Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and has not been thoroughly reviewed for completeness or accuracy.
[00:00:00] Gus Herwitz: This is Tech Refactored. I'm your host, Gus Herwitz, the Menard Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center at the University of Nebraska. For those of you who like acronyms, we've got a lot of them for you. Today we're talking about robocalls. As of June 30th, 2021, all telephone companies in the United States are required to use something called the Stir/Shaken Framework.
Basically, a secure caller ID that should help combat unwanted robocall. I'm joined today by Richard Shockey, a telecommunications consultant, chairman of the Board of Directors at the SIP Forum, the Session Initiation Protocol Forum, and a member of the North American Numbering Council at the FCC, all of which have helped to design the stir shaken framework to talk about what it means for the future of robocalls and the telephone network.
Richard, thank you for joining.
[00:00:54] Richard Shockey: Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Gus. We see each other quite often on social media, so, uh, [00:01:00] happy to do this. I hate to admit that I'm an expert on robocall. I've been involved with trying to do robocall and now increasingly robo text remediation for, you know, for almost five years.
And previous to that, you know, I was deeply involved in local and portability and, you know, we're marching down this road. And it, it's, it's not simple. It is complicated, and you have to be very, very careful in dealing with the phone network because if it's critical relationship to public safety, oddly enough, you know, phone calls have not gone away.
If you look at the, the commissions. Reporting on total number of minutes within the system, oddly enough, voice is held up very, very well. It's just that we do all kinds of communications now, text, email, but the actual number of phone call, the actual number of minutes of usage [00:02:00] has not precipitously dropped.
We now- both in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, we, uh, about 70% of all phone calls originate or terminate on the mobile access networks. So obviously, we've already figured out it's a, a complicated problem.
[00:02:23] Gus Herwitz: So you, uh, you introduced yourself there saying that you're a robocall expert. I'm not sure if this is a more or less a glamorous way of introducing you.
I actually think that you are the world's best plumber, . You are in the deep in the network, the telephone network, understanding how it works for most people. The phone network is this. Thing on your desk or in your hand, you enter a number and magically you're connected to, uh, someone else. It's a whole lot more complicated than that.
So I, I, I'd like to, uh, uh, get into a little bit of that and what, uh, you and the SIP forum and Nancy do, because these are invisible things. Most [00:03:00] people don't even have any understanding exists. But first I want to just start by asking why is the robocall problem. So bad, and I, I could even take a step back and just ask why is there a robocall problem to start?
[00:03:13] Richard Shockey: That's actually an excellent question and the reason for that, and, and when I get presentations on this, the reason we have a robocall problem is because of the 1996 act. The Communications Act and we wanted competitive markets for voice communications. And by the way, we got them. Just think no one ever thinks about the cost of a long distance phone call.
In fact, what is a long distance phone call? Nobody knows that.
[00:03:44] Gus Herwitz: I literally saw on uh, uh, Twitter someone the other day asking long distance. What's that? And this was a, someone with a PhD. So not someone who's, uh, uh, a teenager. This is a adult who's been well educated [00:04:00] and has never encountered the concept of a long distance phone call.
So yes, the, the 96 Act has been a great success.
[00:04:06] Richard Shockey: We don't even think about international calls all that much. I mean, you call somebody in the UK or in Canada and you don't even think about it. It's just like, Oh, I'll call Toronto. You know? The reason we have an issue with robocalls and robo text is an axiom of technology, which is no good deed goes unpunished.
Okay? So we wanted competitive markets, we got them. And so we've driven the cost of voice. Down to zero, like email, and we've had problems of course with spam and email, text, and now we're getting them with voice and to try and peel back the onion of remediating. That problem has proven to be remarkably complicated and it is compounded, and we can get into this later by the fact that we have a mixed network.
Okay, [00:05:00] on the one. We have the classic voice service based on time division multiplexing and signaling system seven,
[00:05:10] Gus Herwitz: and those are technologies developed, right? Even in the 1980s, signaling system seven and tdm. Before then, that's how the traditional phone network would complete phone calls. So I dial in number, it's how it signals across all the switches so that my phone gets connected to whomever I'm
[00:05:27] Richard Shockey: calling.
