office systems the person who just received the threat, and then remembers to punch in that code, could easily (and very likely) be getting a dial tone from a different trunk line than the one the threat came in on.

Reply to
danny burstein

Years ago I worked the switchboard at a large Y. There wasn't all that much traffic, perhaps an incoming call every five minutes or so. Certainly not that many that one call would be overridden by another.

Plenty of smaller enterprises, and most residences, do not have that much incoming phone traffic where a subsequent call would override the first one.

Also, some large businesses still have traditional Centrex where each line is the line.

While certainly in many larger office systems that would be the case, but there remains many smaller systems and legacy service where it is not the case.

Reply to
HAncock4

Dialing *57 gets the ANI sent to law enforcement. The ANI is the outgoing number at the VoIP gateway. The law enforcement people then send a subpoena to the gateway operators to look through their logs to find the IP address of the caller. If they are lucky that IP address is the caller's machine, if more likely the are unlucky it turns out to be a proxy server in China somewhere. At this point INTERPOL has to get involved in order to request logs from the proxy server, if the proxy server can be found, and if the operator of the proxy server hasn't shut it down and moved it to another hotel room....

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

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