The America's Cup

The America's Cup is the oldest continuously defended trophy in sport.  It dates back to 1851, before the Civil War.  The thirty-fourth defense of the trophy is happening in September of this year (2013).  I got seriously interested in the defense of the Cup in 1982.  1982 was also the first year it was broadcast live on TV.  Initially the races were broadcast on a local TV station in Newport, Rhode Island.  But by the time of the seventh race in the series interest was so great that the race that decided who won the cup was broadcast on national TV.  All of the Cup defenses, more or less, have been broadcast since.  Defense of the Cup involves the clash of big money and even bigger egos.  The result is a lot of drama and some very interesting stories.  The first of these stories involves the very first race for the Cup.

By the 1850's Americans, at least some of them, were full of beans and figured they were second to none.  The premier world naval power of the time was the British.  At the time nearly all boats were powered by sails as steam power was just starting to come into its own.  Sailboats of any size at the time were nearly always used for fishing, cargo hauling, or military purposes.  There were a large number of sailboats in use for recreational purposes but almost all of them were small (under 30' in length).  The rich of the period did sometimes own pleasure boats, which they typically used for entertainment or for transportation.  In the latter situation it would be akin to a movie star or big executive owning a private Jet today.

One of the groups of men (it was exclusively men at the time) who owned large private yachts were organized as the Royal Yacht Squadron.  All of them were wealthy and well connected to the British monarchy.  The Royal Yacht Squadron periodically organized races.  In most cases this was more of a social event than anything else but some of the members took the competition seriously.  And of course, being British, it was taken as a foregone conclusion that whoever had the fastest boat in the Royal Yacht Squadron fleet had the fastest boat in the world.  In 1851 a group of Americans, organized as the New York Yacht Club had enough beans to beg to differ.

So the Commodore (in modern terms - CEO) of the Yacht Club, one John Cox Stevens, commissioned the construction of a fast schooner of roughly a hundred foot length that was eventually christened "America" with the intention of challenging the British.  The boat was sailed across the Atlantic to France where it was reconfigured for racing and then sailed across the English Channel with the intention of taking on the best of the Royal Yacht Squadron.  The British knew the boat was coming and a couple of their fastest boats under the guise of escorting the America into harbor did some informal speed testing.  The results were shocking.  The British then spent the summer dodging a contest.  Finally they relented and invited the America to participate in a race around the Isle of Wight.  At stake was a trophy referred to in the early days as the "100 Guinea Cup", a typical trophy of the time for a RYS event.  Of course, as the British feared, the America won the race.

Fearing additional humiliation the British dithered rather than holding additional races and eventually the Americans took the Cup back to New York.  They then offered to host "friendly challenges" for the Cup in local waters and the Cup (and the race for ownership of the cup) eventually took on its modern name, "The America's Cup".  In the early years challenges were erratic.  And at some point the Americans started worrying that the British would find a way to win the cup back so they started to resort to dirty tricks (my characterization) to keep the Cup.  And, while early races were sailed in Long Island Sound, the closest appropriate body of water to New York City, the race was eventually moved to Newport, Rhode Island.  This was because the races were held in the Summer and everyone who was anyone went to Newport "for the season".

Among the most interesting of the early challengers was Sir Thomas Lipton.  He challenged four times and came close.  And, although he lost in the end every time, he succeeded in selling a lot of Tea and establishing the Lipton brand in the U.S. market.  So in the end his challenges were seen as a terrific success in terms of marketing.  He also comported himself as a perfect gentleman at all times (one reason for the success of the tea).  He sprinkled "Lipton Cup" trophies all over the U.S.  The Seattle Yacht Club in my neck of the woods has one of them on display to this day.

The initial race was organized as a Yacht Club to Yacht Club challenge and the contest continues that tradition to this day, at least nominally.  So the contest was open to boats owned by members of each yacht club and the rule was "first boat over the finish line wins".  Gradually it evolved into a race with lots of rules including a "class rule" defining the characteristics of an eligible boat.  A lot of sailboat races involve the use of a "handicapping" role that adjusts the times of the boats based on an estimate of their theoretical speed.  For many years the America's Cup has been a "boat for boat" race on the theory that the detailed class rule makes the theoretical speed of all boats identical.

Up to about the turn of the twentieth century boats of wildly differing design were raced.  Starting in about 1900 "class" rules were introduced and subsequently tightened in stages to the point where the boats looked roughly the same to the untrained eye.  By the 1930's the "J Class" rule was in use.  This resulted in the use of spectacularly gorgeous boats of about 130 foot length.  But the boats were also spectacularly expensive to build and maintain.  As the Great Depression continued, challenges tailed off, eventually to nothing by the late '30s.  After World War II it was felt that a cheaper boat would be needed if anyone was going to be able to afford to participate.  The "12 meter" rule was adopted resulted in very pretty boats of about 60' length coming into use.  The change was a success.  Challenges appeared and the race was held about every three years.  And the Americans kept winning.

There was some grumbling among challengers that the rules were tilted in favor of the defenders, all of whom had to be members of the New York Yacht Club.  But the rules were seen as fair enough that challengers appeared regularly.  And under the pressure of their fear of losing we did see some loosening up of things on the American side.  Ted Turner won the cup one year.  He was from Atlanta.  His nickname was "the mouth from the South".  Among his many achievements was the founding of CNN, the cable news channel.  Another member of the NYYC was Dennis Connor, a San Diego sailor.  He was admitted to the hallowed halls of the NYYC because he was generally considered the most fierce and successful competitor of his time.  All this set things up for the 1982 contest.

As I indicated, there was some resentment of the NYYC in international sailing circles over how the America's Cup events were staged.  The Australian (at some point the challenge, which started as strictly a British versus the Americans competition, was opened up to all comers) showed up with a boat that featured a "winged keel".  This was widely seen as a violation of the "12 meter" class rule.  But after all the activities of the NYYC over the years the international sailing committee that had jurisdiction of these matters decided that the winged keel was legal.  A boat that was otherwise considered on a par with the American boat ended up with a slight speed advantage.  And, to make a long and very interesting story short, the Australians won the competition four races to three.

The result of this shocking development was a dramatic increase in interest in the contest.  The Australians put on a truly excellent event in 1987.  By this time all the boats had winged keels and, true to his reputation, Dennis Connor won the event.  But now the stranglehold of the NYYC was broken so he took the race back to San Diego.  (He was at some point thinking of holding the event in Hawaii, which I thought would have spectacular.  But the San Diego people, who had put the money up to keep him competitive, demanded that the race be held in San Diego.)

Then, as has happened repeatedly in the America's Cup, weirdness set in.  Dennis had been very successful campaigning in 12 meter designs.  So it was his intention to continue to do so.  But remember how the NYYC ran things for decades.  Well, as a result of this there is a document called "the dead of gift" that is the America's Cup equivalent of the U.S. Constitution.  And the official interpreters of the dead of gift is the New York State Supreme Court.  Don't be fooled by the title.  It is equivalent to a "Superior Court" in most states.  A New Zealander named Sir Michael Fey read the deed carefully and found a loophole.  The New York Supreme Court agreed with him.  As a result Fey showed up in San Diego with a 135 foot monster and said "wanna race"?  After being blind sided with this piece of legal legerdemain, Dennis read the dead and said "sure but I am going to defend in a catamaran".  He too was successful in the New York Supreme Court so in 1989 we were treated to a race between a 135 foot sailboat of fairly traditional design and a 60' catamaran.

You know those south seas boats with outriggers.  They are catamarans.  A catamaran has two hulls.  The boat Dennis sailed has two similar hulls rather than a hull and an outrigger but that is a technical detail.  Dennis did something else very dramatic.  He built two boats.  One had traditional cloth sails.  (By now the "cloth" was actually some kind of space age fabric out of a chemistry lab but to the uninitiated it looked pretty much like standard fabric.)  But on the other boat he replaced the mast, the tall pole the sails hang from, and the mainsail, the big triangular sail attached to the back of the mast, with what amounted to an airplane wing that stuck straight up in the air.  Sailors had speculated that a wing design would work better than sails but no one had had the guts and money to try it out.  Well, Dennis had the money and desperation necessary to try it out.  And it turned out that an airplane wing works a lot better than a traditional mast and sail.  It is likely that Dennis's cloth sail boat would have beat the Kiwis.  But the "wing" boat was so fast that Dennis's team had to sail the boat badly in order to keep the victory margin down to only 20 or 30 minutes.

So the Cup stayed in San Diego.  But everyone wanted to avoid the possibility of another "Frankenstein" event.  This doomed the 12 meter rule.  The rule was just too constraining.  It resulted in a very safe, relatively pretty, but also relatively slow boat.  The result was the IACC rule.  It produced pretty boats that were relatively safe, although one boat did manage to break in half and sink in the middle of one race.  But the rule loosened things up enough for people to try a lot of things and the boats were significantly faster then the 12 meter boats.  The IACC boats were about 70' long and looked like people expected a sailboat to look.

The IACC rule was very successful for abut 15 years.  In the first couple of challenges people tried out all kinds of new things like two rudders and no keel.  But the wackier ideas did not pan out.  The Americans lost the second Cup to be sailed in IACC boats.  Dennis Connor is the only skipper to lose the Cup twice (in Newport in 1982 and later in San Diego in 1995).  By this time the race had become truly internationalized.  The winning boat was from New Zealand.  After a successful defense the Kiwis eventually lost to a Swiss boat in 2003.  Since Switzerland lacked a salt water coastline, and the dead effectively mandated the races take place in salt water, the contest was moved to Spain.

The calm of the IACC rule era came to an abrupt end in 2010 when Larry Ellison of Oracle software fame was successful in another series of legal wrangling's that made the Michael Fey 1988 legal shenanigans look like patty cake.  The result was that he secured the right to be the sole challenger that year.  The Swiss said "if you want to be that way we are going to defend in a 115' catamaran".  Larry responded "well, if you're going to be that way we will challenge in a 115' trimaran (three hulls) and we are going to use a wing sail".  Frankly the Swiss didn't think Ellison could put his boat together fast enough.  But Ellison dumped 250 million dollars into the campaign, got the boat built, and won the Cup.