Right? My phone. Correct. And we, we still maintain that antiquated system in part, you know, now that's SIP or IMS and it's, uh, variant now dominates the market. It's basically all of mobile calls. It's mostly in the enterprise space. If you have advanced fiber optic residential service, like, uh, I have here in Northern Virginia, like Fios, you're basically using SIP as well.
One of the things that I [00:06:00] had certainly been suggesting to the commission is if we really wanted to stamp out robocalls, we need to get rid of the, the classic time division multiplexing SS seven network, because the try. What happens is the existing TDM network and the existing system of TDM interconnection has actually become the attack vector.
All right, for your lawyer friends, it's section 2 51, 2 52. Uh, the Communications Act, and this is classic title to stuff without getting into any discussion about net neutrality, voice communications is. Their principle portion of the Communications Act under Title two, uh, and the 1996 Act, as some of us know, was antiquated.
The moment the president [00:07:00] signed the act and trying to, you know, back out of it. Was whether it's significant. And so where we're at right now was we have the Trace Act, which is a remarkable grant of authority. To the Federal Communications Commission to deal with Robo Call In the TRACE Act.
[00:07:22] Gus Herwitz: That's the Telephone Robocall Abuse, Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act.
That was enacted, what, three years ago? Two years ago.
[00:07:30] Richard Shockey: Right. And you know, President Trump signed it and it passed the, the Senate by 97 to 1. Okay. And we won't be people. Go. Well, who would vote for robocall? Well, I, I don't think we need to necessarily go there, but you can look up the legislative history here.
But it was a grant of authority, actually one of the most significant grants of authority to the [00:08:00] FCC since the 1996 Act itself. Um, And that gave them re remarkable powers and the commission has chosen to their eternal credit to actually use them. And so yesterday was a significant milestone in the sense that the first phase of enforcement.
Were had to be done yesterday, the 30th of June, uh, which is that every single solitary carrier in the United States had to file with the fcc, a robo call remediation plan. What is the plan is the obvious question, and they're all over the place to a certain extent, but they had to. Carriers had to make a declarative statement to the commission that they were going to fix the problem using stir shaken, which was actually mandated in the Trace Act itself, which I'm an engineer [00:09:00] of our trade, and that is incredibly unusual for the Congress to basically mandate a specific te.
To be deployed without question. I was involved in local portability as part of the 1996 act. And the ACT was, the 96 Act was actually quite explicit in saying, Well, you're gonna have to do number portability, but we're not gonna tell you how to do it. Okay. And. That made a lot of money for companies that I've worked for, namely NewStar.
The, the fact that Star Shaken, which was developed by the ITF and the SE forum in conjunction with our partners at us, that it would be spelled out so deliberately was something unique and there's a long way to go. There's a lot of issues that are need to be peeled back because when you deploy. A complicated [00:10:00] technology like this, there are bound to be glitches.
It's just inevitable. You know, number portability took almost 10 years to finally sort out.
[00:10:12] Gus Herwitz: And we still have some number portability issues.
[00:10:15] Richard Shockey: Oh, absolutely. Matter of fact, I chair a Nancy committee on the idea of national number portability, which is you could basically keep your phone number, uh, anywhere in the United States essentially for life.
And we still haven't sorted that out yet. There's complications to that. Very serious political issues involving that. People like their phone numbers and they don't like changing them, but without, that's another podcast in and of itself, believe me. So the, we're five years down a road to mitigating robocalls.
It will probably. Another five years, I have to admit [00:11:00] to sort out all of the ramifications. And of course this is going international.
[00:11:06] Gus Herwitz: Okay. Let's actually, uh, I, I want to come back to actually just about everything that you've been saying. We should explain what Stir shaken is and how it's different from the previous way that phone calls were established and why it may or may not help with a robocall scourge.
