they ever were. so you think, for example, companies that say we're going to be an environmental is sensitive -- i think it's great if they have some influence but there's a reason why if we have an environmental protection agency and we have a consumer product safety commission come at all these laws about deceptive practices all the rest. the reason is businesses do those things. they want to make money. so we have to do something to constrain their behavior and to penalize bad behavior because they will behave badly. the reason is they want to make money. we can change that. >> joe, any last statements? >> i think we start to answer question. we have the opportunity to really confront the fiscal realities that are still out there, and engage in a big discussion about whether all of us are going to have to do to convince the public that this thing is worth saving, being public education. if we can answer that question, we know how far we will have to

go to make a compelling case that we're giving every child that comes into public education and opportunity to hit the ball out of the park. and where teachers are -- with the type of professionalism and respect they deserve. this is, i go back, beat it is again. the wisconsin situation made it so much harder to have that conversation than it's ever be been. >> we will let joe have the last word. please join me in thanking joe and terry for a great discussion. [applause] 's. let me say it again. in less than two weeks, big, big, big study coming out on the powethepower of unions state-by. look for to the. finally, the video of this event will be up momentarily. thanks for joining us. stay tuned for the our next event which will be in the middle of november which will be a plug on my book. we look forward to seeing you then. thanks so much. [inaudible conversations]

>> live now inside the wilson center here in washington, d.c. for the discussion is going about the future of afghan women and girls pic will hear from afghan businesswoman and education advocate hassina sherjan. she will talk about her efforts of ensuring education of women and girls in afghanistan. including under the taliban regime when she ran underground schools. this event follows last week's near fatal shooting of a pakistani girl who was targeted by the pakistani taliban for promoting education of girls. we are understand today that young girl is able to stand on her own now. this event should get underway in just a moment. live coverage here on c-span2. >> as we wait for this event to get underway, some of the other programming coming up for you here on c-span2 and across the c-span networks. we go live to the national academies of sciences for a seminar on polling and estimating election outcomes.

that will start at 2 p.m. peace and as part of our campaign 2012 coverage. also today vice president joe biden has a campaign stop in sun city, florida. c-span will cover it live. it gets underway at 11:45 a.m. easter. later today new jersey governor chris christie has a campaign rally on behalf of mitt romney. you can see that on c-span. it starts at 4:45 p.m. eastern. now back to the -- and now back to the woodrow wilson center here in washington for discussion on the future of afghan women and girls. >> the director of the program at the wilson center. i'd like to welcome you all to today's meeting on how to protect women and girls when america leaves afghanistan,

focusing on education. as i was coming down the stairs with our speaker, she said the problem is not only protecting girls, but it's also protecting girls and boys, how to make sure that they will have access to education. this meeting is called, sponsored by the centers asia program and global womens leadership initiative, a new program at the center run why my dear friend and new college. -- colleague. she's the president of the chair of the new initiative. and you will be hearing a lot from her because she's a very active person, and organized

meetings all the time. we i should have a meeting, a joint meeting a week ago with afghani women. so i would like to use this opportunity to welcome her back to the center. and also, i would like to welcome mr. and mrs. johnson, who were one of them bp's women's program first founders. i always appreciate what they did. they made it possible for us to organize meetings in the region. our speaker today is hassina sherjan. she's the founder and ceo of eight afghanistan for education, as well as owner and chief executive officer of boumi company, internationally recognized women owned home

accessory business. she has over 21 years of knowledge and experience in education, business communication and journalism. she is the co-author of a book in afghanistan, a book we recommend strongly that you read. over the last year, we have been reading on and off about attacks on girl schools in afghanistan, torching girl schools. we also always recall the suffering of young girls under the taliban, and women. we recall when little girls were

not allowed to even learn how to read and write. when child marriage became a common phenomenon, when mothers could not even take their sick children to a hospital to be treated, when women became beggars in order to feed their families. when we witnessed public execution of women. all this happened under the taliban. basically when women were barred from any public participation. but nevertheless, there were brave women like hassina, who managed to run schools for little girls. so once the taliban were gone, there was at least a substantial group of young girl where

educated and were able to read and write. this morning, i was quite curious, and i checked the statistics of girls education in afghanistan, at the elementary level it is 40%, but at the high school level it is 6%. that is what we saw, so you may want to correct that. particularly since the girls of the elementary level, 66% of boys at the elementary level. 6% high school level, 18% for boys. but we all know that girls have much more access to education. women have more access to public offices when it comes to kabul

and some of the big cities. but afghanistan is not kabul. afghanistan is the whole country. the villages, small towns, what is going to happen to that? we also recently, just two weeks ago, witnessed the incident with malala yousufzai, the 14 year-old little girl come and tell their 18 they are little girl, who was shot by the taliban in pakistan because she wanted to be educated, because she wanted to be blogger and was defined the taliban. and rather than expressing sadness about what happened, the taliban said they will be after her, no matter what. so in order to help us understand what is going on and what will be going on once -- we

have with us a superb speaker. >> thank you. thank you and good morning, and nice to see everybody. and it's great to be here. and i'd like to thank wilson center for the interest for having me here, to be with you, and i hope that we'll have a conversation today to see how you can join us to educate the afghan population. to give you a little background on why i'm doing what i'm doing, and and it's a question that always comes up, and people always wonder why i left a very comfortable life in erica and went back to afghanistan, in fact my life in afghanistan is quite comfortable. and also home is always home come so matter how long i lived in the united states, which is a second home for me, and it's a great place to live, good

schools, but at the end of the day home is always home, and when you are home, my life is much more meaningful than what i was doing here in the states. it's more rewarding. when i go to the schools, one of the students who is 20 years old gets up and says, if it wasn't for this program i could never write my name. or i just recently came back from graduation of one of our schools and a province which is the schools located in a village which is way up in the mountain, very few have gone there. we just had 44 of our students graduating. one of them who had gotten married when she was in ninth grade, and then her husband took her to a village where there were no schools, so she ended up

having kids and pursued the family life. her husband was very poor, but she always wanted to complete her high school. so eventually she managed, convinced her husband that we have to move back to this village where she can finish her high school. so now she has just graduated, and she wants to become a parliamentarian and a representative from that village. so making a difference in somebody's life that you don't know at all and you will never know, is a different feeling. it really makes life worth living. so i, honestly, i really, when we came to the u.s. because of the russian invasion, i was very busy learning english and working and making money and buying homes and buying traffic ours and all sorts of things, and we were successful. but it always felt empty.

and in 1995 after my father passed, suddenly i had this urge i needed to go back home. and i woke up one morning, and i decided that it just going to pay his mortgage anymore. i need to go back on. so i applied for my citizenship, which i had already been here for 19 years. so after receiving my passport, i bought a ticket and that's going to push our. so my cousin called who have some family and to were i going. i said the shower. and she said where, that's a place where you should show up and go to a hotel. i'm going to call my relative to come and pick you up. and thank god she did that. because, yes, bashar was not a person may just to show up and go to the hotel.

that trip to basically changed my life. it is amazing how, if we really listen to ourselves and what our gut feelings are and just follow that, we'd end up being where we are supposed to be in life. so i went to some refugee camps with his family. ipod, before i left i bought some traffic camera gear and, because i always wanted to be a photographer. so went to a refugee camp and suddenly within the first hour a woman came up to me to say, which one of the twin babies you think is healthy or? because i can't keep both. they were telling yesterday i should tell you straight. i said no, i don't like to talk

about this story because it's always really sad. and then i witnessed some 50 year old women, age expectancy is about 40, 45, sometimes 35 in afghanistan and pakistan. and so 50 year old women who are learning how to read and write for the first time. and their eyes were glowing and they kept saying what else? white house? wow, i didn't even know this, you know? how we take things for granted. because the school was always there for us. and i always wished that i was six i couldn't go to school or the teacher wouldn't show up or something. look at these people. you know, they are starving for knowledge and education, and they want to read and they just found out something that they didn't know. they know that their life is now

ending, and they didn't have the most important thing in life. so basically that one day was just enough for me to know why i went to pakistan. so i came back to u.s. and then it was really hard to live there, because i felt that we, the afghans, were really privileged to have the opportunity in a family who could take us out of afghanistan, and provides everything here in america, and we had a very comfortable life. we are really responsible for those we left behind. and what is it that we can do, and maybe i should do that and hoping that others will follow. so i came back and gathered with other afghan professionals and showed them the pictures and told them what's going on, and we ended up establishing an organization to assist with

education because i thought that this is what's really missing. this is what has taken afghanistan to where it is afghanistan today. because people didn't have access to education. even before the wars there was only, the literacy rate in afghanistan was only 10 or 11%. and i'm not even sure if that's an accurate figure. because most of the schools were always in the big cities. people in the villages had no access to education, even during the years of the king and when there was peace in afghanistan. yes, it was peaceful and accountable, there was a war and the greatest place to go, and tourists loved it. been people didn't, there was no progress. so education was not happening. so we decided to organize a small programs outside of the