Now I am going to change the subject slightly for a minute.  As I indicated above, the 1982 race was the first one to be shown on TV.  It turned out that the Australian challenge was a rating smash.  Boats from all over the world showed up.  And everyone had to tune in to cheer on their own national boat.  And the TV technology was now getting good enough to do a good job of showing the race.  A large international audience developed for the event.  And enough interesting things happened to maintain audience enthusiasm for subsequent Cups.

That is right up until 2007.  Going in it looked like all the ingredients for an exciting event were present.  And by this time the challenger series had become a very big deal.  The Louis Vuitton fashion house had been signed up as a continuing sponsor of the "Louis Vuitton Cup".  The actual America's Cup race was always between two boats, a challenger and a defender.  In 2007 11 challengers showed up.  The racing necessary to winnow this fleet down to a single boat was exciting and interesting.  So the Louis Vuitton Cup races were a TV success.  But then came the actual America's Cup races.  The Louis Vuitton Cup was decided on June 6.  Racing for the America's Cup was supposed to take place at the rate of a race a day with about one day in 3 thrown in as rest days.  But the last of the 7 races it took to decide the Cup did not take place until July 3.  The Swiss were very unsure of the speed of their boat.  They claimed that they did not interfere with the race committee but there were many delays and outright postponements.  This played bloody hell with the TV coverage.  Watching sailboats bob up and down waiting for something to happen does not make for compelling television.

2010 turned into an even bigger fiasco than 2007, from a TV perspective.  The boats were big and fast.  This should have made for good TV.  But as a result of the court room maneuvers there were only two America's Cup races and no Louis Vuitton Cup races at all.  To make a really bad situation even worse, the court machinations were so fierce that it was unclear when the races would go off until a week before the first race.  So most of the world had no rooting interest in the outcome.  Only the Swiss and the Americans had a dog in the hunt.  And the races were scheduled to go off literally in the middle of the night.  The start time translated to 2 AM in the Pacific Time Zone.  As a result of all this there was no TV coverage in the U.S.

And then there was the problem of the wind.  You can't have a sailboat race without wind.  Normally the Cup races were scheduled for the Summer.  The part of Spain (Valencia) that was the venue has pretty reliable winds in the Summer.  But, again due to the legal back and forth, the races ended up taking place in February.  Wind is much harder to come by in Valencia in February.  So the races were delayed until about 6 AM my time.  So each race day I was treated to about 4 hours of watching boats bob up and down before the race actually went off.  This is a shall we say less than optimal set of circumstances in which to build and keep a big TV audience.

So that brings us to the current America's Cup challenge, the thirty-fourth.  So, how's it going?  The organizers are very aware of the things have gone on the last two times around and have tried to fix them.  The first thing they did was to decide to hold the races in San Francisco, literally in the harbor.  This makes for wonderful backdrops.  Typically the boats have had to be towed miles out into the open ocean to the race course.  Then the background consists primarily of open water with a few spectator boats bobbing around.  The "Bay" backdrop is much more convenient for both competitors and spectators.  If you have a view of the right part of San Francisco Bay, say from an office building, then you can watch the boats and you can do it for free.  And you have not just the races to watch but all the training etc. that goes into preparing for the races.  This is a giant improvement.

The second thing they did was to try and make the races themselves more exciting to watch.  They did this two ways.  First then invested in a large amount of technology.  There are microphones and  TV cameras all over the boats.  So you can see a number of "crew's eye" views of what is going on.  It's the same idea as the "in car" cameras in NASCAR cars.  But the boats are much bigger (72' long), much more complex, and have a crew of about 10.  So you get a bunch of views of how the boat is behaving and what the crew is doing.  Then they have added a number of high tech overlays to the TV pictures.  You know how they will digitally add the "first down" line to a TV picture.  Will this is done to the N'th degree.

They add virtual 100 meter grid lines so you can see where the boats are on the course.  The boats have super-GPS so they know where the boats are down to the inch.  They also know how fast the boats are going and in what direction, also to very high precision.  So in the long shots they can tag each boat with a flag indicating the identity of the boat.  They can also show how fast and in what direction the boat is going.  They can even calculate which boat is ahead and by how much.  (This is difficult to do because you have to figure in the current wind direction and do some trigonometry to get the correct answer.)  They also put virtual tracks on the water so you can see exactly where each boat has gone.  All this makes it much easier to follow the action.

They have also amped up the action.  The boats they are using are not traditional pretty sailboats.  They are high tech catamarans.  The hulls are 72' long.  They have "wing" sails that are about 130' in size.  And they are freaking fast.  A typical 12 meter would go 6-8 knots (roughly miles per hour).  A typical IACC boat would go 10-12 knots.  These boats go 25-40 knots.  The commentators are frequently pointing out that the boats are going faster than the speed limit on the nearby Golden Gate bridge.  One boat actually went faster than 50 miles per hour for a few seconds.  Then there is the part that wasn't planned.  It just happened.

 The basic design of the wet part of the boat consists of two skinny hulls that are about 72' long.  Each hull has a long skinny rudder at the back that is in round numbers 10 feet deep and 2 feet wide.  Each hull is also equipped with a dagger board.  This is roughly 15' deep and perhaps 3' wide.  The dagger board on one hull, the "windward" hull is raised to cut down on drag and the other one is left down to reduce the sideways motion of the boat.  The rest of the boat is supposed to be dry above the water.  That's the idea anyhow.

But about a year ago the New Zealand team (officially "Emirates Team New Zealand", colloquially the "Kiwis") figured out how to hydrofoil the boat.  Dragging a wetted surface through the water, especially at high speed, takes a lot of energy.  If you dreg less wetted surface through the water you can go a lot faster if your sails, etc. provide the same amount of energy.  A hydrofoil is an airplane wing that is in the water.  It takes a big wing to lift something in the air.  It takes a much smaller wing to lift something in the water.  The Kiwis figured out how to get the whole boat out of the water with the exception of the rudder and the dagger board.

They did this by using a bent dagger board.  Most of it goes straight down as in the old configuration.  But they added a bend and an additional piece about 5' long that sticks out sideways.  They also put a small wing on the bottom of the rudder.  One of these boats weighs about 14,000 lbs. (very heavy, if you are lifting it yourself, very light for something that size).  Hydro foiling is very hard to pull off.  But if you do pull it off the small amount of surface area represented by the small wing on the bottom of the rudder and the bent part of the dagger board is enough to hold the rest of the boat out of the water.  And getting both 72' long hulls out of the water reduces the wetted surface dramatically.  And with both hulls out of the water the boat goes unbelievably fast, if you can avoid crashing it.  (A couple of boats have crashed and the result has been a number of parts floating in the water.)

So these boats are unbelievably fast.  And the scenery is great.  And the high tech toys really help viewers follow what's going on.  So the whole thing should be a roaring success.  What could possibly go wrong?  Well, a couple of things.  The first thing is that these boats are fantastically expensive.

Remember when 11 teams showed up to challenge in 2007.  Well, this time around the organizers did things to try to get the same kind of turnout.  They sponsored a bunch of races all over the world that were billed as "America's Cup runup races".  To make it easier for teams to participate in these runup races they had a bunch of essentially identical 45' catamarans with wing sails built.  With lots of events spread around the world sponsor money should have been easier to come by.  It worked.  They had about 8 teams participate.  Several teams campaigned two boats,  And the events were pretty popular. So the "runup" events were considered a success.

But when it came to be time to build the boats for the real event things changed.  The boats for the real event are 72' long and each team is on its own to build their boat.  This means that each team has much more freedom to come up with whatever they think will make their boat go fast.  But also drives the expense up a lot.  The boats are longer.  But they are also wider and taller.  So they don't cost roughly twice what a 45' boat will cost, they cost about 8 times (2x2x2).  This turned out to be too rich for most of the teams.  There are only three challengers, teams from Sweden (Artemis Challenge), Italy (officially "Luna Rosa" but essentially Prada), and the aforementioned Kiwis (oil money from the United Arab Emirates, boat building and sailing skills from the New Zealanders).

That's bad enough but then tragedy happened.  The Artemis boat flipped and a crew member got caught underneath.  It took 10 minutes to cut him free.  He had emergency air but only 3 minutes worth.  He drowned.  This caused everyone to become extremely safety conscious.  One of the complaints about the 2007 event was that a narrow wind range caused too many delays.  So the wind range for the 34th Cup was initially set to be very broad.  But after the heightened concern for safety the top end of the wind range was cut.  This has resulted in several races being cancelled due to too much wind.

As I write this we have finished the preliminary rounds and are into the finals of the Louis Vuitton Cup.  So far we have had four scheduled race days in this series.  Another change from previous Cups is to schedule two races per day.  So far at least one race has gone off each race day.  But on three of the four days scheduled so far the second race has had to be cancelled due to too much wind.  I would characterize this as "not good".  The good news is that we have gotten off at least one race each day.  This is not a disaster.  But having an event, in this case the second race, not go off at its scheduled time is not how you make TV executives happy.

And there has also been another problem.  The races have been parades.  If neither boat breaks down, then the boat that is the first one to the first mark has always wins the race, at least so far.  But the problem is even worse that that.  If neither boat breaks the Kiwis have always beat the Italians.  And if neither boat breaks the Italians always beat the Artemis boat.  In fact, at this point the Artemis boat has been officially eliminated.  This leaves only the Kiwis and the Italians.  That's why it is the "finals".  We are down to just two boats.  But so far the Italians have not been able to figure out how to beat the Kiwis.

Like the problem with the small field this problem may not be as bad as it looks. It has been true many times that there are fast boats and slow boats and it hasn't taken long to be able to sort out which is which.  In spite of this, TV audiences have been large and enthusiastic in the past.  The Louis Vuitton Cup contest is not over yet.  So it is possible that the Italians will find some way to start winning.  But they don't have much time.