[00:11:24] Richard Shockey: Okay. Well, remember. I actually have the gray beard to demonstrate that once upon a time, there was a thing called at t, Okay? in a world Long gone. We had a single monopolistic phone system, and because every phone call had to transfer at T lines, then authentication was quite easy. Ok? So when the bell system broke, And then ultimately we had the 1996 act.
You had a much more complicated system. All right? [00:12:00] And part of that was driven by number portability, which created the abstraction between a name, namely the phone number, and the underlying routing address, which is known as an LRN local routing number. So we, we. Inserted abstraction into the system the way we have done in the internet itself.
So you have a domain name nebraska.edu, and then you have an underlying routing address, namely the IP address as well. So the. We, when we designed Stir shaken, we started lifting ideas from the internet that we know and basically grafted them onto the phone system. The principle was authenticating IP addresses.
There's a thing in the internet known as the BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, and what happens? [00:13:00] Networks announce to the rest of the network that they, you could route information to these addresses and they do that through PKI, public key Infrastructure. My friends at Aaron and Rip, and you know, all of the people who give out IP addresses versus phone numbers adopted this public key infrastructure to be able to.
The routing on the internet itself, and still to this day, there are what are known as route flaps where somebody pushes a button, it's fat thumb day on the internet, and all of this traffic gets trombone to South Korea inadvertently. So we grafted the idea that we would put public key infras. In between the phone number and the phone network itself, so that a network essentially announces, yes, this is [00:14:00] my phone number.
I gave it to this customer, and I am going to attest to the fact that the phone number is real. And valid, and you should trust the transaction that is associated with it. So this is how we got started. It,
[00:14:20] Gus Herwitz: it's, it's just important to, uh, emphasize for, for listeners, caller ID, as it's historically existed, is completely insecure.
I basically, Oh yeah. The, the way that caller ID works is the, the caller they send some signals at, on the phone line, and that's interpreted by the receiver as the phone number, and you can display whatever you want with very little control, which is why with robocalls, The, the, the robo callers, two things are going on.
First, they're forging their numbers, so you don't know who's calling and they make up numbers that try and trick you into answering. And also there's very little, if any, ability [00:15:00] for the phone networks to identify who the bad callers are or who the callers using these forged numbers are. Because as, uh, uh, you're saying Richard, there isn't a protocol built in the, to the network for the networks to.
Yes, this is a valid number coming from my network, so it's easy for the fraud starts to engage in the fraud, and it's hard for us to figure out when a specific call is a fraud call, so we can't just block them.
[00:15:26] Richard Shockey: Correct the, it's even more complicated than that because interconnection among most networks is still done via TDM and what we call detail records between service providers are so useless.
That it, it, it's, you know, you can't really do anything with them. And so the trying to do a trace back. Which my friends at US Telecom run a consortium for. Doing so is an extremely difficult and time consuming [00:16:00] process. And then of course we know where a lot of them are coming from. It's overseas and.
Trying to actually shut them down is a problem. However, that is going to be re re remediated in some respects based on the plans that the FCC put in place yesterday. Namely, if you have not filed a robocall remediation plan with the fcc, other networks will simply block your. Okay. It namely, it's what I call excommunication, the famous scene from the movie Beckett.
Okay. Where the, the high priests of the FCC basically say, We're just gonna cut you off, is what it boils down to, which is about as severe a threat as you can possibly.
[00:16:55] Gus Herwitz: So we are speaking with Richard Shockey, a telecommunications [00:17:00] consultant, uh, chairman of the board with the directors of the SIP forum and member of the North American Numbering Council at the Federal Communications Commission about the scourge of robocalls and the implementation of the stir shaken framework, which hopefully will help us address this problem of robocall.
Richard will be back, uh, with you in just a moment.
[00:17:25] Elsbeth Magilton: I'm Elsbeth Magilton, the executive producer of Tech Refactored. I hope you're enjoying this episode of our show. And, hey, do you have an idea for Tech Refactored? Is there some complex thorny tech issue? You'd love to hear us break down? Visit our website to submit your ideas to the show. And don't forget the best way to help us continue making content like this show is word of mouth.