refugee camps in pakistan, because there was a war so going on in afghanistan and they couldn't travel my way into the country. so in 1990, when i was in bashar picking up on the programs, i decided that it really have to see what's going on under the taliban for myself. this is unbelievable that women and girls have to sit at home, or don't work. my mother always work. she worked at the american embassy. she opened the very first florist in afghanistan. she always had her own businesses. my aunts work. everybody -- my mother's and was a first senator in the '60s and there were women in the parliament and in the cabinet. so it was unbelievable for me what was happening during the taliban, 21st century. so i went into afghanistan,

bought a burqa in afghanistan and talk to people and they said they would take me as long as we have an ngo and they will take me. it's a very long story, but after many discussions with the taliban leaders, i realized that i was not going to get anywhere. i was very naïve thinking that okay, they either saying the issue is money. they don't have money for girls to go to school. and i said money shouldn't be a problem here. so if i can convince them that we bring money, they will allow girls to go to school, and let's go. but now my, that was not the case. so i ended up establishing five clandestine schools, 250 girls, and that's all the money i had. i had the money with me. and pushes some books and stationery for them -- purchased

books and station for them. and that went on until i returned in 2001, and the students were doing extremely well because they were small classes and because a lot of attention at all it did was study. so that all went to third, third chris wood typically and if critically to seventh grade, so they were doing really well. and then i thought it must be another problem. there are no 55 million students coming back to school, but what is it that we can do to help? so after many discussions with school principals and students and going to classrooms, i realized that were these 17-year-olds sitting back in third grade. they were embarrassed to say their age. but obviously they were much older. so it took a lot of convincing.

the ministers when believe me if i said we need accelerated education programs because these girls want to finish high school, go to university, have a life. and they kept saying we have a letter to program for older people, but anyhow, after a lot of meetings and many talks and eventually our program was the very first accelerated learning program that started in afghanistan. however, programs and projects have to be sustainable in the long term. and i never do anything that is only for two years or one year, and fit it in spirit i have to know what happened to these people. and our students said that if you close this program were not going to go to formal school. we are older. our parents wants to get married. and we don't feel comfortable sitting with 10-year-olds.

so we managed to convince the donors that continue funding this. and our donors were very much involved in a program, so they would come and we always invited them. so they knew what was happening. unfortunately, by 2007, we signed an agreement with the ministry of education that we will be able to give graduates and 12th grade and they will provide them with their high school diploma. so this was a huge achievement because no ngo does this. so since then we have given 834 graduates, and schools are doing very well, instance are very happy and we continuously have more and more and more demands. so hopefully we can expand to as many provinces as we possibly can work.

we really work where ever we can work. because there parts of afghanistan we cannot work at all, period, because there are no schools for boys or girls. in some of the places. so why putting our staff or the students in danger when we can't? so, but there's so much demand in places that we are working in nice provinces, and we have 13 schools with 3000 thing of students and 104 middle students. and that's also another subject, because we have ignored the boys since the last 10 years, unfortunately. our program is not really intended to be only for girls, in fact. we really wanted to do this for male and female because during the taliban period when i came into kabul in 1990, i also realize boys were not learning very much.

majority of what they were learning was indoctrination, and there was really no education taking place. so -- so we are hoping that we'll be able to because the young boys are the ones that are becoming the subject of recruitment for the insurgents and the taliban. and doing it a little differently probably for them, because it's very difficult to keep an 18 year old boy in fourth class. they really, they want to get married. you know, they're almost no, all kinds of things going on with them. they need to work. but in order to work we need to educate them at least up to

ninth grade, and then teach them a vocation so can go and work and provide for their family. speaking of the statistics, i don't get wrapped up in the statistics in afghanistan because it's very difficult. it's very difficult to get accurate statistics in afghanistan. and people don't tell you the truth. you go -- i had a friend who's working on her ph.d and she came to stay with me from france, and the last day before she was leaving she said, hassina, i think i just here for for another year now. i just interviewed, my last interview today was with this girl who said at the end of her interview, did i do well? so it's always, like you know,

they don't realize that this is important information that's going to be used for something very sensitive information, that it has to be accurate. so especially they don't tell the truth to foreigners. and the hours want to make it look better or nicer, you know, then it is. so i, i don't exactly know how, what the percentage of girls are going to school. education in afghanistan before the taliban was always compulsory. everybody could go to school. however, they didn't have the access to go to schools. so one thing that i see is that parents are very eager to send all of their children to school. and to really educate girls, boys, everybody. because i think they are finally realizing the importance of

education and why they are where they are. so we have had, since i just came back from a trip in the north visiting our schools, and one of the provinces, some are gone. it's quite amazing that majority of the students are saying, 80% says that my husband encourages me to go to school. even though the husbands don't have a high school degree themselves. but i think it other thing that is also happening is that one of them said that my son who is in first grade came home and asked me to help him with homework, and i couldn't. and when i told him, he was very upset. and since that day i told my husband that no matter what, i have found a program, i'm going there, and i have to do this. and i'm very happy now. i work with my son, with his homework, and we are both

learning. so i think children is also are making, forcing the parents to learn and to be educated and do not really feel like the kids know more than them. is very important because if the kids, on educating the kids, the parents, there's a respect level that, you, won't be there, feeling like i know more than you now. and the students are extremely interested in computers, and so now it almost feels like it's genetic. you put a computer in front of them and they already figure it all out. so if we can somehow, what has not really happen in the last 10 years is people to people connection. because we have left everything for the government to do.

and i don't think governments do whatever they can and whatever they know, but i think that we have to be much more active, and getting to know afghan people and getting to know what their life is all about, what do they want, how they want it. and then i think even people here can have some leverage over aid money that is being spent in afghanistan. because then they know where the aid money should go. because we know what people need. right now it's not very clear what afghan people need. programs are not based on needs. it's based on what we think is best for them. so, everybody gets frustrated.

i hear a lot about, we should pull out of afghanistan, it's not working, you know? it doesn't work, billions of dollars later, thousands -- we haven't accomplished anything. it's a frustration that are here, of course because when we are not involved in something, and something goes wrong and was given the power to someone else to do it right, they didn't do it right so we all get frustrated, yes, american people have died and we haven't achieved anything. i don't really, and income yesterday somebody said, you know, quitters are not winners. and i don't think like quitting we're going to achieve anything. i think only by stopping and reflecting, you know, what happened, what did we do wrong in the last 10 years? and how we can change that. because nobody wants another september 11 happening.

and we have already ignored afghanistan once, and we saw the result of that 10 years later. it doesn't mean, we may have forgotten out about what happened in september 11, but 10 years later we may not. and then it will be too late. so, should we open the floor? >> do you want to show speed as we have a very short, seven minute video. it's mostly about our work so you will see some of our students in schools and what we're doing in in afghanistan. so that's what the short video is all about. so it's a seven minute video, and then we can have a conversation. >> thank you very much. this is very interesting. after we watch the video, may want to ask you a couple of questions, how you see the

future. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> education is the main goal, and ultimately happens. afghan people are hungry for education.

the main cause of violence and corruption is the lack of a population that is education. ♪ a not ♪ ♪ >> afghans are hungry for education, and we have to educate the whole population, and not only the privileged. i just came back from a province where i visited our school. we have 12-year-olds sitting in first grade, and that we have some five year old sitting in seventh grade. ♪

>> the 25 euros are sitting in seventh grade told me that it's her husband who encourages her to go to school. and have a high school diploma. because he doesn't have the opportunity. he had a fifth grade education before the wars, and he doesn't have -- [inaudible] this is why it's crucial that we provide education, for male and female, in afghanistan. ♪ >> in afghanistan for education is working currently in nine provinces with 13 schools. with 3000 female students, and

104 male students. and we wish to expand to as many provinces as we can to educate the public. ♪ ♪ [speaking in native tongue]

♪ ♪ >> the only counterinsurgency is through education, and not war. this has to be an international effort. we need our international allies to help us educate the afghan population, and to help bring peace in the world. ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ >> thank you.