And we really don't know who is faster between the (presumably) Kiwis and the defenders, the Oracle team sponsored by Larry Ellison.  There have been no "head to head" matches under race conditions.  On paper Oracle looks to be favored.  Ellison has very deep pockets and has assembled a first rate team.  But the Kiwis have pulled a rabbit out of a hat before.  Remember they have won the Cup once and defended it successfully once.  So they know how to play effectively at this level.  They have lots of oil money behind them.  And finally, they were the first team to pull off "foiling", the short hand name for this hydro foiling business.  It turns out to be very tricky to do.  And if you handle one of these boats badly, and by this I mean "slightly wrong", you can lose 100 meters of position relative to the other boat in a few seconds.  If you actually handle the boat badly then you can end up with a boat that is upside down and in pieces, also in a few seconds.

Let me wrap things up with a quick peak toward the future.  I don't know who is going to win.  I would have to give a slight edge to Oracle at this point.  But I may change my mind after the first race between the Oracle boat and the Louis Vuitton winner.  Regardless of how it comes out though, another interesting question is what will the 35th defense look like?  There are a lot of people including my mother that would like things to go back to when the boats looked like traditional sailboats.  I don't think that is going to happen.  I also think all this high tech TV stuff is here to stay.  I think everyone feels it is a good addition.  I hope that if the venue moves because Oracle loses, the new venue will be as audience friendly as the San Francisco Bay venue is.

Larry Ellison has opined that he is concerned with cost and safety issues relating to the current 72' boats.  He said he is thinking of maybe switching to the 45' "runup" boats for the Cup.  (This assumes he wins the Cup allowing him to maintain control.)  I am not sure it is possible to put that genie back in the bottle.  The current boats are way cool so I can't see going away from a "catamaran with a wing sail" design.  One easy fix to the safety issue is to jack up the weight requirements.  The current boats weigh about 14,000 lbs.  You can make the boats much stronger and do some additional changes by changing the rule to make the boats, say 1,000 lbs. heavier.  By requiring various parts to be a little heavier, a hundred pounds here, two hundred pounds there, you can eliminate any reason to make parts just strong enough.  If you are required to make a part heavier you may as well make it stronger.

You can mandate that the hulls be stronger by requiring them to be heavier. You can also change the rule to require them to contain more volume.  The increase in volume, if properly done, will make the boats harder to go nose over.  These and other rule changes can make the boats safer.  This will perhaps make them a little slower.  But I don't think that designers, builders, and sailors have run out of tricks to make the boats to go faster.  So I think you can make relatively small tweaks that make the boats a lot safer with little sacrifice in speed given an otherwise identical design.  But at the same time designers, builders, and sailors will simultaneously figure out how to make the boats faster.  The design will not stay "otherwise identical".  I think the result of combining pro-safety changes with "go faster" changes will be new boats that are both faster and safer than the current boats.

The biggest factor affecting the cost of the boats is their overall size.  The 45' boats are definitely cheaper.  But I am not sure that you can go to a 45' boat and have people associate that boat with the "biggest and baddest thing out there", which is what people expect of a modern America's Cup boat.  If I had to bet, I would predict that they will stick with the current 72 footer.  But if they do decide to change the size of the boat I would recommend that they not go all the way to 45'.  They could perhaps go to 60', the size of the Dennis Conner boat in '89.  Perhaps you can go a little smaller, say 55'.  But I don't think you want to go any smaller than that.  Downsizing to 60' or 55' would reduce cost and increase safety but it would also eliminate the "used boat" option.

One money saving option that has been available for most past Cups is to buy a boat from one of the teams after the race.  It is many years since an older boat has been competitive.  But it represents a starting point for a new team and a trial horse for an established team.  So even a non-competitive boat is helpful.  In the current Cup no one could get a used boat because no one had ever build a boat like the current ones before.  If the Cup sticks with the 72' boats there will be old boats available after the Cup has been decided.  Assuming none of the boats is destroyed, there will be an Artemis, one or two (I think 2 but I am not sure) Kiwi boats, one or two (again I am not sure) Italian boats, and two Oracle boats that represent possible "used boat" opportunities.  It's not a lot of boats but it is more than none.

One thing I am sure of is that the technology will continue to evolve at warp speed between the current defense and the next one.  It (the technology race) should be fun to watch regardless of how interesting (or not) the sailboat races also turn out to be.

Home Networking

The other day I saw an add in the paper.  I know.  I'm old.  I still read newspapers.  Anyhow, it was a full page add on the back page of the sports section.  This made it pretty high profile.  The headline in the add was "Public gets Free TV with no monthly bills".  Talk about a blast from the past.  The add was for a TV antenna, something you could hook up to your TV so that you could get channels "over the air for free" instead of paying for expensive cable or satellite service.  Then it hit me.  This "new" service is the way everyone used to get their TV back in the olden days.  But this company felt it needed to put an expensive add in the paper to tell people that they could still get TV the way everyone got TV a half century ago.  And you can.  Over the air TV is still there.  Its just that so few people now get their TV this way that lots of people need to be reminded that the option is still available.  And, of course, this company is still in the business of selling you the gadget you need to make it work, a new fangled version of the "rabbit ears" antenna of my youth.

This story is an example of technology on the move.  But the march of technology is a messy process.  And right now we are in a pretty messy place.  The "way of the present" (think "way of the future" and the phrase will make sense) is always a combination of the now possible and the way we have always done it.  I consider myself pretty tech savvy and my house is a mess.  I have all kinds of gadgets that are unnecessarily difficult to use and don't play together well.  I am annoyed by this but I believe I can figure all this out if I just take the time and energy to dig sufficiently deeply into the manuals for my various gadgets.  But I know lots of people who are completely baffled.  And I sincerely believe that these otherwise bright people don't stand a chance of figuring it out even if they did put an appropriate amount of effort into it.  They just don't have the "tech" gene I was blessed with so they are doomed to be permanently baffled.  It shouldn't be that way.  You shouldn't have to be the proverbial "rocket scientist" to get all these gadgets to play nice together.

The first thing I am going to do is to go over a little "how we got here" history.  Then I am going to peer a little way into the future to show where I think things are going.  I will finish up with a short remark on what I think the chances of my predicted future of actually coming into being.  And away we go.

A classic saw has it that "form follows function".  And there is a lot of truth to this saw.  And recently (e.g. the last 50 years) it has become apparent that what we now call technologists have a much greater impact on history than kings and generals.  For most of history historians have worked for kings and generals so it should be no surprise who ended up with top billing.  Roads and aqueducts made the Roman Empire possible but I don't know the name of a single designer or builder of either.  In the modern era technologists like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have deployed massive public relations operations so everyone knows their names.  And they and their brethren will loom much larger than any political or military figure in the shaping of our times.  So lets talk about some functions.

I grew up in Seattle.  TV rolled out in the U.S. in the late '40s.  At the time sending a broadcast quality signal across country was fabulously expensive and terribly difficult.  So a single cable was built connecting the east coast (New York) to the west coast (Los Angeles).  There was a primitive connection that ran up and down parts of the east coast through New York.  There was a similar hookup on the west coast through Los Angeles.  So network TV could reach a chunk of the east coast and a chunk of the west coast.  But Seattle was too small a market.  So it wasn't on the national hookup.  So there was a "kinescope" gadget.  It consisted on one end of essentially a 16 mm movie camera hooked up to a TV set.  Film was shot of a particular TV show, then developed, printed, and thrown on an airplane and flown up to Seattle.  The other end of the kinescope consisted of a 16 mmm film projector hooked up to a TV camera.  This lash up was used to get network shows on the air on the one station then operating in Seattle.  Needless to say there was a lot of what is now called "local origination" going on at the time.  And these old kinescope movies ended up stored away in various Seattle garages where they eventually ended up providing most of the material used to study the early days of television broadcasting.

So how was what is now called "the last mile problem" solved in those days?  Well TV stations had great big radio transmitters that beamed out a signal that could be picked up in homes for miles around.  That was what the technology was capable of doing at the time so that's how it worked. More cables were installed and more TV stations got on the air through the '50s and '60s.  We ended up with the "big three" networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) plus a part of a network (PBS) and "independent" stations.  Anyone who lived in a medium to large market typically had access to 5 or 6 stations:  the local affiliates of the big three, a PBS station, and one or two independents.  That was it.  You tuned in to whatever station you wanted to at a particular time and watched what they were broadcasting at that time or you turned your set off.  And most homes had only one TV as they were expensive.  A TV in the '50s cost about as much as a decent used car.

But time and technology marches on.  Besides accumulating all those kinescopes of early TV broadcasts that later turned out so valuable to historians, Seattle was responsible for another innovation.  Seattle has a lot of hills and these are serious hills.  TV signals go in roughly a straight line.  TV engineers know this so they built high towers to put their transmitting antennas on.  But still it turned out that a lot of Seattle was shaded.  There was some hill between you and the station's antenna so you couldn't pick up their signal.  The first TV station in Seattle was started as a gimmick to sell TV sets.   People wouldn't buy TV sets if they couldn't pick up TV stations.  One answer was high antennas on houses.  When my did bought our first TV set he had to get a 40' tall antenna put on top of the house to get a picture.  A neighbor had to put up a 60' antenna.  This is expensive and ugly.  There had to be a better way.

So the first TV station started putting a TV antenna on the top of a hill.  This could pick up the TV signal just fine.  Then they strung a bunch of wire to all the houses in the shadow of the local hill.  For a small price (they wanted lots of people to sign up so the made the service cheap) you could hook up to your neighborhood Community Antenna TV (CATV).  The name of the service got shortened to "cable TV" and spread like wildfire.  And someone decided you could make money with "cable TV" and started raising prices.  And that's where the modern "cable" industry came from.