We hope you tell all your tech interested friends about us and encourage them to listen.
[00:17:56] Gus Herwitz: And we are back with Richard Shockey talking about robocalls. [00:18:00] And, uh, Richard, you were just, uh, explaining how as of yesterday, June 30th, uh, 2021, the FCC is requiring all, uh, telecommunications carriers to have a robocall remediation plan in place. And if you don't have one, uh, you are being excommunicated, you can no longer interconnect with the telephone network.
Is this going to get rid of robocalls?
[00:18:25] Richard Shockey: No. I was hoping for a different- okay, there-
[00:18:28] Gus Herwitz: Oh, I was hoping for a different answer. What, what is it going to do and, uh, what comes next?
[00:18:35] Richard Shockey: It's, um, as I often point out to folks, there's no silver bullet. Okay. It is a complicated problem and you know, even with the email service, we still have spam emails that are basian filters simply cannot deal with at some particular point the idea.
From with Stir shake, it was, you can't ultimately eliminate robo call, but you can [00:19:00] suppress the problem to a point where you are restoring trust in the phone network itself. And because of the absolutely critical nature of the phone network to public safety, for instance, nine. The government will and the FCC and the CRTC and my friends at Ofcom in the UK will basically take every conceivable task to basically do that.
But some are gonna slip through except that we won't think about it as much anymore. And there are some complications, which is is we're already beginning to squeeze the rob collars, namely. There are significant call blocking rules already in place that allows, uh, a phone company, uh, cable, the majors, the c Lex, to block a call if in fact they have reasonable data analytics to indicate that the call is being spoofed.
Okay, And this would've involved, say [00:20:00] for instance, a malformed phone. Okay. Or one that has not been issued as part of the North America numbering plan, or one that is in the process of being reassigned. So the phone companies have given blanket immunity. Basically safe harbor from, uh, blocking calls based on a set of criterion that the network can now use.
Right? That's one. So the robo callers have now gone into the allocated portions of the numbers, namely your personal phone number, my personal phone number, and stuff like that, right? And that's harder to deal. But star shaken over time begins to block those out. And again, what we've seen is as we've squeezed the balloon on one end, it's starting to come out in the texts in the SMS service as well.
So we're all beginning to, to sort of see that there are a lot of [00:21:00] other things in the future that. That we're thinking about. Okay. The one is, and we still don't have consensus on this, which is what do we display to the consumer? What do you see on your phone when a call is authenticated by stir shaken?
Is it a little green check mark? Is it a okay or something like that.
[00:21:24] Gus Herwitz: So ju- just to make sure listeners understand, the store shaken in many ways is like with your web, web browsers, https, it's using in encryption, this public key encryption to authenticate, uh, and you likely are familiar. From your web browser, if you, uh, go to a web page that is properly authenticated, you'll get a green lock or you'll get some visible visual indicator that this has been in successfully authenticated.
You can trust that the URL is going to the right place. If you, uh, if there's a problem, you might get a, a red lock that's broken, that's [00:22:00] saying, Hey, there's a problem here. And if you're, uh, going to a normal webpage, you won't see any lock. So there are these visual indicator. That are really important for consumers.
Consumers need to understand them in order to, for them to be effective. And standardization will help with that, uh, as well. So that this is kind of a, a next stage of we have the technology, now how do we implement it in a way that's useful to, uh, consumers.
[00:22:25] Richard Shockey: That that's exact, that's an excellent analogy that, you know, we're trying to come up with different kinds of potential indicators and that there's, we're starting to see on our mobile devices, the data analytics companies, h a tns, first Orion that work with the three majors are, are also saying, putting in, Okay, another acronym, c a call or display.
That said, possible spam, maybe spam one way or the other. The problem is c a is very limited in [00:23:00] scope and the Europeans, for instance, have never deployed it. Okay. So one of, one of the things we're looking at is this concept called rich call data, which takes the original idea of c a and just basically takes it to its logical limit.