thank you very much, hassina. we will open the floor now to your questions. but can you tell us a little bit about your concern having going back to the title of your presentation, once the american troops, nato leaves, what is going to happen to these school texas, the girls in school especially, into remote areas areas in the taliban? do we see once again the end of girls education, or how do you see this? >> well, i'm always very optimistic, because without it i don't think i can work and live in afghanistan. and i think if, we're all out of this, and something positive will happen. because if we continue to think that things will go wrong with

the taliban will come in and we're going to leave and that's exactly what's going to happen. all the attraction. so i think if collectively we believe that things will be okay, things would be okay, afghans -- i don't personally believe that taliban have a chance to come back to afghanistan. we have to remember that the circumstances are quite different now than it was in 1997 when they came into afghanistan. we were in a factional war. things were truly falling apart. people were desperate. it's not the case right now. there's been a lot of progress in afghanistan. and yes, maybe, you know, some of the infrastructure is not yet

in place. there might be some problems. some people are maybe not very happy with the government, but, but that's everywhere, no? weekend, i think it's not realistic to think that after 30 years of war and devastation, suddenly afghanistan is going to become this amazing democratic country that everything is fine and nothing will ever go wrong again. so i think it's a process and democracy is also a progress -- process. and we have to get there. so afghans, i think if the school suffer during that period, if taliban try to take over, the thing is that the targets are mostly foreign

troops, foreigners, some establishments because of the foreigners, military and all of that. so i'm not really sure if the taliban even know what they would if they come to afghanistan. i met with him and they have no idea. they haven't thought about governing afghanistan. they never introduced themselves to afghans. they belong to a philosophy, and their mission is to convert everybody into their own version of islam. and then after that, the end of the world will come because life starts after. so the goal is to die because life starts after. how do you compete with something like that? so i don't really see taliban

coming. i think we have a lot of work to do. i think that afghans have to step up and take responsibility, take ownership, take ownership of this democracy that we have, take ownership of the economy, market economy. it's all very for to afghans can and that's why it's not quite working, you know, because we need -- internationals also have responsibility to, how do you give all this back to them, because they are not taken responsibility for this because it wasn't even democracy. is a process. egyptians will hold their own democracy and it will last. they will make sure that nobody can take it away from them. because they earned it. they fight for it. we didn't. it just came in a beautiful box. and it is there. we have no idea what to do with it. and including this market economy, market economy is not

for afghanistan because they don't understand, even in u.s. there are all sorts -- you have to protect your own production. we don't have that in afghanistan. we have become a dumping ground for all the neighbors. so, we have a lot of work to do. afghans have to realize that where to start and what to do and also i think seeing some of the civilian people, some of the advisors to the ministers leading. it will help because they have to do it themselves. because right now the advisers coming in and consultants, they do all the work. they write the strategy and they do everything. so nobody takes ownership of anything. i think we, we may have some difficult times, but i think the difficult times might also be okay.

it's just that it's a learning process and we have two, giving up after many years of war and stand up on their own feet it's not easy. so i think we will always need our international allies to be there for us. when we need help. i'm very optimistic and i don't think that afghanistan is going to fall into the hands of insurgents or anything like that again. >> yes, please. could you just wait for the mic and identify yourself? thank you. >> i'm from johns hopkins. i really enjoyed your talk. i have at a very smaller scale experiences in iran. for educating younger disadvantaged people.

very happy you mentioned the role of economics and free market. so where do you think that should come into the curriculum, when you're educating these young men and women? so that they understand that also goes into society about the role of free market. because, well, maybe because of my field, but i believe that the understanding of the ways in which the economic system works would also help people realize their individual rights and then establish norms, social norms towards fostering democracy. if you would elaborate on where and how you take, that could be infused into the curriculum in education, i would appreciate that. >> thank you. again, it's a matter of time. i don't think that we can, i think part of the problem so far

has been that we wanted everything to happen yesterday. we didn't give ourselves enough time, and we didn't give the afghan people enough time to even recognize what the issues and problems are and where to begin and how do we fix it. so understanding economic systems, first we have to educate the population. then we have to understand economic systems. then have to make a choice of what economic system what they feel are comparable with. we've had a socialist system for the past 52 years. it had nothing to do with the russians in afghanistan. it's always been this way. the government has always been very much involved, and people are asking for this. people are saying, why isn't the government doing this was? they are totally confused. so they don't understand competition. you see all the bakeries are all on one street and all the food shops are all on one street and all the butcheries are all on one street, because there's always been a price control

system. and even up to 2009 when i spoke to the missus probably at imf, they had price control system. -- municipality. i don't know what i, so it takes another generation or two, to realize that there are ways for the economy to function, based on -- we have to compete with the region. we can't compete with u.s. and japan, which is right up life in kabul is extremely -- [inaudible]. i can live on less money in u.s. then again in kabul right now. my rent is $2000. and that's cheap actually. some security, u.s. security companies are renting houses for

$65,000. so there's a very artificial economy right now in afghanistan, especially in kabul. it's better outside kabul. i think it's just a matter of time, and reforming the whole education system. because we are still on this road of learning where there's a lot of memorization take place, and learning is not taking place. so we are trying without programs to create a model, more like a charter school maybe or something, that would be duplicated so that people learn and they know how to learn. when i tried to -- rate from high school, i can do this. i had no idea how to do this because i was trying to memorize quite a lot of things. so it's really, and is a very

painful process to learn how to learn. because we have to reform education system, not on and education minister, higher education mr.. the same thing with universities. so we have a lot of work to do. the real work hasn't even begun yet. we've been too busy trying to build high rises and and some roads which is good, but, you know, but the real work which is education, and for real infrastructure, sewage system, you know, because in kabul the air is very bad. the environment is really, really important. more people die right now in afghanistan, or a lease in kabul from the pollution than from the war. so yeah, it's time.

>> hassina, thank you for your very moving and very effective presentation. i just want to highlight two important points you made, and then a question. you talk very powerfully about the importance of educating the girls as a way of educating the woman. now for years we have done research on the impact of educating the woman on the family, and the girls and boys in the family. for example, the world bank's 2012 report argues that even one extra year of education for the mother results in better test scores for the children. but your piece is also about the impact that the education of children have on the mother's, and that is a really important

analysis. and more research must be done on the impact that the education of children have on their mothers. you also spoke about the importance of educating boys, often in this movement we forget the importance of the education of boys. the woman in pakistan who was gang raped, and a frontier province by the men of another, and then who then had to walk naked back to her village, used the money that she got to start schools in her village. not just for girls but for boys because she said boys must learn how important, how important it is to see that girls enjoy equality and the law. and that unless you educate more girls than boys, girls will never be safe, whenever have the security that they should enjoy.

and that is what you, you have also raised. so my question to you is, in educating boys, and educating girls, it's not enough that we ensure access to equal access to education. but the kind of education, the kind of pedagogy that also you talk about. so do you, do you raise issues of gender the court in the classroom? do you raise issues of the ways in which gender bias, harms girls and boys and diminishes both boys and girls? so, my question is, it is not just enough that we have equal access to education, but the kind of education that is privileged in schools, and the responsibility that educators have two in calicut those values are gender equality in a new generation of children in afghanistan. >> thank you. yes, of course. i think that the quality is most

important added don't think we should get all wrapped up in numbers of students asked them to come to schools because millions of students are coming to schools right now. but what is it that they are really learning. so this is also another process because now we're working very close with the ministry of education do not only create a coalition of ngos that will be working only in education, to keep track of what's going on and who's doing what, but also to reform the curriculum but because we have to teach the ministry curriculum in order for the ministry to provide our graduates with her diploma. and also they have to take the entrance exam. as soon as we can reform the curriculum for the ministry, then only we can change things. we do provided students with additional reading. they have more libraries.

they read a lot. please write a book report. they love to write magazines and things like that, but it's not enough. it has to be included in their grade exams. >> hi. i don't know if i can see it all. i'm with the atlantic council south asia center. you've answered a number of the questions that i was going to ask about pedagogy. i just had a question about the teachers and how they are selected and trained, and as your reforming the curriculum, the textbooks that are currently being used, on the adequate, or as you said, are you just towards using supplemental material to teach the students?

>> thank you. the curriculum, the books have been revised over and over and over since 2001. we have had some experts from columbia university sitting with minister of education. we have rewritten the books, but it still being revised every year, which is reduced ago because every year they have to print new sets of books, and you cannot use the books use already the year before. so i'm hoping that one of these days they'll have curriculum and they will say this what it's going to be. teachers, most of our teachers, our teachers that are already teaching as the government schools, they teach have today with the government schools and have a day with us. and we have also hired some university graduates, new university graduates, which is much more hopeful and fun

because they are much younger and they're very open to change. they're open to doing things differently. so i'm hoping that we'll be able to hire university graduates who graduate and have more jobs and give them like a very condensed accelerated teacher training program for two or three months, and send them out to the provinces and also keep them in kabul. and also i have spoken to some the university and the provinces also, so that's what really, we need to come up with a nice teacher training program to do this for them. >> take one last question. yes? >> and of ngos in education. could you put the work of your group and a somewhat broader

context? what other groups doing, how are they coordinating? and also as i understand it when you started come you were aiming at this particular group for those who had missed out on education under the taliban. i think over time that will kind of fade out, and then how are you also fitting into this broader framework in against a? >> it wasn't only during the taliban. i mean, there were two or three different groups. the one that was the girl who couldn't go to school for the seven years of the taliban period, but in 10 years before that was also very difficult for kids to access to education because there was a factional war and there was bombing left and right in kabul so nobody went to school. so we have lost like two, three generations.

and yes, the program started with an accelerated education as a catcher program so they can integrate back into the regular school system. and now we still have a lot of demand from people who had like a second grade education or third grade education during the taliban, before the taliban came in. they keep coming back to school. and also because people in afghanistan generally didn't have access to education, so there are a lot of older people in afghanistan, if you're 10 years old and never have access to education, you can that formal education system will not take you. in fact, the law is to be seven and be entered, be admitted to the first grade. but now they're taking up to nine. but if you're 10, never been to

school, that's it. so we are the only system right now that taking these students and helping them graduate from high school, so they study 12 years within eight years with us mostly. and as far as your first question -- [inaudible] >> the coalition of ngos, because i think only the ministry of health has a better system where they have certain ngos who are working only in health. that's a big issue for everybody to keep track of things. no other sector really has a group of ngos that are only working in the sector. and again, ngos was always, this concept was also not an afghan concept. it's very much a foreign concept that started when afghans were in pakistan. so it's not very clear. they don't really understand

what, why ngos are there and what they should really be doing. so what i'm trying to do is to create a model where they understand that ngos should really be helping the government to do what they cannot do. there are 70 are sometimes 90 sitting in a classroom and the government schools, so we're trying to outsource these classrooms to ngos. asked last a chance and ran -- this is one way they can spend the money and also have a better quality education. ..

