Bell's Mind

Long overdue complaint about NANPA and a chance to win $40

As you may or may not know NANPA removed all CLLI information from its public site two years ago. This means that as time goes on our data gets more and more out of date. We still update everything else daily but the CLLI information we have will soon be useless as switch equipment is upgraded, removed, or relocated.

This is not our fault. NANPA redacted their CLLI information [doc | html] after being required by a ruling to do so. The claim was that this was to prevent terrorism but this is complete nonsense. After looking into it a bit more I found that it was "championed" by Verizon (in particular by Robin Smith, +1-410-736-5031, according to the official documentation). I can only guess that it was just a good excuse to keep the smaller guys out of that data so they are forced to by it from database companies at great cost.

NOTE: "Robin Smith" was very clever and didn't put her actual contact information on the request. That number is just a generic Verizon voicemail system

After thinking about it for a long time I can't think of a single way that a terrorist could use this data other than if they had an SS7 switch and peering agreements with big telcos. If they already have that then they already have access to this data since they must have it in order to program their switches. The ulterior motive here is both money and decreased transparency in the telco world, as if it wasn't closed off enough.

What can you do? I think at this point the situation may be beyond repair. Getting something like this enacted in the first place isn't too hard but convincing a bureaucracy to reverse a decision could be a Herculean effort. It's not easy to get a paper-pusher to understand that a decision they made in the past could be so wrong that they'd actually have to rethink it. My suggestion would be to call Robin Smith, record it if it's legal in your jurisdiction, and get a full explanation as to how this data can be used for terrorism. If you send me lawfully obtained recordings of a conversation like this then I will host it here for everyone to hear.

I will PayPal the first person who does this, and gets good information, $10 to get things started. You need to do the following:

• Record the conversation legally, there is a guide for this but I can't guarantee that it's 100% correct
• Talk to the "champion" themselves OR, if they're no longer available or in that position, get their replacement to explain when they took over for them
• Get an explanation as to why they felt this change was necessary
• Get an example of how a terrorist could use this data to commit an act of terrorism
• Get an example of how a terrorist, who isn't currently working in the telco business and does not have access to other sources of information with the same data, could use CLLI code information to commit an act of terrorism
• Bonus (worth another $10): Get this person to admit that the change is completely ineffective and was a bad move
• Bonus (worth another $20): Get this person to explain how the decision could be reversed

Are you up for it? It's at least $10 just to make a phone call if you're the first person to do it successfully. What do you have to lose?