Namely, we could display logos. Theme song addresses, photos. I mean, basically anything that would give the consumer an authenticated indicator that the person is calling you is in fact who they say they are. And this is a very, very big deal for a lot of, um, financial. I mean, I personally have spoken with, you know, the voice team at Bank of America.
I know a bunch of people at Mutual of Omaha, by the way, who are deeply concerned about this. And if they detect possible fraud in your account, they wanna be able to tell you. They [00:24:00] wanna get you on the phone and they want you to answer the phone. Cause call completion rates have fallen off Niagara Falls.
I can guarantee you that this is very prevalent in healthcare, by the way, namely your healthcare institutions. Are deeply concerned that they can't get a hold of you via voice because they think everybody thinks that every call is a robocall. So your doctor has got your test results and they want to tell you, you know, get in here now.
And it becomes telephone tack is what it boils down to. And so healthcare institutions, I mean, I've talked to Hospital Corporation of America about this and it's, it's very. Also, you know, public safety folks, they're deeply concerned about all of this as well.
[00:24:49] Gus Herwitz: You're hitting on such an important point.
People don't trust their phones. If I get a phone call, I don't answer it unless I recognize the number, and even then, right? Sometimes they don't. My voicemail, I've turned [00:25:00] into a text-based handshake, so in my voicemail, I say, send me a text and I'll call back, and what, what you're describing is a more sophisticated version of the caller can embed some information.
Here's my company logo. Here's, I don't know, three lines explaining what I'm calling about. Do you want to answer this call? And it's, it makes a lot of sense. It would be much more consumer friendly, but also to this public safety perspective. Um, I don't know if I were to get a text message popping up on my phone saying, Emergency alert, take shelter.
Now, I don't know if I believe that life has got one.
[00:25:35] Richard Shockey: I just got one, you know, 60 minutes ago, because we're gonna get a storm here anytime now, it looks like in Northern Virginia. But yeah, it, it, there are systems. That are authenticated that allow you to do that. And of course this rich call data concept is going to be authenticated exactly the way we do the phone number [00:26:00] itself.
It is going to use star shaken, it's gonna use the same certificates authentication. along those lines, one way or the other, we we're already looking at how to extend it, but there is something else that is driving service providers a little crazy, and it's actually driving financial institutions, which is, if your call actually has been blocked, how do you get notified?
Because there nothing is perfect, but you have emails in your spam box. That have been your BA and filter has not been able to judge it correctly. And then you, and you know, you send another email going, Well, did you get that email that I sent you to go, Oh God, it was in my spam box and all this other sort of stuff.
[00:26:51] Gus Herwitz: And sometimes your follow up email gets caught in their spam box and-
[00:26:55] Richard Shockey: Right. Exactly. Exactly. So there's, [00:27:00] in the sip error message suite, there are two, two things. One is called 608 and six oh seven, which is call blocked by consumer. Okay. It's 607. Call blocked by the network is 608. Okay. And the bank- the loan processors are adamant that they want to, if they think their call has been blocked by the network or even by the consumer itself. In the case of loan processors, they wanna be notified, and this is driving the. Service provider is a little crazy. So the problem with unfunded mandates like Rob call remediation.
Cause remember we paid for number portability. There was 50 cents on the bill for a decade to pay for that system. But they're basically going, Well wait a second. Now we're all trying to find robo calls, but I can only do so much in a quarter because you're you, you don't want [00:28:00] to destabilize the phone network when you're trying to save it.
Is, is, is what I boil this down to. So software, software upgrades in a phone network is not like getting a software upgrade on your laptop, okay? It's a complicated process. You have to have requirements, and then the requirements need to be coded. The. Once it's coded, it has to go back to the service providers for regression testing and all this sort of stuff, and then somebody has to pay for the bill, and then maybe in 18 to 24 months, it actually gets deployed within the network itself.
This is the same thing with the internet. It's the problem of what I call persistence of protocol. We've been trying to do IPv6 for 20 years. We've been trying to do DNS SEC for 15 years. We've been trying to do all kinds of things, even in the data side of the network, that it just takes an awful long time to do that.