[applause] thank you very much. i also want to let everybody know this saturday night there's a wonderful event for and there will be dancing and music and a lot of fun if anybody it is free at 7:30. if you leave your card there. i will be happy to send you the flyer. it is in chevy chase.

>> thank you very much. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> we have more live coverage coming up. we'll go to the national academy of sciences here in

washington for a seminar on polling and stilting election outcomes. that is expected to start at 2:00 p.m. eastern as part of our campaign 2012 coverage. device president joe biden is on the road campaigning at a community center in sun city, florida. c-span will cover it live this morning. it starts at 11:45 eastern. governor chris christie rallies supporters in richmond, virginia this afternoon. it is life on c-span. that starts at 4:45. >> i have to be honest with you, i love these debates. these things are great. and i think it is interesting that the president still doesn't have an agenda for a second term. don't you think that it is time for him to finally put together a vision of what he would do in the next four years if he were elected? he has got to come up with that over this weekend because there is only one debate left on monday. >> so let's recap what we learned last night. his tax plan doesn't add up.

his jobs plan doesn't create jobs. his deficit reduction man, adds to the deficit. so everybody here has heard of the new deal? you've heard of the fair deal? you've heard of the square deal? mitt romney is trying to sell you a sketchy deal. [applause] we are not buying it. >> watch and engage monday as president obama and mitt romney meet in their final debate moderated by cbs's bob stheef fer from lynn university in boca raton, florida. our debate preview starts at 8 p.m. eastern followed by the debate at nine. on line at c-span ride yo and online at c-span.org. yesterday federal trade commission chair jon leibowitz spoke about his agencies effort to put an end to illegal robo calls. he was speaking at ftc in

washington. after his remarks we'll learn more about the evolution of phone kmigss and how the agency is structured. this is an hour and 40 minutes. >> we're exceeding glad all of you are here whether in person via the web or via phone dial-in now right? yes. at the ftc we pride ourselves on the fact we take a multifaceted approach to consumer protection issues. enforcement, education, policy, and advocacy. today's summit is a living example of what we mean. here you are, distinguished technologists, telecommunications experts and law enforcers, all sitting together in one room to help brainstorm on ways to stop the onslaught and it is an onslaught, of illegal robo calls. now, everyone here knows that robo calls are intrusive and disruptive because probably all of us in this room have

experienced them. that's bad enough, but by deceptively pitching phony products and services such as debt reduction programs and mortgage modification scams these bottom-feeders are not only disturbing our peace at home, and violating what justice lewis lewis brand dice our right to be let alone. lewis brandeis along with woodrow wilson was one of the architects of the creation of this commission, they are also stealing our money. [phone ringing] oh, who is calling? >> hello this is rachel at card holder services calling in reference to your current credit card account. there are no problems currently with your account. it is urgent that you kangt us concerning your eligibility for lowering your interest rates, your eligibility expires shortly. please consider this your final notice. please press the number one on your phone now to speak with a live operator and to

lower your interest or press the number two to discontinue further notices. thank you. have a great day. >> is that voice familiar to any of you in the room? raise your hand if you got a call from rachel? wow! i have too. well, there we go. well, let me tell you this, rachel. as the subject of more than 200,000 complaints to the ftc every month, as a major source of anger and irritation across the country, you are now public enemy number one. we don't know her face actually. we can't see her face but we know she is a bad human being. [laughter] look at some of these tweets. can we scroll some of the tweets? and you will understand why this summit is called, robo calls, all the rage. i'll just read a few of my favorites. yes [laughing] there is a special place in hell for rachel from card holder services. would i really go to jail,

second one? would i really go to jail if i found and murdered rachel from card holder services? i'm not so sure because in the united states we have something called jury nullification. [laughter] we even good old school u.s. postal mail complaining about robo calls. we get a lot of it. i got a letter from a man in michigan who called robo callers, and i quote, ma left owe lent predators, clearly prowling among the uninformed and unsuspecting for opportunities to trick them out of money. he closed his letter asking us to quote, please put your best investigators on this and protect the american people from such evil marauders. that's exactly what we've been trying to do here at the ftc. we've sued rachel multiple times as well as some of her chipper coworkers like heather from card holder services and stacy from card holder services. in fact we have brought more than a dozen cases targeting illegal robo calls, taking

action against 42 companies and 24 individuals and we have stopped billions, literally billions of illegal robo calls. spoiler alert. we have more cases in the pipeline just stay tuned for the next couple of weeks. you can look forward to continued aggressive law enforcement from the ftc as well as from our state and federal partners some of whom are here today. that said we know law enforcement alone can't stop illegal robo callers and that's why all of us are here today to take a deeper look. we'll start with some history. what is it about the infrastructure of the telecommunications system that has enabled the growth of illegal robo calls in such a short time? with exert period of time as our guides, we'll technology boosted voip bandwidth bringing tremendous benefits for consumers they enabled voice blasting technology to

flourish at bargain basement rights. we will talk about the dramatically program of back office violations from india. you know, it has been nearly 10 years since the ftc spearheaded and implemented a national do-not-call registry. today there are more than 217 million, 217 million phone numbers that are on the registry and there is no question that our efforts have significantly reduced the number of unwanted telemarketing calls people are getting from legitimate marketers. who honor the system and recognize the importance of respecting consumer choice. we also know, how much american consumers value, value the do not call system as well as how much is valued by dave barry the american humorist, called do not call the most effective government program since the elvis stamp. if you're not going to laugh at my jokes. let's be honest, the telecommunications

infrastructure like so many other core ecosystems was not developed with an eye toward fighting crime. alexander graham bell did not especially focus on telemarketing fraud let alone caller i.d. spoofing when he invented the phone. still we are sure the technology used creatively and thoughtfully could help us stem the tide of telemarketing abuse and misabuse. do's agenda is engaging and it is provocative. robo callers are increasingly creative in perpetuating their scam. we need the help of everyone here in the room today to develop creative solutions to catch and out with the perpetrators. nothing, nothing is off the table

creative ideas from the public at large. there will be more on that with a special announcement later today. really anything that will help us retain our peace and quiet in our homes. so thank you all for attending. now i have the honor of introducing our first two panelists who are both equally distinguished yet eerily similar. why don't you guys come on up and i introduce you and i'll explain. first let me introduce the ftc chief technologist. steve bellovin. he is from columbia university where. he spent many years at at&t bell laboratories during graduate research for m s&p hd in from north carolina at chapel hill. he created net news. if that is not enough, he holds number of patents on

cryptographic and network calls. we're grateful you're on our side and not theirs for these and many more reasons. great to have you here as second chief technologist after ed felt ton. next i like to introduced, henning schutzrinne, at columbia university and ftc chief technology evident. he worked at at&t bell laboratories and before joining the technology departments at columbia university. you can sense a common theme. columbia, university, and at&t and bell labs really developed wonderful technologists who also are committed to public service. branching out on his own henning, codeveloped the internet standards used by all internet tell phony and internet applications rtp, rtsp and sip. so we have here, two of the foremost thinkers in public

policy and, and, government about technology. the ftc and the fcc's chief technologists, working together on behalf of consumers trying to think creatively about ways to stop illegal robo calls and track down the perpetrators. please join me well coming our first two panelists. thank you. [applause] >> thanks, john. so we're going to talk about the history of the telephone system. if we go way back, you couldn't really make very many calls or make them very quickly since every kuhl involved, remember lilly tomlin's ernestine character? someone sitting at switchboard pulling out wires and plugging them in. you knew who was calling whom. if nothing else you traced the wire but probably could go ask the operator, who was that who just called me?