You may have heard of another cable pioneer.  His name is Ted Turner.  In the '70s people figured out how to put satellites up that could be used to relay TV signals.  Originally this was fantastically expensive.  But over time the price dropped.  Renting a "transponder" is now so cheap that local TV stations do it so they can broadcast a minor sporting event involving a local team.  Ted figured out early on while prices were still pretty steep that transponders represented a business opportunity.  He owned a not very successful independent station in Atlanta.  He rented a transponder and put the signal on it.  He then offered it to cable companies for free.  At that time cable companies could handle more channels than there were broadcast channels in any specific market.  So for the price of a satellite receiver (then too expensive for an individual but cheap enough so a cable company could afford it) they could add a "bonus channel".  It didn't matter that the programming was pretty cheesy, it was free and it was at least a little different than what the local stations were offering.  Ted could raise his advertising rates for adds on his little Atlanta station enough to recover his costs and make a boatload of money besides.  Within a few years Ted was offering a number of channels including TBS and CNN.  It made him a billionaire several times over and paved the way for ESPN, C-SPAN, HBO, the 700 club, shopping channels, the hundreds of offerings served up by your local cable company.

This was all the result of the evolution of broadcast TV.  Broadcast TV begat cable TV.  The combination of cable TV and satellite transponders begat the modern TV landscape.  A lot of evolution has taken place in the technical details.  Color has replaced black & white.  Digital has replaced analog.  Hi-Def is replacing standard def.  But it's all just improved technology applied to the same basic idea.  But there has been a parallel evolution that is starting to be the dominant influence in TV ecology.  That is the internet.

The internet started out as a lab project in a corner of the Defense Department called (at the time) ARPA.  It was obvious that computers were becoming more and more important to the military and that hooking computers into a network, if it could be pulled off, had the possibility of becoming a game changer.  So the DOD funded something called ARPANET.  And it worked.  A bunch of computer science and electrical engineering types figured out how to network together a bunch of computers.  And they did it at the then unheard of speed of 50,000 bits per second.  At the time a "fast" modem was capable of communicating at 300 bits per second so this was way cool.  The technology kept improving but for a while it seemed like a solution in search of a problem.  Various military facilities and research universities were hooked up but it just kind of puttered along under the radar until a bunch of humanities types discovered email.

Email was the first killer application on the net.  It turned out to be fantastically valuable to humanities types because they could quickly and easily collaborate on research and publications.  Email was much faster and better in every way than snail mail.  All of a sudden network usage skyrocketed and the traffic was not driven by tech types.  Fortunately, the technology started improving and network speeds started going up, just in time to handle the rapid increase in traffic.  And every college and university in the country started clamoring to get hooked up.  And then people started clamoring to be able to hook up at home.  And the PC came out and it just kept spiraling.  ARPANET went public in the '90s.  Also in the '90s Tim Burners-Lee invented the concept of a web.  You put "web pages" up on a server that can be viewed by a "browser".  This made it possible to organize and present fantastic amounts of data to people through an intuitive interface that regular people would figure out.

The design of web pages was very flexible.  They could be used to present text.  But they could also be used to present other things like still pictures, audio, and video.  This opened fantastic opportunities.  The most obvious one for the purposes of our discussion is that the internet can be used to deliver video and TV is just video.  Technology limited us to a few broadcast video channels in the early days.  With cable interties and satellite transponders it became easier and easier to move video around the country.  Cable TV wiring enabled hundreds of channels to be fed into a home.  But there were restrictions.  Some of them were technical.  There is only one over the air radio spectrum.  There are hundreds of possible uses so it gets sliced and diced up.  Only a small amount of the radio spectrum can be dedicated to sending video over the air.  It will never be possible to do video "on demand" over the air.

With the cable companies the restrictions are more of a business nature.  The days of content being given away to cable companies for free are long gone.  Content is a precious commodity and who pays how much for what are now determined by painfully negotiated contracts between the players. And the "players" are the cable companies and content providers.  Us subscribers don't get a seat at the negotiating table.  As I write this there is a fight going on between CBS and Time Warner Cable about who will pay how much for CBS content on Time Warner Cable channels.  And cable subscribers get essentially no say in the eventual outcome.  All parties agree that it would be a bad thing if the suckers, excuse me, I mean the subscribers knew the details of the deal.  So we all get a choice between various cable "package" options bloated with channels we don't want.  The idea is to provide us with an option that is just barely perceived as a good deal.  The content of each offering is designed to maximize amount of money flowing into the coffers of the cable company.

Enough history.  Let's look at the present.  I will take my house as an example.  I have a "land line" phone.  It is more expensive than other options but I want something that works.  The regulatory authorities demand that land line phone companies but a tremendous amount of infrastructure in place so that lots of things can be broken and the phone still works.  This is not so true of cell phones,  It is definitely not so true of cable or internet phones.  I also have a cheapie prepaid cell phone.  It costs me a hundred bucks a year.  It is way cheaper than my land line.  But this is because I don't use it much. But there are a number of situations when it is nice to have.  So I have phone redundancy.

I also have a cable.  But it's not just cable.  It is also internet.  Both come in over the same wire.  But due to the magic of electronics they behave pretty much like they are separate services.  Except when something happens to the physical wire.  Then they both go out.  And the TV part of my cable service is much more reliable than the internet part.  The internet part has gone down when the TV part hasn't a number of times.  I don't think the TV part has ever gone down without the internet part going down at the same time.  Of course over the air TV is available but I haven's owned a TV antenna in decades so it might as well not be there.

Inside my house I have a "wired" network and a wireless network.  All of the wired part of my network is in the same room so I have been able to get away with just running wires along the floor up next to the wall where people don't notice them.  The wired part of my network runs at 1 gigabit.  That's way faster than most devices need.  But it is solid and trouble free.  There are three standards for wireless, "b", "g", and "n".  "b" is the oldest and slowest, "g" is in the middle, both by age and speed.  "n" is the newest and fastest.  I run a "g" network.  It is best to run only one speed.  At work we were having wireless network problems.  We finally traced the problem to devices hopping between "b" and "g" for reasons we were never able to figure out.  Every time the device hopped it dropped out for a couple of seconds.  We fixed the problem by running all the network hubs at only one speed.  With only one speed to pick from the hopping stopped and the problem went away.  I disabled the "b" capability of my home hub and have never regretted it.  I only have one device on my wireless network, a laptop belonging to my renter.  Even so, I occasionally have a problem with my wireless network.  It can usually be fixed by rebooting something but it is still annoying.

And have I mentioned that I have some wireless handsets for my land line phone.  These would stop working if the power went out.  But I do have an old fashioned phone that would keep working.

Now let's look at my TV setup.  I only have one TV.  I have a direct feed from my cable into the TV.  This used to work just fine but a component in my TV went out a couple of years ago and it doesn't work any more.  But that's ok.  I actually feed my cable signal into three devices.  One of them is an old VCR.  I haven't fired it up in ages and I have reason to believe it doesn't work any more.  It is an "analog" VCR so it probably doesn't know what to do with a digital cable signal.  When digital came in the FCC required TV and cable companies to maintain backward capability to the old NTSC standard.  But I think that has pretty much been phased out now.  The third feed is to my TiVo DVR box.  The TiVo and the VCR feed into my TV via auxiliary inputs.  So I generally watch TV through the TiVo.  That's why I don't much care that the direct feed to my TV doesn't work.

As an aside let me note that I have no "cable box"es, and, therefore, no cable remote controls.  This is because both my TV and my TiVo have something called a "cable card".  (The part of my TV that is broken is the part that interfaces with the cable card).  The cable card comes from the cable company and provides the programming that allows the TiVo and TV to accept and decode the cable signal properly.  It even unscrambles the scrambled signal for the scrambled channels that I pay to see.  So aside from the fact that the direct cable connection to my TV doesn't work, and my VCR doesn't work, and I have no way to "tape" something over the air on my VCR (assuming it is working) from my TiVo, everything is hunky dory.  (I note that I could rewire thing so that my VCR could tape from my TiVo but then I couldn't tape from over the air.)  I also have an old laserdisc player (think DVD player but a previous generation of technology) and a Blu-Ray player.  Both are wired into auxiliary ports of my TV but neither is wired so that I can record things from them to my VCR.  (Both have VCR ports but again I would have to disconnect and rewire things to get that to work.)

The latest thing is called "on demand".  I don't do on demand but I know others who do.  One friend does it using her Comcast remote on her TV that is hooked to Comcast cable through a Comcast cable box.  There are various ways to get on demand stuff to play on my PC.  My Blu-Ray also has various services I can sign up for.  It is hooked up to my wired internet so it has direct internet access.  The menu system on the Blu-Ray lets me sign up for and use these services.  I have not.  My TV is old enough (about 10 years) so that it does not have on demand type features built in.

This is a complicated mess.  I have 5 remotes.  I use the TiVo one 90% of the time.  It is programmed so that it can turn the TV off and on, change the volume, and change the input source.  The "channel change" function is actually handled directly by the TiVo.  But I occasionally have to use one of the other four remotes for one thing and another.  I have noted the lack of interconnectedness.  Another thing is feature redundancy.  The remotes control the devices they came with but they also want to control something else, typically the TV.  I can get on demand stuff a couple of different ways.  I have two cable cards because the TiVo needs to decode the cable signal sometimes and the TV other times.  Theoretically it would be nice if the VCR was cable card compatible.  (I also note that new digital TVs don't seem to come with cable card capability -- why not?)  And all the remotes work a little differently so there is a learning curve for each.  Why all the complexity?

Part of it is history.  I detailed the history of the TV path and the internet path.  If you want to drill down there is a history of VCRs, laserdisc/DVD/Blu-Ray devices, of DVRs, of "on demand", etc.  In the context of this history the current configuration of each device makes sense if you stick to only the history of that device and ignore the ecosystem the device operates in.  And you have a bunch of companies and industries fighting each other to get more than their fair share of the pie.  If you don't provide a certain feature or capability in your device then someone else is going to include your base capability as a feature or "add on" to their device.  That's how the current mess came to be.  Now let's imagine how it could be.