[00:28:59] Gus Herwitz: And, and [00:29:00] you, uh, you mentioned this, this, this is such an important issue. Um, you, you mentioned that the trace stack. Specifically says, use stir shaken. It, it gives a lot of power, but also it imposes that constraint there and that that's really important. Otherwise, you're going to have some idiot lawyer, listen, like me, uh, or some idiot law professor like me talking to some regulator who just thinks, Oh, this is a, a good change to your protocol.
They're gonna say, Right, you. We're, we're going to require industry to change this protocol, to work this way that I think it should work. And, uh, I was just reading yesterday, um, ibm apparently they've been working for 18 months to, um, update their internal system. 18 months. It just went live the other day.
And apparently for the last several days internally, no one has been able to use email because there are problem. Uh, and I- IBM you think they know what they're doing with this sort of [00:30:00] thing? It's really hard to design these complex systems, right? Make sure that all the components work and when you hit go, when you make them turn them live, you never know what's going to happen, even if you're making a small change.
So you really don't want. Some regulator saying, Well, you know what? It would be great. This is how Stir Shaken works, but let, let's change it. So that, right the size of the image in the uh, uh, rich call data, uh, a specification. Let's say there's a 256 by 256 pixel image, and they decide, you know what, it should be 300 by 300.
Let's enact that. In a rule you could have just crashed the entire network. Trying to implement that.
[00:30:40] Richard Shockey: Th that's true. Um, and I, I will give staff at Wireline Competition Bureau and, and governmental affairs, I mean, they've laid this thing out reasonably well. I mean, there are things that, again, I think they need to do and we'll, we will cross that Rubicon when we get to it.
And I think the, [00:31:00] the biggest thing is we need to turn off TDM and SS seven, you know, we need the all IP voice network. Existing system, you can't buy the equipment any longer. Uh, it's impossible to upgrade. But there needs to be, you know, some consensus agreement among all of the various operators. You know, not just the majors, but the CLX and the rural carriers on how to do this under 251, 252, because we still have these tandem access switches out there.
There are problem. Even now with drop in calls to TDM because of carriers can actually make money on originating access charges, and you've gotta reform this stuff over time and it's not easy to ultimately, do. We all know what a proceeding at the FCC looks like. You know it's intercar compensation [00:32:00] has been going, the docket is still open, and it's been open for 20.
And you know, the technology transitions docket, which deals with SIP and uh, the psdn issue, it's still. Still going on one way or the other. So the, the advantage of the way we did the trade stack was we cut some of the lawyers out of it Okay. And, and allowed some engineering consultants actually, to make a few bucks.
But I'll tell you one thing I've heard from, You know, my friends at the Federal Communications Bar Association now for the last six weeks, and they have had, they're all shopping for new boats because of the robo call remediation program. Okay. They're getting calls not just from domestic carriers, but from Canadian carrier.
And from foreign carriers. Cause there's a pro basically does France Telecom, Telecom, Thalia, Deutsche Telecom, the real Deutsche Tele [00:33:00] actually have to file a rob call remediation report with, with the fcc. And what is the legality of that?
[00:33:06] Gus Herwitz: That is one of that, that's my, probably my pin ultimate question.
What? What's the international dimension of this? I know a lot of robocalls originate. And I, Is that still a loophole that the callers can avail themselves of, or will implementation of star shaken and their mediation plans, will that cut off international origination?
[00:33:29] Richard Shockey: We hope so, we hope, again, this is a work in progress.
So the international implications of this are, again, robocalls are the number one complaint, the FCC. The number one complaint to the, to the CRTC in Ottawa. It's the number one complaint to Ofcom in the uk. Now, the virus has spread. I personally had conversations with RCEP, the French [00:34:00] regulator, because the United States tends to get its robo calls from the Philippines, for instance.
The British get them from Pakistan and India, but now the, the Robo callers have set up shop in the former French colonies of North Africa, Algeria, and Morocco, and acep. The regulator is live it, I mean, epileptic. They just don't know what to do. They're, and what I was told actually as well is that they've got a authority to act.
