Sure, but that only works so far. Even a european-style police force would eventually snap if they had to do 100 break-ins to combat ongoing crime if 99/100 calls were fake.
Surely if 99/100 calls were fake, that should reinforce the idea that a fake call is a possibility, and ensure that police are less likely to react with deadly force unless a threat is proven.
The same way telemarketers fake phone numbers. More surprising to me is that the deeper routing data (as in, the real source of the call, which the phone company necessarily has) is not available. I understand that you want to allow anonymous tips, but it would make sense that if the caller ID data is faked (i.e. the purported number's exchange doesn't match the source), then the data should be made immediately available.
Seems like a lot of people here really want VOIP to be anonymous/unregistered. You know, so that the nazis can't get you if they seize power. But they also seem loath to acknowledge this desire, particularly in this context.
You can specify the number you want to appear to be coming from when terminating a SIP connection, depending on where you're connecting to the network.
Edit: Ah, after reading more from that link you provided; the issue is stuck in your dysfunctional government.
I'm so confused right now.
Does the US not have a central agency that allocates phone numbers and operators? Does that agency not have the ability to shutdown operators who don't follow the rules?
Long story that I’m not fully familiar with short: the phone system suffers from the same trust issues that the internet does. That is, it wasn’t designed with things like adversarial users in mind.
EDIT: Am I incorrect in this statement? I'd love more feedback.
Right but in this case it was unproxied VoIP, right? It should be easy (in the sense of not requiring a forced universal protocol upgrade, I mean) to at least protect against this kind of attack — a caller from an LA IP claiming to be in Kansas.
There is another story happening in parallel to this where the Police arrested the wrong person based off the IP in use. IPs are just too ephemeral to trust for any form of location data.
Not to mention the caller chose to call a line which would normally not have a lot of need for those protections, in comparison to 911.
"IPs are just too ephemeral to trust for any form of location data"
That is just policy decision. It would, for example, be possible to declare that no single IP should be used for more than two customers during a single X hour block.
A policy decision by whom? Specifically, how do you do this when IP spaces are controlled by various unfriendly countries around the world? Politics aside, the required technical coordination would be a nightmare. We can barely handle BGP without conflicts as-is.
IPv4 space is also quite limited, and new devices are popping onto networks all the time. I'm not even sure a IP time window is feasible without a full move to IPv6 - something that policy makers have been trying to push on for years without success.
> Specifically, how do you do this when IP spaces are controlled by various unfriendly countries around the world
You begin a "911-certified program" that requires your local ISPs to register their IP ranges with some central authority. The rest is a bunch of detailed but solvable details.
Your idealism when it comes to making this seem more complicatated that it really is seems misplaced.
I agree; it should be technically trival to implement this. All of my comments along the lines of this are wildly downvoted though; I'm not quite sure why. Maybe privacy cowboys?
Sure thing. Let me switch industries, learn a completely new skillset, and rise to a point of power where I can affect such widespread (cross-state and company) changes. Shouldn't take more than a few months.
Well, I do agree. I shouldn't take more than a few months to fix this. I don't live in the US, but I get the feeling something is terribly wrong with the way you're handling such a basic thing as a phone call, be it VOIP or not.
Reacting as though they are credible enough to warrant deadly force is not.