you didn't have to go to elaborate mechanisms to trace back who was doing things. we even had old iphones or phones in the shapes of i. this is actually a pay-phone. little box off to the right where you deposited nickles when the operator told you to. it was not exactly automated t made a sound the operator recognized? why sound? the phones carried sounds, not data. we didn't really have sophisticated end systems and we didn't have sophisticated computing devices. this mechanical calculator was probably state-of-the-art around 1950 or so. it persisted into the mid '60s. i actually played with similar one when i was in high school. no electronics in there, period. wasn't going to make any phone calls. but even way back when there were signs of growth. what you see in front of you a picture of so-called panel office. early central office phones,

this particular one was built in 1923 and if you look very carefully down at the bottom, you will see there really was still a few plug wires for making old-fashioned manual switchboard calls but you also see that even the candlestick phone there has a dial on it. we moved ahead to the dial era. the dial era goes back actually 25 years before the panel switch was invented. rumor or legend had it that strewger, who was undertaker invented the phone switch for reason of competition. his competitor's wife was local phone operator. when someone very agrieved called, picked up the phone, ask the operator, connect me with the under taker guess who got all the business? he tried to invent his way out of the problem, a many competition problem. but also the volume of phone calls was getting too high for purely manual call processing. it just wasn't going to

scale. and so you started getting abused even very early on. this is a pen register, real of paper tape with associated gadget tri. was back in the 1920s a pen register is a device recording what phones are, what phone numbers a particular phone is dialing. again this is a creature of the dial age, back when you're dealing only with manual operators, you asked the operator, who just called me. by the 1920s when most calls were dialed you already needed a mechanical gadget to keep track of who was calling whom. and you need it because there was already abuse going on by the 1920's. we also saw the start of data communications. here's a picture of teletype. this one is vintage 1963 but goes back to, practical ones go back throughout the 1920's or even earlier. keyboards and printers start

to send data bits over wires. also a paper tape reader. you could prepare your message off-line on a paper tape punch and load it in and send it much faster than any person could type. we're already seeing increase in speed to amplify humans capabilities there. of course we're still sending sounds again, that is when the phone network could handle did. as we look at the phone network, what we see is, telephone handsets, telephones, whether it is modern ones or old-fashioned candlestick phones and a variety of different phone switches ranging from manual switch boards to very modern electronic switching systems to complete the calls. but initially it was a wire from every phone to the central office. one phone, one wire pair. several offices became automatic. we have trunks between the

central offices to connect them. when you make a call your central office contacts the receiving central office, possibly routing through intermediate switches along the way and connects you to the number you wish to call. fundamentally though, copper wire path between each pair of phones that's talking. but even way back when it was more complicated than that. think of that, even that very manual switchboard. it could be used within an office and yes, there was a pair of wires from every phone in that office to the switchboard but many fewer pair,s of wires out to the phone network as a whole. so you already have lost the end to end relationship between one physical wire from a phone going out to the phone network. private switchboard. today we call them pbxs. we also find evolution the way calls are set up. way back when, when we have

so-called data, signaling path and the voice path. the call setup means i want to call this number went along the same pairs of wires that were going to be used to handle the actual voice call. by late 1960s fraud was afflecking that technique and the desire for more capabilities. so they moved the signaling path away from the voice path. a separate data network was used to set up for calls. even contacts to outboard service for things like 800 number look-ups all the modern features we love. those lovely menus, aren't you pleased with that? blame the phone company. we start to see a lot more complexity in there. we are also seeing tremendous change in the economics of phone systems. order phone cables that had very limited capacity. that was true until the late

'80s when the first underwater fire was laid down. when i worked in the mid '60s you had to book a in advance a transatlantic operator. calls were very, very expensive. even domestic long distance was very expensive. many of you in the room still remember, call in the evening. further you call, the more expensive it is. gee, what a quaint thing. but the phone network has changed a lot. there is no longer one phone, one wire pair. we don't have just simple paths. we have complex data flows for both the voice path and the signaling. signaling is not the same as the data, as the voice path anymore. we have a data path, not just a voice path. distance and location are

not particularly important. there is a whole separate problem of mobile phones i haven't even gone into and end points are no longer just phones. it is a much more --, this is not only not my grandfather's phone network, is is not even the phone network i grew up with. it is a very different one. we move onto the votes over ip age which henning will talk about. >> are we taking questions now or later? okay. so, segueing on from steve's introduction to how we got here, let me try to discuss a little bit as to what makes the problem so challenging. as was mentioned in the introduction it has been, tremendous decrease in cost and increasing capability in the past, i would say 10 years but we have seen nothing yet. much of our telephone systems that we have in our homes, if we still have land lines, are indeed, haven't

really changed all that much. but there's now a movement afoot to fundamentally and dramatically replace the whole infrastructure to the kind of technology that steve was alluding to. thus, we are at the cusp of a even more dramatic transition we've seen, namely a technology now available primarily in corporate environment will also become the technology of choice in the consumer realm. what i want to do in the next few minutes is to go through some of the challenges that we're facing going forward and why some of the solutions that we might think about as obvious solutions to solve the robo calling problem, unlikely to work. we have to be far more creative base of transition this is

unique opportunity before the phone has made the transition to build in security and consumer protection into the network going forward. this is opportune timing before we think of new issues when we have a new legacy problem except with new technology. so briefly i want to look at the telephone world where through the eyes of the robocaller. what made this opportunity so enticing? steve alluded already to some of those aspects. i'll try to delve into that more deeply. a reaction when i talk to people about robocalling and in slightly related problem, sms spam, well, various companies that provide e-mail services have at least made e-mail spam more bearable. it is still a nuisance but we can deal with it but it has decreased if anything in volume. why can't we use the same technologies to deal with

robo calls? then i will i address what individuals and consumers can do. i give away the punch line, not a whole lot. given that what can we collectively as industry, as policymakers, as technology developers do so that consumers have a fighting chance to deal with robocalls and law enforcement does as well. let us walk through in a little bit of more detail into the ecosystem at now enables as combination of technologies, the modern robocall. we have now essentially three actors that may well be one company and one organization, or in many cases for both technical and, let's just say law enforcement reason, making them harder to catch, three different entities that have created a whole economic

environment to enable robocalls, selling services to each other. so it clearly is for the telemarketer itself that actually wants to peddle good or services, worthless, however worthless they may be, then there is an entity in the bottom left, the qualifier, that actually picks out the marks for that particular service, qualifies customers to make sure that they're actually are real people as opposed to machines of various sorts, and they in turn are fed by auto dialers that simply obtain lists of numbers, maybe just randomly dialed or, from lists, that have particular qualification, say seniors or others that may list people that have financial difficulties, whatever the case may be, that are then passed onto the qualifier. in particular, that allows

to minimize the costs, the labor costs, to the telemarketer because by the time the call reaches a live human agent or some proctor & gamble mace -- approximation, named rachel. not an endsing machine but qualified to some extent that they're willing to at least listen to a pitch. those entities leverage the ability to access voice over ip services. the two advantages that they offer are distance and sensitivity. you can be anywhere in particular outside the jurisdiction where you might face prosecution and you can do that at very low costs so even if the success rate of calls is very low, you still have a viable business model, which is, indeed very similar to the spam model, even only one in a million spam messages yields a

supplement sale, you still can make some money out of that. the same is not true for telephone services. as steve pointed out that business model just didn't work if you had to pay a few dollars even for the initial few seconds of a call. and in particular, as i will try to explain in more detail shortly voice over ip makes it much easier to hide the true identity of a call and insert caller identity information of somebody else or even obscure our origin with no particular intent to hide behind somebody else. simply to make all calls appear to come from different numbers or you can not bloke those easily or even more nefariously, pretend to be an organization that the caller, callee trusts, bank, government agency, social security administration, doctors office or other entity call person is more likely to

both pick up the phone at least believe initially the sales pitch. then goes through a variety of telephone carriers that often have a very tenuous relationship with each other in the sense that the first one may not know who the last one is through various schemes such as lease call outing that is currently used where there is much more complicated business relationship between entities, compared to what it used to be 10 and 20 years ago when you had a local exchange carrier, long distance carrier and another local exchange carrier and all of those carriers were fortune 100 companies and were well-known. now you have thousands of small companies all over the globe. . .

>> we have a number of suppliers and components, voice recording services to be usedded to record

responses so you don't even need marketing game -- don't even need a live person, just somebody sounds sufficiently similar to one. you need a provider of caller ids, have access to numbers and the ability to identify numbers not likely to be blocked. you also have an interesting component here that most of us are not familiar with, namely, the number of data base providers that map telephone numbers to names in the so-called data base providers taking a ten-digit telephone number in the u.s. and provide the name provided by the customer to other entities in the chape. they also have a manual relationship in the sense they are paid by dip in the service. this has flawed potential. for example, that data base can be used to uncloak numbers of a

caller that would not wish to reveal his or her identity. the carrier receives calls unwittingly, but they do have a somewhat of a financial incentive because they get paid for terminating the calls, and there's the outer dialogue obviously. in summary, we have, i believe, three key components that makes robo calling particularly attractive now and increasingly so, not just cheap transport and switching, the ability to spoof numbers, and because of the ability to move internationally to utilize cheap labor where labor is necessary at all, much of its obviously automated. those three things are what makes robo calling scalable than the old boiler room ever was. there's also a law enforcement

problem, not quite sure if it's the best analogy, but you can think of a relative distribution capability between the bad guys and the sheriff in town as one between the one which has a printing press can stamp out the illegal materials and the sheriff that has to issue and fax individual subpoenas one carrier at a time laboriously and manually tracing the call back to an origin in a far away place they may not reach. here, currently, it's not just a consumer problem, but there's also a law enforcement problem in the sense that the automation has been all on the side of the bad guys and law enforcement, because of necessity and history and lack of coordination in some cases operates in the analog world often literally making it

