bush-adad

Honey, who was that?

Oh, it was just President Bush
illegally invading our home.

President George W. Bush's prerecorded voice was heard on millions of home phones and answering machines across America during the 2002 election cycle, asking folks to vote Republican. And each time that call was made, it violated federal law/regulation. Click to hear call (545kb wav)

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (47 U.S.C. § 227), at paragraph (a)(2), instructed the FCC to prescribe regulations to implement the requirements of that law. The resulting FCC regulations (47 C.F.R. § 64.1200) states the following at:

(d)	All artificial or prerecorded telephone messages delivered by an automatic telephone dialing system shall:
	(1)	...
	(2)	During or after the message, state clearly the telephone number (other than that of the autodialer or prerecorded message player which placed the call) or address of such business, other entity, or individual.

Well, there was no mention of a phone number or address in Bush's prerecorded message. And since 99.999999…% of such messages are delivered via automatic telephone dialing systems, Bush's prerecorded messages (which lack required identification) were almost certainly a clear violation of law.

Here's the best part. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 allows each state's attorney general to sue for each violation of the law. At 47 USC §227 (f)(1) it states (in part):

AUTHORITY OF STATES. - Whenever the attorney general of a State…has reason to believe that any person has engaged or is engaging in a pattern or practice of telephone calls or other transmissions to residents of that State in violation of this section or the regulations prescribed under this section, the State may bring a civil action on behalf of its residents to… receive $500 in damages for each violation…

Let's say that the Bush call was made to only twenty percent of the nation's 100 million residential phone lines, and half of the state attorneys general sued Bush for his illegal attack on American privacy. Bush may have to disgorge $5 BILLION as a result.

Post Script:
As an additional affront to our privacy, Bush's message was commonly accompanied by an 'injected' false Caller ID signal which displayed 'Unknown Name" and "000-000-0000" on a recipient's Caller ID. This technique is commonly used by telemarketers to in order to defeat call intercept services (such as SBC's Privacy Manager) which are offered to residential telephone subscribers who hope to reduce junk calls.