As I have noted above, over the air TV is small potatoes.  If it went away completely most of us would not notice.  I think there is still a place for local TV stations or more specifically local content.  What I am talking about most immediately is the method of delivery.  If I can get that local content over a wire into my house then I am getting the valuable part.  Historically local TV stations were the vehicle for delivering network content.  I don't think this is adding value any more.  There are any number of cable channels like USA and A&E that deliver network-like content.  I see no reason why I couldn't get the ABC or CBS or NBC "channel" without the content having gone through my local network affiliate.  The current model still prevails for what were technological reasons and are now political and financial reasons mixed in with a lot of inertia.

Boiling all this down, I want a "cable TV"-like capability.  I want what is local content (local news,  sports, "what's happening", etc.)  I also want all my cable channels (well at least some of them).  And I want a "watch TV"-like experience where I do my couch potato thing and it just comes at me.  But I don't need the current delivery system.  I certainly don't need the over the air delivery system.  But I also don't really need the "cable TV" delivery system either.  The internet can do all that without all the cable specific hardware, software, specifications, etc. of the current system.  Give me a screen that gives me the same options that my current cable menu gives me and I'm a happy camper.  In short, give me the internet part of what the wire that is connected to my house delivers, and a "cable TV" web site, and I don't need the "cable TV" part of what comes in on the wire now.  That would save a lot of hardware up and down the line.  It would also simplify things tremendously.

On demand is a mess.  You have You Tube, Netflix, HuLu, Comcast on Demand, and dozens and dozens of other on demand service providers out there.  They all have their own system with its pricing model, passwords, etc.  If I know what I want it is very hard to tell where I can get it from.  Ideally you would have a small number of providers.  Popular content would be available from more than one of them.  You could then sign up with the one that provided the best service and the pricing model you liked the best, confident that you could get what you wanted from that provider.

I am even ok with some categorization.  Let's say TCM-on-demand had every movie that had ever been made that was more than 10 years old and Hulu-on-demand had every TV show that was more than a year old and Universal-on-demand had every Universal movie that had been released to the theaters between 1 and 10 years ago, and, well you get the idea.  But now Hulu has some TV shows but not all.  And some are available for free and others require you sign up for and pay for the premium service.  And Netflix has a lot of movies but not all movies, not even all old movies.  It's just too confusing.  Then there are new Netflix shows like "House of Cards".  It's the wild west out there.  So on demand needs to settle and there need to be a few major players that have much broader and deeper libraries.  But let's say that in the next few years there is a big shakeout and we get a couple of on demand services that have broad enough scale that you can confidently sign up for one or a few of them and be confident you will get what you want.  Moving on.

What's the defining characteristic of a TV?  Historically there was one but not any more.  I remember the year the number of computer screens manufactured that year exceeded the number of TV picture tubes.  It turns out that a computer screen was just a high quality TV screen (in the early days) and a TV screen was just a low quality computer screen (later).  This high quality/low quality differentiation continues to this day.  A flat screen TV screen is just a low quality computer screen with different electronics delivering the image.  It all boils down to size, resolution, and picture quality.  A TV is now just a limited function computer screen.  And that's the best way to think of it.  What we have are just screens.  We have big screens (formerly TVs) on the wall.  We have medium size screens on computers.  We have small screens on portable devices like smart phones.  So what if the thing on the wall is just a big network accessible computer monitor.  It might be a good idea to have a network accessible audio system on the floor underneath it.  But we can make placement flexible.

The foundational idea is that we have a computer network in our home with devices connected to it.  Then we have boxes with capabilities connected to the network.  We can use wired or wireless connections as appropriate.  And the current network standards (wired LAN or Wi-Fi) are perfectly capable of provided all the functionality we need.  Some of the boxes can be of the traditional kinds like PCs, laptops, smart phones, etc.  We add some capabilities and we put those capabilities wherever it is most convenient.  What is currently a TV would be a limited capability device.  It would be a display.  It could also have a low end sound system built in if we wish.  If we want a better sound system we have one that consists of one or more network components.  Perhaps we have one woofer on the floor beneath the large display.  We have two medium/high frequency capable sound boxes to the left and right on the side of the room opposite the display..  We have three similar boxes to the left, center, and right of the display (or perhaps built in).  Together they constitute a 5.1 sound system.  Each unit would receive a separate digital signal across the network, decode it, amplify it and turn it into sound.

We need some more boxes.  A critical box is the internet interface.  It would connect to wire coming into the house on one side the home LAN on the other side.  Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs suggested that it is practical for this to run at a speed of 1 gigabit.  That would be more than fast enough to handle current and future internet loads, on demand loads, and, in my opinion, "cable TV emulation" loads.  1 GB wired LAN is mainstream now.  Speeds are rising on Wi-Fi but I think more improvement (e.g. beyond "n") is needed.  But there is every reason to believe that evolution in this area will continue.

That leaves us with the need for boxes with "TV world" capabilities.  The first requirement is the most obvious.  A box (and one box should be enough - multitask) needs to interface with the cable company.  It needs to know what is available (e.g. what feeds has the customer signed up for). On the customer side it would field requests (e.g. I want to see this show or this channel now) and serve up the response (e.g. here's the feed for channel "X" or show "Y").  The other box would be a DVR like repository, essentially a smart disk that would archive streams when they became available and serve them up when their display was requested.  Since the processing necessary to feed the video to the wall display (or smaller display or laptop or phone) is modest by modern standards it could be done by both the able box and the DVR box.  The same is true of the audio.

Another annoying feature of the modern world is the proliferation of remotes.  There is no reason these couldn't all be replaced by software.  The software could run on a PC, table, smartphone, whatever.  Microsoft standardized driver software with Windows 95.  For each video card they wrote a master driver module.  This was served by a parameter file that instructed the module about the particular quirks of a specific network card.  There is no reason the same thing could not be done with the various boxes I have discussed.  A "display" driver would be configured with the characteristics of the particular display in the family room.  It would be also configured for the smaller and less capable display in the master bedroom, etc.  This would enable true "universal remote" software to be developed.  You would load the configuration files for each of the components that needed to be controlled.  Then one piece of software on one device could control them all.  It could schedule which programs would come down from the "cable provider" at what time, which "on demand" programs would come down from which on demand provider, what should go up on the rec room screen (and be fed to the rec room sound system) now, etc.  Actually, since there are multiple members in most families and likely multiple screens, etc. multiple pieces of master control software could be in use on multiple devices.  But that is easy to sort out.

All the current "TV specification" devices would be replaced by "network specification" devices.  There would no doubt be a very messy transition period.  But in the end home networks hopefully will follow the car model.  In the olden days (before about 1965) cars were pretty simple to work on and there were a lot of backyard mechanics out there.  Then when catalytic converters started showing up cars started to get very complicated.  After several decades things have gotten simpler again.  Cars are far more complex.  But a lot of that complexity can be ignored.  All modern cars have a "diagnostic plug".  You get a special cable.  One end hooks up to your laptop.  The other end goes into the diagnostic plug.  In this way you can read out the car computer (actually multiple computers).  A modern car is just a bunch of FRUs hooked together.  A FRU is a Field Replaceable Unit.   The computer tells you which FRU is misbehaving.  You replace it and you are good to go.  And a lot of tune up stuff is now software.  You can tweak the performance by updating some table.  What this means is that it is now possible to be a backyard mechanic again.  You just need a little computer expertise.

Hopefully home networking will follow the same model.  In the old days things were simple and if you had a little talent you could do a lot of things yourself.  Everything now is a lot more complicated and only delivers a little more functionality.  But if we can make it out the other side then things will get simpler again and the capabilities that current setups theoretically deliver will be actually delivered.

I see no technical impediments to anything I have described.  All the impediments I see are political/financial.  There will be winners and losers.  No one wants to be a loser.  Corporations are now expert at working the lobbying game in DC.  It is easy to put regulatory impediments in front of the necessary changes.  Since these impediments would be buried in the fine print of thousand page bills no one will find them until after they have done their work.  There is no reason why much of the reconfigured equipment (e.g. "TV monitors" that only accept streaming signals across the network, audio equipment that accepts a network delivered audio signal) aren't already on the market.  Universal remote software exists.  But the device makers make it hard.  They expect the device to receive the same old infrared signals used by current remotes.  The hide the specs of those remote signals.

At some point I expect techies to start building the devices I have described themselves using the open source software model.  These devices are not so complex that the required expertise is beyond everyone.  It's just beyond most of us.  The expertise required to build a Unix from scratch was also beyond the expertise of most of us.  But it was done.  And now Linux is so successful that it has almost completely killed traditional Unix.               

Malicious Phone Calls - *57 results

This is an update to a previous post (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/06/malicious-phone-calls.html).  Today I got yet another robocall.  I didn't even stay on the line long enough to find out who was calling.  After hanging up I decided to stop stalling around and see what happened if I did the "*57" thing.  So I tried it.  The results were less than completely satisfactory.  I got a recorded message indicating that I was being charged $1.50 and that if it was a life threatening situation I should hang up and dial "911".  Then the message started repeating.

I hung up and mulled for a while.  Then I picked up the phone (same phone) and dialed "0" ostensibly to be connected to the Operator.  This put me into an "answer tree" that was mostly set up to allow me to change my telephone service.  I did end up eventually getting to an "operator" or at least a live body.  When I explained that I was trying to get some information from my "*57" trace he transferred me to "customer service", actually could more accurately be described as sales.

The person I talked to was not familiar with the "*57" service or malicious phone calls or call traces.  He did say that "*57" was a "third party service".  Eventually he transferred me to his supervisor, a "David N in North Idaho".,  He couldn't provide me with any of the trace information either.  The best he could do was to say that "if I had caller ID", which came bundled with some kind of long distance package, and he couldn't tell me what such a package would cost, then somehow this would help.  By this time I was pretty frustrated and he accused me of being unprofessional (apparently being unable to provide any service or information on his side is not unprofessional but my being annoyed with his inability to provide any information or service is unprofessional).  Anyhow, eventually he hung up on me without providing any help.