also much more difficult to put a stop to that. an important facet that changed making the problem harder from a consumer perspective and a law enforcement perspective is that in the old world, as steve pointed out, you had one device, one number, and there was just no way that the customer could even change what the number was. there was no setting at the bottom of the black telephone where you could set your own number. there was a small number of physically present local exchange carriers. they had facilities that you could identify. you have programmable devices that can set their own number. you have a number of entities that essentially blurs the distinction between customer equipment, private branch exchanges, pbx's and public switches, essentially now the same software so a carrier can

no longer know if they are a customer, entitled to use a small number of assigned telephone numbers or a wholesalers that serves a number of other providers and can obviously transport any number. you only need one bad apple or one company that is less than interested in resolving these issues and you have a problem. nobody down chain can actually know whether this is legitimate call number or not. let's look at e-mail for a moment. we've had, and still to some extent do, a spam problem, and, indeed, vast ma majority of e-ml you never see are all spam, but we have at least used a number of techniques to greatly reduce the amount of spam that reaches consumers. we have a number of -- unfortunately, many of the

techniques are currently not applicable to robo calls. while some of us provide lessons, others, unfortunately, not as acceptable to that space. the name space that we have for e-mail is essentially infinite. you can have any name, any inclination about so guessing e-mail addresses is much harder compared to phone numbers where there's a fairly small smie, you can, indeed, dial every number in the u.s.. you can't dial every possible e-mail address. you generally have to find it somewhere that's public. that protects a fair number of people that don't have publicly available e-mail addresses. particularly important is an e-mail most inspect content and look for signs of money and body parts people might want to extend and that is less possible

in phone calls. we don't want someone to monitor the call, and, indeed, it's not possible because by the time the call reached me, most of the damage in terms of my dinner being interrupted was already done. content inspection is not a viable option. we have an e-mail, two addresses that we can use for filtering. the network address, vip address, and the e-mail address. the e-mail address is like the telephone number, relatively easily spoofble. it's harder now, but it's something many bad actors can spoof. the ip address, however, at least if one of the delivery vehicles along the path is not spoofable because you have to seemed -- send it back to the address. based on ip address filtering allowing to exclude entities

that are never supposed to send e-mail to begin with. for phone numbers, as i said, relatively easily spoofable now and you don't have that luxury. delivery that we have in e-mail is filtered by all kinds of providers, both your e-mail provider as well as possibly third parties -- block list, spam house, standards like spf and dcam providing a level of attribution of e-mail addresses, origins. however, in the phone world, we have, and for very good reasons, the opposite. there is a strong preference to put is mightily that if you get a phone call, you better deliver it regardless if there's suspicious that it's not a desired call by the recipient. you can't block phone calls intentionally. that would get you into deep

trouble with my agency. we have delivery traces in e-mail. they are not always completely true, but they can be partially fake, but a good path of the good guy part of the path we know where the e-mail came from. that often helps in identifying sources of e-mail. in phone calls currently tracing back calls provider by provider is essentially manual which makes it not scalable. we can't automate that on a number of calls to see where they are all coming from. we can't do that for most of the calls, but that's only starting to do, and with technology so-called border control, there's skew of that. in e-mail, limited use addresses. you can give e-mails to people you'd rather not be spammed or make up addresses. providers allow you to make up addresses, your name plus a tag only you know and only give out

to certain individuals, and that, a, tells you this is somebody that you permly -- personally contacted, and, b, if someone unwanted use that address, you know where it leaked and which mailing list or which web page got that number two somebody you didn't want it. that's certainly currently not feasible. e-mail has own issues, consent based system and capture a system where you have to type in some scribbly things on the screen to show proof you're human. that's not feasible in the telephone system at least as currently constituted. what can consumers do? unfortunately, and i won't walk you through all the options, you can do that easily for your own amusement. there is really not much you can do because basic problem is you don't know where the call really came from. it will also come from a

different telephone number. the next time the same caller call, and if you press whatever button they offer to actually get out of it, what it means really is you just qualified yourself more so for the next call. about the only viable option that you do have and consumers do have is to file a complaint with donotcall.gov providing more data and input to law enforcement and other mechanisms we might end up with. what can we do in the future going forward? as i said, we are part of a major transition. many of us working in the industry have essentially replaced analog and circuit switch system with an all ip packets public switch telephone network. first thing we need, and we'll get into that later in the day, is trustable phone numbers. we simply have to have the ability that when i get a phone

number, i have to know whether the phone number is verified or not. looking back on the web, initially e-commerce could only take off when you had web pages that were encrypted and authenticated. the lock or green bar indications. they are not perfect, but certainly, we would have a larger problem today if we didn't have those crypted validations. blackless and whiteless depend on trackable numbers and the ability of third parties that i, as a consumer, trust as a trusted number otherwise anybody and everybody uses numbers i likely will have to let through and will accidently block important phone calls. we can do that, and i won't go through the technical mechanisms here, but it's meant to trace calls in the voice ip environment much better than in

the circuit environment where you adopt have vizzability into the -- visibility, and now we can actually do that. we can trace, if we encourage and enforce that ability to get calls all the way back to the origin if it is a place of ip, and, indeed, one could envision automating the process of legally obtaining trace back information for authorized -- with an authorized subpoena that's essentially routes back to the call origin all automated with crypted validation. that would even scale us between the bad guys that automate and the law enforcement that's operating in a manual world. when we conclude that we have a situation that voip gives all the advantages that consumers enjoy, to namely low cost, sensitivity, programmable

features, helps global calls possibly even more so. we currently have, unfortunately, very limited consumer remedies because of the limited advantage taj point that -- vantage point that consumers have, and the point they have don't allow them to block or deal with numbers, global calls any stashly. because we have a manual law enforcement world, but targets that move, shift around, use an ever-shifting change of characters and smo -- and suppliers are transnational. thus, going forward, we have to address both facets having better ability of all parties, providers, third parties providing consumer oriented services wells the consumers themselves to have access to trustable telephone number, and we need to have the ability of law enforcement with much less effort to reach back to the

entities that actually perpetrate robo calls. >> so we can take questions now, and if you have questions in the audience, raise your card, and questions from the internet should be coming up to me. the first question is focusing on what gives you hope we can deal with the illegal robo call situation, and the subset of that is that some consumers trust their land lines and are sticking with them for right now, and so i was wondering is there anything that gives you hope that you can find a solution that works for those people in the shorter term also thinking about these, you know, security by design issues that you mentioned? >> steve?

>> i'll start with the second part of this with people wanting to stick with land lines. no one's beginning to flash cut the phone system overnight from today's public switch telephone network to an ip package network. it's going to evolve, and changes happen initially at the back end. your phone switch, you may retain the land line, but local company will be replaced by an ip switch with a crypted indication that henning talked about to trace it back meaning the caller id display you get will be far more reliable and trustworthy and far more ability to trace it back even if you don't do anything. as you upgrade, you can get more information delivered directly and more enhappensed services, but a lot of, you know, telephones made in the 1920s and

30s still work on today's telephone networks, remarkable. that's not true for tremendously much longer, but it will be true for a fair number of years more, and, yeah, a lot of change happens under the hood and you don't have to worry about it. >> i think first of all i should say whether land line or cell phone, you're just as likely to be a victim of robo calls. that, unfortunately, in and of itself does not protect you, but there is some hope beyond the items steve mentioned in the sense that for reasons completely up related to robo calls, the federal community cation -- communication commission indicated that cell phone carriers do much better job of passing on valid and signaling a number of information. this has to do with what's known as intercarrier compensation,

universal service fund, among other reasons, and that may well also be helpful in some circumstances to provide more traceable information, even existing systems simply because many of the smaller actors those are the ones that generally for a variety of reasons unconnected to today's topic, have incentives to hide originating telephone numbers along the way have other republicans beyond robo calls to deliver better information. that could help in the near term. the longer term, not talking a decade here, but we have the opportunity to do much better with the back end side of the system, and we need to tackle that quickly before there's another legacy problem and one thing that i've learned is if you don't build that in, when you have a chance, there's a reason we see that in the intercarrier compensation regime

saying we have the equipment, can't change it, too exceptive, the manufacturing no longer exists, we can't upgrade it. we need to do that before we get into that situation again. >> can you talk about the steps to do that? how to build it? >> in general, we have to have, i believe -- it's a two-part problem. right now, they can't prove they are legitimate holler of the telephone number. nip here registered a domain name with a so -- certificate with a domain name,ing, suspecting you have. it's not -- it's a national security level secure, but keeps out many of the bad guys in the sense of pretending to own a

domain name that they don't. we can't do the same thing today with telephone numbers. we're trying to get to the model as part of a process i, at the fcc, to see if we can get to a model where entities are entitled to telephone numbers, have a means of proving that to upstream and downstream entities when they place a call. that requires a number of crypting mechanisms available, but not widely deployed at the moment. tried industry cooperation. >> there's more security mechanisms that have been designed for voice over write not widely use, but could be. one reason they'll come into some use is unlike e-mail, phone companies like to get paid for the service so you're running a voice overweight ip company, and you want to make sure you're getting paid. just knowing who sent, who made