They've actually got to go to the French National Assembly to do their own version of the trade stack before they can take demonstrable action. Canada and the and the UK are different because of the way their acts are written one way or other. But it's spreading and we're hearing it's spreading even into the nether.
Okay. And so the Dutch regulator is taking fairly aggressive action [00:35:00] about this, but there's some problems, by the way, if you actually read a TRACE Act. One of the things that we were concerned about was that the penalties were insufficient. Namely, the FCC likes to tout. They collect a lot of fines for Robo Call.
What they won't tell you is did they actually get the money? Okay. the, there was what we would call the hang 'em high committee, which would be the regulators. Essentially getting together with the Department of Justice and the Attorney General to see if the penalties could be strengthened, and Europeans, oddly enough, have a lot better tools than the United States does.
The Germans, for instance, can seize bank accounts on a, okay, even before a. So they just walk into the back of the yard, just, you know, lock down these accounts. I've got a rep and it doesn't have to be signed [00:36:00] by a. Okay. That is something the Federal Trade Commission or the FCC would simply, uh, they, they'd love it if they could get it.
Some of the authority to act has been difficult. In the case of the Federal Trade Commission, there's the common care exemption, which causes my friends at the SC ftc. Amount of heartburn, by the way, and even the FBI and the Department of Justice has limited powers over some of this stuff because there are areas in the TCPA Telephone Consumer Protection Act that basically law enforcement throws up a tan because you've gotta prove intent.
And, and if you're a law professor, you know what it's like to try and go into in a court and prove intent. And the TCPA itself has caused a lot of problems for folks in trying to deal [00:37:00] with enforcement issues. So one of the things we may see whole, the Biden administration will, will. Move on this, uh, changing the actual criminal penalties, civil and criminal penalties for, for doing these kinds of things.
[00:37:17] Gus Herwitz: So it, uh, it sounds like I'm gonna have to have you back on, uh, to , uh, and that there's so much more that we, uh, uh, could talk about and. Regrettably, I, I was hoping, even though I knew you weren't going to say this, I was hoping that you would say that a, as of yesterday, the, the problem of robocalls has been solved, but unsurprisingly it's not.
I I do have one last question. It's not a, the most substantive of questions, but we've had a lot of acronyms, uh, in this discussion. Of course, the, the best one is stir shaken for anyone curious. Uh, uh, secure tele secure telephony identity revisit. That's stir and signature based handling of asserted information [00:38:00] using tokens that's shaken, but stir shaken is much catchier my my question, very non substantive.
Who comes up with these acronyms?
[00:38:10] Richard Shockey: Well, we all drink martinis. Okay, that's how we start. We start with what acronym do we want? Oh, wow. Again, it's, it's when you have idle engineering minds, put put to poor usage. In a bar. For those of you who actually want more information about stir shaken, uh, you can go to Google and type in Stir Shaken virtual Summit, which will be beginning on July 19th.
It is totally free, but you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about robocalls and stir shaken, and we've had wonderful sponsorship one way together. But look it up and we'll. We'll, we'll probably end up doing this, Gus, in six months.
[00:38:59] Gus Herwitz: Well, I, I [00:39:00] think I, uh, engineering minds might be brilliant marketing minds.
On that note, uh, Richard, it's been a pleasure talking with you. And for our listeners, thank you for joining us, um, your host, Gus Herwitz. I hope that you've enjoyed this episode of Tech Refactored. If you want to learn more about what we're doing here at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, If you can go to our website@ngtc.unl.edu or you can follow us on Twitter @UNL_NGTC.
This podcast is part of the Menard Governance and Technology Programming Series hosted by the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center. The Nebraska Governance and Technology Center is a partnership led by the Nebraska College of Law in collaboration with the Colleges of Engineering Business and journalism in Mass communications at the University of Nebraska.
Colin McCarthy produced and recorded our theme music. Casey Richter provided technical assistance and advice. Elsbeth Magilton is our executive producer, and Lysandra Marquez is our associate producer. Until next time- no, Mr. Robocaller, I expect you to die. [00:40:00]