I decided to try again and called the "operator" again.  Again after a couple of rounds with the "answer tree" system and another person I ended up back at customer service.  This person was better informed and slightly more helpful.  She suggested I call the "annoyance call bureau", which she described as an industry organization, at 800-582-0655.  I asked her if she could reverse the $1.50 charge.  She said she couldn't because it hadn't come through yet but she put a note in my file.  She also indicated that I could get it reversed when it came through on my bill.

So I called the annoyance call bureau.  The "answer tree" system I was connected to did indicate that it was part of Century Link, my "land line" phone company.  One of the first things the "answer tree" did was ask if I had done a "*57" trace.  I selected the "yes" option.  This all happened before I was connected to a person.  I asked this person if they could identify or give me contact information on the "third party service" that apparently performs the "*57" function.  She could not.  I asked her if she could give me the results of the trace.  She could not.  The information was only available to law enforcement (and the NSA).

She recommended in the future that I do a "*69".  This is effectively a one time caller ID where a voice gives you the information.  When I asked if the "*69" information could be blocked or spoofed she said that it could.  I asked her what the next step was assuming that I had done the "*69".  She indicated that my only option was to fill out an FTC complaint form.  Given that it is cheap for businesses to block or spoof caller ID this is not much help.  I have written about the "robocall challenge" (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/10/fcc-robocall-challenge.html) previously.  The fact that the FCC ran the contest indicates exactly how effective filing a complaint is.

The "annoyance bureau" lady did indicate that she could get my $1.50 charge reversed.  We'll see.

In summary, the good news is that "*57" is out there and that it works at the basic level of tracing a call.  The bad news is the rest of the story.  Maybe other phone companies do a better job in this area than Century Link but I doubt it.  So the approach I recommended in the post linked to at the top of this piece looks more feasible than ever, again assuming that the trace information is real and can't be blocked or spoofed like standard caller ID can be.  And I can't say I am surprised that the NSA gets better service than I do from the phone company.  They have actual clout and I, as a member of the "99%", don't.

World War S

A movie called "World War Z" is opening soon.  The title is a play on "World War III" where the "Z" stands in for the "III" part and refers to zombies.  The movie is no doubt designed to be escapist entertainment.  In my case I am also doing a play on "World War III".  But here the "S" stands for Syria and the subject is deadly serious.  I am extremely concerned about the Syrian situation.  What most concerns me is that I am seeing a pattern of spiraling escalation and I don't see any forces arrayed effectively to break the spiral.  What's to stop Syria from growing bigger and bigger to the point where it actually does resemble a World War?  As the hero opines in numerous action movies, "I've got a bad feeling about this".

Let me take a look at a classic "runaway" situation, one that resulted in an actual "World War", specifically World War I.  The definitive work on the subject is the great book "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman.  Stated most simply, World War I started because no one had the simultaneous will and ability to stop the war from starting.  This was in spite of the fact that no one was specifically trying to start a war.  Events just got out of control.

A large contributing factor was the general attitude of the eventual participants.  Each participant believed that a "nice little war" would be a good thing.  They all believed that a war could be fought for a reasonable cost and each country believed that the war would be beneficial for them.  Finally, they all believed that the war could be controlled, its size could be kept manageable resulting in the cost being kept manageable.  All these assumptions turned out to be catastrophically wrong.

Europe had hundreds of years of experience with war in the run up to WWI.  I visited Poland in the early '70s.  It was fascinating to get their perspective.  It turns out that one of the tried and true strategies was to have the war in someone else's country.  As the Poles saw it various European powers had been coming to Poland for centuries so that their nice little war would wreck Poland and not any place important.  This was hard on Poland.  But who cares?  After all, it was only Poland.

Another recipient to a lesser extent of this strategy was what is now Germany.  Other countries, especially France, had been going to Germany to fight wars, again for centuries.  But in the 1800's something changed.  Germany got united and militarily powerful.  Once they were in a position to do so, the first thing they did was to put a stop to other countries going to Germany to have their war.  But by the time this happened (late 1800's) the Germans had built up a great deal of resentment, particularly against France, for all the earlier wars.  So Germany had a mad on for France and wanted payback.

By the early 1900's the Germans had the finest military machine in Europe.  They were just looking for an excuse to have a nice little war so they beat the crap out of France.  Meanwhile France had a glorious history (or so they told themselves) of beating the crap out of Germany.  And they had a magic "secret weapon" over the Germans called "élan".  They were just damn superior to the Germans so they would no doubt beat the crap out of them every time they got the chance.  "The Germans were vastly overrated", they said to themselves.  Other countries had other reasons.  Let me mention two more.

Again for centuries, the British had been playing "power politics" on the continent of Europe.  The idea was to come in on the right side of the many little "continental" wars so that the sides were pretty much evenly matched.  This would result in both sides exhausting themselves leaving the British as the last major power standing.  The British believed that another continental war would work out the same.  France and Germany would beat the crap out of each other.  The British would control the rest of the world via the British Empire and the Royal Navy.  This would leave the British in a better position after the war.

Finally, there was Russia, "the sick man of Europe".  Russia should theoretically been powerful.  They had a giant land mass, far more territory than every one else.  They had a large population and lots of resources like timber, coal, and steel.  On paper they looked great. But they weren't and everyone knew it.  They just never could get their act together.  But hey, there's always next time.  Maybe in the next war the Russians could finally leverage their advantages of large population and vast resources and show everyone else up.  But to get a chance to show everyone else up they needed a nice convenient war.

It turns out everyone was delusional.  The Germans did in fact have the finest military machine on the continent.  But it wasn't superior enough to triumph over the combination of France, Britain, and Russia.  France's vaunted "élan" advantage turned out to be so much smoke.  The war ended up being so expensive that it effectively bankrupted Britain.  And Russia still did not have their act together.  In fact, the fact that the Russians did not have their act together turned out to be the single item most responsible for the war starting.

These forces I have outlined above had been in place and building up steam for a long time.  In fact, there is a lot of scholarly research that supports the theory that the war should have started in 1912, two years before it actually started.  The reasons why it did not start in 1912 and why it did start in 1914 are obscure and not worth going in to.  So everyone ended up miscalculating going into the war.  And that was not the greatest miscalculation.

As Tuchman so brilliantly documents the war was a war of movement, exactly as everyone had predicted and planned for, when it started.  But by the end of six weeks, the point where Tuchman's book ends, the war had stalemated and turned into the beyond horrific "trench" war.  This phase of the war gobbled up men by the hundreds of thousands and money and material by the millions and eventually billions of dollars.  And for years neither side was able to gain a lasting advantage.  By the end, WWI was a war of exhaustion.  It simply became a matter of finding out which side would run out of the necessary amount of men and material to continue the war first.  It turned out that although small, the U.S. contribution was critical because the U.S. provided the men and material that allowed the winning side to continue on to the end and outlast the losing side.

World War I is the classic example of war going horribly wrong.  I see the seeds of the same thing happening in Syria.  Many of the same forces are in play that were in play during the run up to and in the early phases of World War I.  The last really big war was World War II.  It was roughly 70 years ago.  Since then we have had any number of wars but they have been limited wars.  The poster child for limited war was the Korean War.

It represented a clash of the superpowers with the U.S. and its allies on one side and the U.S.S.R. (as Russia was known at the time) and its allies on the other side.  But Truman, the U.S. President, was concerned from the beginning that the war not spiral out of control into a cycle of escalation that would eventually lead to a nuclear war.  He formulated and implemented the doctrine of "limited war".  That governed the U.S. strategy even when the Chinese, then seen as a puppet of the U.S.S.R., committed a large number of Chinese troops on the other side.  Korea turned out to be another classic war of exhaustion.  The "armistice" that ended active combat is still in place many decades later.  There is no formal end to the conflict in sight and the battle lines ended up very close to where they were the day before the war started.

This "limited war" doctrine was applied to Vietnam a decade later.  Gradually it came to be seen as the norm.  It is now so much baked into everyone's thinking that almost no one spends any time worrying about nuclear war any more.  Everyone assumes that all wars are automatically limited wars and that it is impossible (always a dangerous word when applied to human behavior) for one of these limited wars to escalate to become a "World War" and it is beyond impossible for it to "go nuclear".  But just as in the case of World War I, where hundreds of years of European experience demonstrated that wars would always be limited wars for limited objectives, our current experience now tells us the same thing.

No two wars ever play out exactly the same.  So Syria will not play out the same way that World War I did.  But there are many other similarities.  Another similarity is the attitude of the players.  Take the Arab world in general, for instance.  They now have almost a hundred years of experience with what they call "Crusader" wars.  These are wars where one side is a western power (Iraq and Afghanistan are contemporary examples) or wars where western powers are supporting on one side of a nominally Arabs versus Arab war (the first Iraq war, for instance).  Pretty much all the wars in the eastern and southern Mediterranean follow this pattern.  I can think of no purely Arab versus Arab wars in the modern era since World War II.  Generally the side backed by the west has triumphed.  This has given Arabs an inferiority complex, like the one Russia had going into World War I.  And generally the west has played the "British" role.  The west comes in on one side or the other and in most cases the result is to keep all the Arab states weak and effectively leave the west in control.

And there are "élan" factions.  The Arabs tell themselves that they have driven the U.S. out or Iraq and will soon drive them out of Afghanistan.  They also drove the west out of Iran and the Israelis (a western proxy) out of the Gaza.  There may be some wishful thinking going on here but it allows some segments of the Arab population to believe that "we have defeated the west so we have the élan to defeat our enemies, whoever they may be, because we are superior".  The argument can be made that these characterizations are delusional but they do not have to be true to have the same effect delusions had on the actions of the various players in the run up to World War I.