the call alone is not enough unless they are trying to impersonate someone well known like the social security administration. i get a lot of phone calls from people i've never heard it. awe thentyically this number, being stooped, makes no difference, it's someone i never heard it. yes, even from countries that export bank accounts, but the phone companiments to get paid, and there's -- company wants to get paid, and there's techniques that allow you to trace it back certainty to the originating phone company saying, hey, you're responsible for this, stop it. much better than with can even do with e-mail today. >> good. i have two questions here that deal with challenges, and i'll tell you what both of them are, and they might relate to each other. one is how do you protect consumers against robo calls while allowing automatic information calls consumers need like school closings, flight changes, package delivery? a different question is in an

era of authentication and traceback, how do you ensure consumer and civil privacy? >> second is there are mechanisms to be used. i won't -- i don't dare go into details now, but you can think of the caller's phone number as being, say, in a sealed envelope, and it's only unsealed with the appropriate court order, possibly using information not even known to the phone companies themselves. different mechanisms you can use. i have to get three parties to agree to unseal this. you know, in order to do it. it's not going to help in the totalitarian regime, but it helps in a place where there's the rule of law. >> to the first one, it's a very important part namely that unless we stop illegal robo calls, all the desirable and necessary means of mass notification also fall by the wayside because people no longer

pick up the phone when they don't recognize the number or we will end up with techniques, filtering techniques with a difficult time distinguishing between a school closing call or other reverse 9-1-1 systems that are very popular and life saving and other service calls. >> one more point on that. in security, the difference between authentication like your password and what you can do once you proved identity, the issue of the legitimate robo caller is awe thept cation. they are allowed to make the calls. you can have agencies registering with whomever saying i wish to be qualified to make the calls urn the following sets of rules, ect., ect., and they will get credentials letting them tell the phone network they

are qualified, and they can be revoked if they are violating the laws and regulations. this can be done. >> once you can identify them, think of bonding and other techniques we have in a private and the public side. imagine you have your own service that a third party provides, and they would, as has happened, not terribly successfully in some cases, for e-mail, legitimate mass senors, identifiable, and conform to agreed upon codes of conduct. i can, as a consumer, decide which ones of those i want to do. also, it's much easier than when i sign up for these type of services because that's often what i do in many cases thinking of the airline or school district. you sign up for thesed ahead of time. you can then add those just by mechanical things happening in the background to a white list, and so even without government

dimension, there could be ways to fa till at a -- facilitate such things as long as there's thrustble authentication. >> this is a question we received in similar form from two different people. can you elaborate as to why a consumer receives more robo calls if they press one or another number to try to determine the identity of a robo caller. >> one, i'm guessing, robo call psychologist in the room here, but my guess is they found generally speaking that indicates the person is, a, a real person opposed to some answering machine or maybe in an office or somebody, and maybe somebody's who's naive enough to believe it makes a difference. that could be a qualifying characteristic as well. i don't know if anybody has published a study on why that is, but the general anticipation is that it indicates you are

willing to listen to those to the end of that opposed to hanging up when rachel introduces herself. >> great. we have a couple questions from in the room and e-mail that relate very much to other panels coming up in the day. i'll hold the questions for the moderator of those panel. will the power points be available today? the answer is yes, they will be posted online for access to them. some of the information graphics that were used will be available for people in the room today outside on the table. with that, i'm going to turn it over to our next panel. first of all, i want to thank the chief technology officers. [applause] and i will turn it over to my colleague robert anguizola to

introduce the next panel. >> you guys can come on up. good morning, i'm robert anguizola with the ftc division of marketing practices. in case you don't know, we handle the policy work and enforcement around the do not call list and the tsr provisions that prohibit illegal robo calls. it's my pleasure this morning to introduce our industry panel, representatives of the telecommunications industry kind enough to share their challenges dealing with robo calls, and

hopefully we'll be able to provide ideas for a path forward. our first panelist is cell phone rupy, senior directer of policy for u.s. telecom. u.s. telecom is the broadband association. it is the premier trade association representing service providers and suppliers for the telecom industry. next to him is david diggs, haven't of wireless internet development for ctia. that is the wireless association, and he represents the wireless communications industry. our third panelist is brad herrmann, founder and president of call-em-all, a company that offers automated dialing services, and so we have someone that's actually responsible for placing some robo calls, and

he's going to talk about how some are legitimate -- [laughter] and hopefully his company's not making any of the illegal ones. without further adieu, i present our panelists, thank you. >> okay. thank you roberto for that introduction, and thank you, everyone, for being here today, and i will just open up -- there we go. i'll just open up with a few points. i'm kevin rupy with u.s. telecom, and i want to mention four things. i want to thank the ftc for having this important panel today, and we're thrilled to be a part of it. number two -- we'll leave the program at this point for what is expected to be a brief pro forma session of the u.s. senate, and we'll return to the discussion on robo

call right after the senate session. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c, october 19, 2012. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable jim webb,a senator from the commonwealth of virginia, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: daniel k. inouye, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 1:00 p.m.

that i would like to you to take away from the slide. the circuit switched network, this original phone network was

a closed system meaning voice services were generally provided by local exchange carriers or long distance carriers, and then when we had the passage of 96 act, we had the introduction of competitive local exchange carriers who were also connected to the network at both the local and long-distance level, and then we brought in wireless with the added mobility. but the key point here that i want folks to take away is that it was a closed system with a very finite number of voice providers. the second thing you can take away from this slide is that at the time these companies were providing what's called plain old telephone service, pots. there wasn't internet involved in this traditional circuit switched network. but as stevan mentioned, these

networks are in evolving and changing, and what we've got now today is basically this, okay? we no longer have this sort of finite universe of voice providers. we actually have a myriad of companies with diverse backgrounds providing voice services so in addition to lecs we of the voice-over internet providers, over the top we have autodialer companies, just the sort of vast ecosystem whereby voice services are delivered over the network, and the key thing to remember here as a was raised on the last panel, the pstn is still out there but it's just been kind of

subsumed by the internet if you will, and what that means is that whether a company is a circuit switched company if you will or an internet based company, that voice service can transit either through the internet and a gateway to the pstn command can connect to the pstn that can get to the consumer and i put that autodialer company up to show that half. that voice path with this from a web based audio dialer or it can go through kind of a pstn. so, with that, when you talk about the stakeholders and the robocall environment i'm not going to go through this in great detail. but as i was talking with some

folks earlier, there's a lot of stakeholders out here. we have a voice, isp come the robocall customers, the autodialer companies. and i would note that there are subsets. so even with autodialer companies there are companies that just do software development, some manufacture equipment. others sort of provide this bundled service to consumers, and as you can see anybody from automobile shops. but there is a lot of stakeholders in this robocall environment. so, with that, what are we talking about when we talk about robocalls? i kind of like to think about it in sort of a traffic light and algae, okay, and green, yellow and red. i think it's a great brad is here to talk about the call

model because it think it's important for consumers to understand that there are a lot of legitimate companies, and in fact robocalls that come to consumers. if you work from sort of left to right on the slide, reflecting all mass calling the events there are many that fall into the green category and these are important and things like school closings, push 911 calls, weather alerts and such. important call that can be accomplished through the robocall technology. we have that sort of middle area practical and legal automated calls so these can be political messages. i'm getting called by romney and obama. it's that time of year. surveys, utility call service reminders, these are practical and legal and then you get

militias and illegal, phishing calls, a new sense, these are where the bad actors fall and please, keep in mind in all three of the categories not an exhaustive list, not an exhaustive list. this is one important way to sort of bring all of this together. my previous slides and the last slides. we need to understand the different perspectives so it's what consumers see and what the service providers see. consumers are seeing all these different types of robocalls and the understand what they are getting. my kid's school is closed. johnny has his dentist appointment tomorrow, can't forget that. rachel from cardholder services.

so they are in that position to see and understand which robocalls they are getting. our member companies operate network operations centers and what they see is a mass calling event. they can't delve into what specific type of call that is. all they are seeing is basically a massive spike in traffic and there are certain characteristics involved in the mass calling events. they are highly localized said they will be in the central areas a fairfax virginia. they are tremendously high volume. they are extremely brief, lasting a matter of minutes, and there is absolutely no advance warning on these calls, so basically a mass of the incident in a brief period of time and then it's over and it's done. it's an important thing to understand sort of perspectives.

