Thank you to everyone who has bought my latest book, Telephone Terrorism. This book is all about the invention we love to hate—robocalls. It’s also about the bizarre but fascinating U.S. law (the TCPA) that allows savvy consumers to collect thousands of dollars for receiving these unwanted calls.
There have been some interesting developments since the publication of the book last October. The most important is the passage of the Pallone-Thune TRACED Act, which increases penalties and enforcement of the existing law. Now that con artists and criminals have taken over virtually our entire telephone network, Congress is belatedly throwing everything plus the bathroom sink at them. Maybe next they’ll finally get around to ratifying a trade agreement with the Ottoman Empire, or impeaching that wily rascal Warren Harding.
There is other big news this year. The Supreme Court has, for the first time, agreed to consider whether the TCPA violates the First Amendment. It’s possible that all of the nation’s laws and rules against robocalls and telemarketing will be declared null and void, and then it will be open season on everyone who has a phone. Pallone-Thune TRACED Act, we barely knew ye.
This outcome seems unlikely, because the Supreme Court justices are certainly frustrated with the robocall epidemic like the rest of us. If you want to make Ruth Bader Ginsburg really angry, try calling her three times a week to sell her burial insurance. That lady isn’t planning to retire from the Court until she’s 113, and then twenty years after that she’ll start thinking about burial.
However, the folks over at TCPA World think there is a real chance that the Court will rule that the TCPA is unconstitutional. See this interesting post by defense litigation expert (and self-declared Czar) Eric Troutman. And, by the way, I highly recommend TCPA World as the best site for keeping up on changes to the law, even though its authors usually react with glee every time that a robocaller gets away with something.
And finally, for those 8 billion people who still haven’t purchased my book, I’ve put Chapter 1 online to read for free. This chapter takes us back to the origins of the crisis.
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