And there is another great delusion that is affecting the actions of a major player in the Syrian conflict.  Many in the U.S., both government officials and "opinion makers", believe that the U.S. can have an effective positive influence on events in Syria.  There opinion of what constitutes the proper "positive influence" might differ but they all agree that "if the U.S. just does the right thing then a good outcome will be the result".  This is in spite of a vast amount of evidence to the contrary that has come out of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and other locations.  Lots of events turn out the way they do not because of but in spite of U.S. efforts.

The events that touched off World War I happened quickly.  Syria is playing out at a much slower pace.  We are about two years into the war.  It started out as yet another manifestation of the Arab Spring.  People demonstrated their unhappiness with their government.  The government cracked down.  So far we are following the standard "Arab Spring" scenario.  But in Syria things then started going their own way.  And by that I mean that we has seen a gradual but steady set of escalations by both sides.

The government cracked down hard.  The demonstrators went violent.  The government started using the military.  The opposition (no longer just "demonstrators") was able to secure permission to import weapons from outside.  The government started importing bigger and better weapons itself.  The opposition scored some impressive military successes.  The government started importing fighters from Hezbollah in Lebanon and "freedom fighters" from Iraq.  It also seems to have started using poison gas, of which the Syrian government has vast stockpiles and its the "good stuff" like Sarin.  This has caused President Obama to signal that the U.S. will now start supplying arms to the Rebels.  And. in response to something or other, the Russians recently announced that they will be providing top of the line air defense systems to the Syrian government.

And the Syrian conflict is showing signs of escalating to a regional conflict.  It is spilling into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordon, and Iraq to some extent.  It has also pulled in "second ring" countries, countries that do not directly border on Syria.  These include Iran and Israel so far.  And it has pulled in both former superpowers, the U.S. and Russia.  Some amount of spill over is common.  China got involved in Korea.  Vietnam spilled over into Cambodia and Laos.  Afghanistan can be seen more accurately as the "Afghanistan/Pakistan" war.  But in these other cases there seemed to be an informal fire wall.  In Korea the Chinese involvement was limited.  The same was true with Cambodia and Laos in Vietnam.  Pakistan is deeply involved in Afghanistan but no one else is likely to be pulled in.

There doesn't seem to be the same kind of fire wall operating in Syria.  Hezbollah (nominally based in Lebanon) has recently become involved in fighting in Syria in a big way.  Iraq started out only involved to the extent that it was looking the other way as Iran sent arms to the Syrian government.  That is currently the limit of official government involvement.  But unofficially a lot of fighters left over from the Iraq war have moved to Syria.  Iran seem to be ratcheting up their involvement and it is hard to see how much support will turn out to be too much.  The U.S. and Russia have been increasing their commitment and involvement too.  As noted above, the most recent move on the Russian side has been to promise a top tier antiaircraft system.  On the U.S. side, we have seen in the past few days that the U.S. is now committed to directly supplying arms.  And people like Senator McCain want the U.S. to go much further.

From the U.S. side there has been a significant push for escalation based on the humanitarian problem.  The best estimate is that just under a hundred thousand have been killed so far.  The humanitarian faction believe that the U.S. can wave some kind of magic wand and cause the slaughter to stop.  So Obama is being pushed from the left (oh the humanity) and the right (I never saw a war I couldn't support) to do more.  Both sides want contradictory things.  Both sides greatly exaggerate the ability of the U.S. to have a positive influence on the outcome.  The only thing they agree on is that "the U.S. should do  more" but that is enough to move events along.  The Russians have their own reasons for escalating their support.  But those reasons have been equally effective at greasing the skids for escalation.  And its not just within the U.S and Russia that pressure has been building.

There is tremendous pressure in the Arab world.  In concert with the pre-World War I European experience, the Arab world has experience dating back to the 1920's with limited wars for limited objectives.  And they have lots of experience with "Crusader" wars where the west is heavily involved.  Rightly or wrongly this has led to the broadly held belief in the Arab world that "its always the west's fault".  This is frequently true.  But it is NOT true in the case of Syria.  Syria is not a Crusader war.  It is a purely Arab on Arab war.  The Arab world has no experience with pure Arab on Arab wars.  And given this, both sides in Syria will justify anything that goes wrong as "the west's fault".  This will allow them to justify almost anything, which in turn will allow them to do almost anything.  There will continue to be pressures from multiple directions to continue escalating and no pressure from anyone to wind things down.

Then there is the population boom.  There are large numbers of young Arab men all over the Arab world.  And these young men live in countries with poorly run economies.  So the unemployment rate is high.  So there are literally millions of military age Arab men with poor prospects where they are and nothing better to do than go off to participate in a "lovely war" in Syria.  And sending large numbers of military age young men off to Syria takes pressure off local governments all over the Arab world.  A young man who is off fighting in Syria is not a young man standing around on a local street corner making trouble.

And then there is the fundamental rift of the Arab world, the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites.  They have been itching to get at each other for decades.  If this sounds like the Germans and the French before World War I, it should.  And theoretically they have butted heads before.  The Iraq war is one of those times.  The minority Sunnis were lording it over the majority Shiites.  The U.S. invasion overturned that dynamic.  But this example is polluted by the presence of the "Crusader" Americans.  And, while Shiites are more populous in Iraq they are less populous in the Arab world as a whole.  There have been other examples of Shiite/Sunni conflict before but they have always been polluted by the Crusader influence.  So the two groups have not had any recent chance to go at it head to head.

And there has been a small development in Syria that I find very troubling.  Historically the Assad family that has led the country has been referred to as being part of the Alawite minority.  This made them appear to be neither part of the Sunni nor part of the Shiite factions.  But the Alawites long ago split off from the Shiites.  Recently Assad's association is being referred to as "Shiite" rather than "Alawite".  This puts Assad firmly in the Shiite camp, the camp dominated by Iran.  There is a general dislike of Iran in the Arab world because Iran is seen as Persian rather than Arab.  But Shiite Arabs are definitely closer to Iran than Sunni Arabs.  And Iran is seen as the protector of the minority Shiites against the majority Sunnis.  And the Iranians have been strongly supportive of the Assad regime right along.

All this leads me to "be afraid - be very afraid".  I think the Syrian war is a long way from being over.  And I think it is going to get much bigger and much more ugly as time passes.  The roughly hundred thousand fatalities we have seen so far are going to start looking like pocket change.  And I would want to do something about this if I was convinced that there was something to do that would be effective.  But, unfortunately, I think it's going to get a lot worse before there is a chance of it starting to get better.  I think the U.S. is destined to be a peripheral player in all this.  We have had too much involvement for too long in various "Crusader" activities to be able to do much good now or for some time in the future.  So what should we do?

The good news, and this is definitely very small good news, is that Syria is going to overshadow a lot of other things like Afghanistan.  I think Pakistan and the Taliban have booth been looking forward to making a lot of mischief directed at the U.S. as our intervention there winds down.  If Syria is blowing as hot as I am concerned that it will be then a lot of energy that would have gone into Afghanistan will be redirected to Syria.  This means that Afghanistan has a better chance of sorting itself out and ending up in a positive place than I had previously thought.  So my first recommendation is that the U.S. continue to extract itself from Afghanistan.

The second thing I recommend is that we work through proxies with respect to Syria.  Lots of people in the Arab world are going to want to point to the U.S. and say the "American Crusaders" are responsible for whatever goes wrong in Syria, and a lot is going to go wrong.  The more distance we can put between ourselves and Syria the less effective will be these claims that "America did it".  If we are going to arm the insurgents, and I presume we will, we should do it through Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Jordan or whoever.  Let them be seen as being the ones providing the arms even if they are U.S. arms.

The third thing we should do is ramp up aid, especially humanitarian aid, to the peripheral countries, particularly Turkey and Jordan.  Both counties are currently sheltering large numbers of refugees and neither country can afford it.  Jordan has been particularly hard hit.  They keep getting hit with large numbers of refugees going all the way back to the 1948 Israeli war of independence.  They also got hit with a lot of refugees fleeing the recent Iraq war.  They have a small economy and they have been one of our best allies in the Arab world.  It is problematic trying to do something for refugees in Iraq or Lebanon so we shouldn't try very hard to help in those countries.  Sometimes you really can't help.  And the U.S., particularly the media and the public, is very bad at figuring out when we really can't help.

The fourth thing will be very hard to do.  If I am right then the violence is going to go much higher than the current horrific level.  Other than assisting refugees once they have made it out of the country we should not put much effort into trying to tamp down the war.  To the extent we can, and our abilities will most likely be modest, we should try to tilt the outcome in a favorable direction but mostly we need to just let things play out.

Wars end in one of three ways:  There can be a complete clean victory for one side.  That's what happened in World War II.  Second, the war can stumble to an end due to exhaustion.  This is what happened in Korea, as I noted above.  Finally, outside forces can intervene.  This only works for relatively small wars.  The classic example is the war between Israel and Egypt for control of the Suez canal in 1956.  This was stopped almost single handedly by President Eisenhower.

This third way where someone (and usually people mean the U.S. when they say "someone") steps in, waves a magic wand, and stops a war is what people have wanted the U.S. to do in Syria over the last couple of years and on numerous occasions in the past.  It is rarely possible.  The U.S. has been trying to broker a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians for decades and under the direction of numerous Presidents.  We haven't succeeded in the Israeli/Palestinian war and we have rarely succeeded elsewhere.  If you don't have the overwhelming leverage that Eisenhower did in 1956, it's  not going to work.  And the Israelis and Egyptians found a way to go to war anyhow in 1967, only 11 years later.  So even when it works it often doesn't work very well.  But this sorry history doesn't stop the media and "wise heads" agitating over and over for one Administration or another to wave their magic wand and make it stop.  If the parties involved actually want to stop and are just looking for a mechanism, an uncommon scenario, then wand waving can work.  The rest of the time it is bound to fail.

So the final thing the U.S. should do is prepare for a long and bloody war that is likely to get much bigger and much more ugly than it currently is.  We should try as best we can to position ourselves to be in the best position possible when the whole thing eventually burns out.  A long time ago (it now seems like a lifetime) there was a list that circulated among IT professionals.  Here it is:

The six stages of a project:
- Wild enthusiasm
- Disillusionment as things start going wrong
- Panic and Hysteria about what to do to fix it
- The search for the guilty
- The punishment of the innocent
- The promotion of the uninvolved

I think Syria will follow this model.  So our best strategy is to be widely seen as being as uninvolved as we can manage.



 

Malicious Phone Calls

I have attacked this general subject before.  My first post was http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/02/rachel-from-cardholder-services.html dealing with my efforts to do something about the calls from "Rachel from Cardholder Services".  Later the FCC announced a contest to solicit ideas for dealing with the problem.  So I did a post about that (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/10/fcc-robocall-challenge.html).  Since the "FCC" posting I have become quite discouraged.  In retrospect my proposal looks quite complicated.  Then in the last few days something apparently totally unrelated happened that gives me renewed hope.

It was reported that the secretive NSA, the organization within the Federal Government responsible for collecting and analyzing "Signals Intelligence", was receiving a record of every single phone call made from or to a telephone serviced by the Verizon telephone company for a period of three months.  It is since come out that this is a routine procedure.  The authorization for the NSA to sweep up this information from Verizon must be renewed every three months.  So the specific authorization leaked is one of a series of standard authorizations issued routinely every three months.  And it appears that similar requests are made every three months to all the other telephone companies too.  So apparently the NSA has a record of every phone call made to or from a U.S. phone number for a period of years.

This revelation is very troubling.  Yet it has been coupled with other revelations.  It appears that the intelligence community has ways (the details are still being argued about) of getting access to the text of emails, web search histories, pictures, all kinds of web postings (like private blog postings), and other "content" information.  It may also be that the actual contents of phone conversations (e.g. if they used Skype or if a leg of the conversation transited an IP phone link) may be available some or all of the time.  The official stance of the security services is that spying only takes place if there is a foreigner on one or both ends.  But much of the legal opinions, court proceedings, rules and procedures, etc. are top secret.  As an example the FBI can issue something called a "National Security Letter".  The recipient of one of these is directed to provide all kinds of personal and private information.  They are also required to keep the National Security Letter itself a secret.  So the target of one of these letters can't even find out that he is the target of the letter, let alone whether the justification for issuing the letter in the first place is valid.

So you can't find out what's going on because it is secret.  You can't find out if whoever did it acted legally or properly according to the appropriate laws and regulations because when and how the laws and regulations are applied is secret.  In fact, you can't even find out what the laws and regulations say because even that is secret.  This situation is correctly described as Kafkaesque (after actions described in a novel called "The Trial" written by Franz Kafka and first published in 1925).  The primary legal foundation for these activities lies with a law called the "USA PATRIOT Act" (originally passed in 2001 shortly after 9/11 and reauthorized and updated a couple of times since) and the "FISA Amendments Act" (one of a series of laws relating to "FISA" courts, this specific one was originally passed in 2008 and reauthorized with minor modifications in 2012).  The provisions authorized in these laws essentially eviscerate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized").  I think that major provisions of both acts are completely unconstitutional.  But what do I know?  As I have remarked elsewhere, (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/01/second-amendment-rights.html), the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says the Constitution means.

And here I am refighting a fight that has been going on at least since the PATRIOT act was first passed.  The fact that Congress has chosen by big bipartisan margins to authorize and reauthorize these laws in spite of the many people who agree with me means that it is old news that I am on the wrong side of this argument.  In fact, these new revelations have been greeted widely with a reaction of "no big deal" by large segments of the general population, legislators, and the media.  So what I want to do instead is move on to an issue that is peripheral to the recent revelations but central to the whole issue of Malicious Phone Calls.

One of the big problems with dealing with "Rachel" and her ilk is the problem of tracing the call.  I date back a while.  I remember old movies and TV shows where the cops were trying to trace a phone call, say in a kidnapping situation.  Back in the old days it would take a couple of minutes to trace a call so if the bad guy hung up quickly enough the cops were foiled.  Things progressed to the point where in the movie "Three Days of the Condor" (1975) our hero had to wire together a bunch of pay phones in phone booths (kids:  ask your parents if you don't know what I am talking about) to avoid having his calls traced.  Theoretically, tracing a call is now a simple and instantaneous process.  You just get Caller ID and it tells you what the caller's phone number is.  But the "Rachel" people have been able to block (no caller ID shown) or "spoof" (cause a bogus number to be displayed) Caller ID so it doesn't work.  I didn't really know how to get around this.  So I came up with the complicated plan described in the "FCC" post.

But a detail in the recent NSA revelations indicates that call tracing information is available after the call is completed.  Apparently Verizon ships the call data to the NSA about a day after the calls happen.  And I am confident that the data the NSA gets includes the real originator of the call.  If the bad guys could just block or spoof Caller ID then they would and the data would do the NSA no good.  What this means is that in the hunt for "Rachel" nothing has to be done while the call is still in progress. And all the Rachel types have an "instant hangup" device so they can and will cut the call off any time they want.  But they can no longer beat the "trace" by just doing an instant hangup.  This ability to get usable trace data after the call is over makes everything much simpler.

Having gotten this far, my next thought was to use a telephone "star" code.  You know those star-this and star-that codes that do interesting things.  For instance, if you dial "*69" it will dial back the person whose call you just missed.  Or in the old dial up modem days we would add a "*70" on the front of phone numbers so that your computer session would not be disrupted by a "call waiting" announcement.  My thought was to add a new standard star code so that you could report a Rachel call after it ended.  But it turns out there is a standard list.  You can find it in Wikipedia (where else) in an article titled "Vertical service codes".   And we don't have to add a new code.  "*57" is defined as "Malicious Caller Identification".  "*57" is also sometimes referred to as "MCT - Malicious Call Trace" or, even better, "CAMCT - Caller Activated Malicious Call Trace".  This code is perfect for our purposes.

I had never heard of "*57" before so I suspect few people know about it.  That leads me to believe its implementation is spotty and inconsistent.  But I really don't know.  So, on the theory that it is spottily or inconsistently implemented, here's my plan for how it should be implemented:

Basic version

All telephone companies would be required to implement "*57".  Whenever a customer received a Malicious call that call would eventually come to an end.  After the call ended the customer would, using the same phone line, pick up the handset, get a dial tone, then dial "*57".  (On cell phones the user would enter "*57" then hit the "dial" button.)  The phone system would recognize the code.  This would cause the phone system to locate the call record for the previous call to the same line and instantly forward it to the FCC.  The record would be tagged with the phone number of the line that had entered the "*57".

Over time the FCC would accumulate a database of Malicious calls.  The call originator would be easily identified.  If an originator accumulated a sufficient number of malicious calls then the FCC would investigate and act accordingly.  The telephone business is a business.  This means that someone "owns" every phone number in the sense that some phone company bills someone for every "in use" phone number.  The Malicious call origination data should be aggregated by the person or company that owns the number the call originates from.  If I own a thousand numbers then all the Malicious calls that originate from any of those thousand numbers should be bundled together.  This would take care of the situation where a Malicious caller distributes the originating numbers over a large group so that no single number stands out. To discourage misbehavior by the phone companies the FCC should allocate Malicious calls from numbers where the owner can't easily be determined to the phone company that controls the number.

This basic version would go a long ways toward a fix to the problem.  But more could easily be done.

Advanced version

This would work like the basic version but in addition the caller would be automatically connected to the FCC.  We are all familiar with how complex automated answering systems can be so by "FCC" I really mean an automated answering system managed by the FCC.  This automated answering system could collect additional data by running the customer down an "answer tree".  Here are some ideas for what data could be collected:

• Was the caller an individual or a company?
• Was the call associated with a police related matter (e.g. violation of a "no contact" order)?
• Should the information from this call be made available to law enforcement (e.g. authorization to release the information to law enforcement without requiring a search warrant)?
• Was the call associated with a potential scam (e.g. "Rachel")?
• Was it an annoying but probably not illegal call (e.g. survey or charitable solicitation)?
• Did the call appear to be a prank or annoying call rather than a serious threat?
• Does the caller wish to remain anonymous or can the reporter's billing information be forwarded to the FCC?
• Does the caller want to leave a voice message with additional information ("This is a "Rachel" call" or "This is a call from my ex-husband Frank")?

These are just suggestions for a starting point.  All and much more is easily within the capability of standard commercially available "answer tree" automated phone answering systems.  So the whole data collection system could be implemented completely automatically and very inexpensively.  The "answer tree" could evolve based on experience and new requirements.

With the advanced version it would be possible for a person who received a threatening call from someone under a "no contact" order to "*57" at then end of the call, select the "release the data to law enforcement" option, hang up, then call 911.  The 911 operator could then query the FCC database through a "law enforcement" portal and be immediately shown the call information of the released call.  I don't know what the current procedure is for these situations but I can't imagine it operates as smoothly, efficiently, or potentially effectively as the scenario I have outlined.

In the case of "Rachel" calls the current procedure is to go to the FCC web site and fill out an online complaint form.  But "Rachel" has spoofed or blocked the caller ID, if it is available.  And when you get through to a person they do not provide you with the name or contact information of the "Rachel" people.  So you don't have the information the FCC needs most to be able to effectively deal with these people.  You have to leave key entries in the complaint form blank or enter "don't know".

My "Rachel" calls started years ago.  They kind of reached a steady state where I would get a "Rachel" call perhaps once per week.  Then the FCC filed suit against 5 "Rachel" companies and things went blissfully quiet for a few months.  Then they started back up.  Only now besides "Rachel" I get calls from people who want to clean my ducts or drapes or carpets or something else.  All these calls are completely illegal.  But the people behind these calls know it is extremely unlikely that they will ever be caught.  And if they are caught they will receive a slap on the wrist and they can open up again in a few days under a different name.  So I now get more of these kinds of calls than ever.  And I also get tons of "survey" calls, "political" calls, charitable solicitation calls, and other legal or quasi-legal but quite annoying calls.  Its worse than ever.