that being said, i do not want to imply to our member companies are passive observers to the incident because that is not the case. there is a lot that they are doing when these incidents occur and as a was noted on the previous panel there are some limitations. suggest an example post even a lot of the carrier's will reconstruct the event and investigate so if they receive a call from multiple consumers saying rachel just called me, that's an indication that we've got to look and see what we can figure out here. so through these network operations centers, they are doing things like traffic data for an six, mass calling investigations. if the event warrants come oftentimes carriers will

initiate legal action at the federal level. that actually says state but it's at the federal level. the work with law enforcement to pursue some of the bad actors through the subpoena process and as was mentioned earlier another important thing these carriers are doing they are working in standard setting groups and the best practice groups like the alliance for telecommunications industry solutions coming in the these are basically where the industry stakeholders come together and figure out best practices, procedures and standards whereby we can find the consumer centric solutions to some of these robocall issues. last but not least, there is legal limitations and terms as was mentioned on the previous panel in terms of the inter carrier -- interconnection obligations, privacy plays a

huge role in this. and then last but not least, there is a technological arms race component to this issue. it can be like a game of whack-a-mole. that's it for me and i am happy to turn it over. >> all right. thank you. as noted, i am david, ctia why your list trade association and we represent carriers and infrastructure providers and other suppliers. so, the odds are that you're wireless carrier is a member of our organization. on that note, the first presentation there was some discussion around wireless carriers like to get paid so feel free to turn your ringer up

to a loud. i don't want to stand in front between you and our member companies. so you get amnesty. [laughter] i do want to cover a couple of points, just to in particular. i want to point out that while your list is different from the land line environment on a couple of reasons, and in particular with respect to the issue of who is allowed to call a lawyer list of life's? it's important to understand the historical and to a certain extent current distinction between the land line and mobile pricing regimes. it doesn't cost a consumer anything to answer the phone in the kitchen that is likely that model is referred to as calling party so if i want to call you at your home than i pay the freight on that. on the other hand, the white airless industry initially evolves with a charge from any

calvo you got on the wireless device. so while there are trials of the base if you hit the send button to send a call the meter was running on that. for that reason, the telephone consumer protection act of 1991 specifically put in provisions to forbid robocalls to mobile devices. so, as someone that lives in virginia, i will second of the torrent of calls to the home phone on a swing state. but i'm not getting those on my mobile device because the ethical robocall organizations are respecting that. there are those only to car felch coming emergency purposes and with the prior express consent of the called party. there is a debate about what constitutes but in general it has been less of an issue for

mobile customers and for land line subscribers. i've already spoken to the exemption for political or charitable does not exist for mobile. so i want to talk and basically echo of the theme that you already heard a couple of points on. i would speak about this in terms of the historic telco land line to a large extent the lanham line operators also provide your mobile service. the cultural differences between that and some of these internet service providers there's over a century of work that's been done in the regulatory arena with the traditional telephone companies

around the consumer proprietary network information around pii. all of these things. if you reach the point is in the dna of these historical your traditional operators to protect at all costs the traffic they carry from point a to point b. it is sacrosanct with a net. the calls are transmitted from point a to be. we don't listen to them. we don't attend text to them and stick the ads in them. it was a key provision of the way this works. there are innovative services that come from the new innovators and other internet service providers that say wait a minute maybe there's a different way to do this. there's probably the market for something if i can get the service for free i would be willing to be tolerant of some of their services and that are

mixed in. there are services that will inspect the traffic be that a voice or text. that's fine. but a difference and problem that we are struggling with in some regards is looks like a duck and? like a dhaka and has a phone number that looks familiar to me but there is something different going on. how do we notify consumers that this is not your father's telephone call that this could be something very different and how we draw the distinction is on some of that? to look completely the same. the other issue that you heard a loaded to owls well, in the past there was a trusted closed network of those that could provide telephone services. that is no longer the case. you get into this 6 degrees of kevin bacon game finding out

they sold the number to someone else that you get three to 4 degrees of separation, and the mystery to the traditional operators has been i don't know who i am trading traffic with. this isn't at the consumer level, this is the operator to operator and there are numerous and as far as i can tell competing solutions for identifying who is a few wealthy owner of the telephone number. we talked about that earlier that there is in fact a finite list of telephone numbers in the u.s.. it's the north american numbering plan. they are ten digits. you're all familiar with them. that is a finite universe and as administered by an incredibly complex -- i'm not going to talk to the slide other than put it up here and say this. we spent about a half an hour on with the dotted line meant.

this is the north american numbering council and the north american portability number portability etc. so, again, that is just there to illustrate that it is a very complex question as to who it is that can draw down phone numbers and how those are identified. so, i'm going to go backwards here. the only other point and you will hear this again is about because of -- and i think the next speaker is going to come up here and hit this it used to be that it was pretty hard to provisioning phone number. they used to be you had to go through a telephone company to do that. that is no longer the case so a lot of the blocking technologies are ineffective with the telephone numbers because i can change it and will cost a lot of money. i can speak for it, so it is a potential source of pain for consumers and for the operators

alike. i don't have anything else, so i will turnover at this point to brad herman. >> good morning. my name is brad her men. i am the founder and president of call them all. we are in automated calling company. so, the first thing i want to get out of the way is i nor anyone from my organization is rachel from card services. [laughter] we make very few political calls. you might be surprised to hear that you get so what i want to do first is just give you a few more examples of the school closings for what a legitimate automated calling company does. we send out messages on behalf of soccer and football leagues

that practices are closed because fields or closed. we certainly do school closings and i could go on for days with examples but maybe an apartment complex calling all of the residence to let them know that tomorrow water is going to be shut off between ten and noon, and these are examples -- here is one of a business example you may have a manufacturing facility with a thousand employees working three shifts and there's a problem on the second shift and you need to notify everybody or the organization needs to notify their employees we are starting late on the third shift today or we are running an extra shift on saturday if you want to work overtime come on in and work. and there are thousands and thousands more examples like this. and the one thing they all have in common i believe is that when people get these messages, like if you just get the message that the soccer games were cancelled for tomorrow, you don't usually hang up and go with a terrible robocall that was. you don't even consider, i don't think most people use the word robocall to describe that col. but as we see with

infrastructure at the end of the day it is the same thing. that's why i am here today. and i've been asked to walk through two scenarios for you. the first 1i will walk through is what these big network diagrams that kevin and stevan have walked through, what they mean to me. it's just one little block on the diagram, and thankfully it is a lot simpler. and then what do we do to stop the unwanted robocalls as the end point where people are entering into this network? so we will start walking through that. the first example is what i call old school robocalling. let's consider someone that wants to call a million workable million people. in the old school robocalling scenario, it was a much more permanent structure that you had to set up. so, you were going to be investing significant amounts of capital into a specialized hardware and equipment.

you were then going to need -- you certainly can't just plug a few phone lines into the back of it. it would take weeks. so you had to order ads3 or something like that with a lot of sports or lines if you will to come in there. this takes 60 to 90 days to set up and you come with multi-year contract and a thousand dollars, you know, a month commitment to use that, so it wasn't the kind of thing you just set up with a bunch of some wanted calls and then ran away. it was something bigger than that. and what we have seen moving forward is this robocalling. what that has done is made is a you don't really require special equipment. you need a big fat internet connection you can get today in a few days. this isn't like an internet connection at home, this is something bigger than that but it's something you acquired in a few days and you also see the programming skills required become a little bit easier.

you're not looking for a program that tells specific hardware or software that specialized for the hardware that you're using it becomes a little more generic. you know you're doing that it becomes easier and the biggest thing is the lead time goes on today's in this scenario. then you take a company like mine and that wraps that service up into what we see cloud service all the time and we use them for many different things. and we wrap it up and our clients can now use an api to service calls. if you went down the street to any of the universities and a grab the young computer science guys they can say i need to make a million calls and whether you had to list a million members allowed them to generate them come he's going to say no problem, show me the epi and i can start calling these. so we have watched the initial capital requirement go from a very significant and a big investment all the way down to

basically nothing as long as you can afford the permanent rate for the calls. the software development time has gone down to hours and that's the situation where we are today, and that's what it means to someone on the end that wants to make these kind of calls with the way the infrastructure has evolved. so, you know, there are a few things that stayed the same though. the first is you have to have a way to drop the calls on to the network. the other thing is you're going to encourage cost to all of the blocks and charts that we have seen our businesses that need to get their cut so it hasn't gone down. what changes is the up-front capital requirements and the up-front time requirements. so now that it is as easy what i would like to do is tell you that what a company like mine does to try to prevent these calls from getting on the network and what i'm showing you today is a subset of what we

really do. i don't want to spell it out because there are people out there. these illegal guys are actually very smart and are probably listening some going to give you a little bit of what we do and we say that this kind of common sense. but it's hard work and there's a lot of programming that went in behind it and we played probably -- there was a point early on we went through probably a 12-month cat and mouse game that was using the service to make in many cases they wanted to call hundreds of thousands or millions of people coming and we have done a pretty good job of blocking them out of it to block them out we have empowered employees that listen to messages before we approve them to go out. that sounds pretty simple and a lot of these messages or the agreement messages and the red light green light. they are green examples. it's an emergency that is a

university to stay indoors or something like that. and then there is a lot in the yellow area, too. these are messages like i walked through with you and our employees listen to them and quite frankly i tell my employees the underlining thing is we call people who want to be called. and you can tell when just by listening to one of these messages whether it sounds just fine or not. if it is pastore jones and the message is this is pastore jones reminding everybody we have three services easter sunday at nine, ten and 11 instead of the normal service at 8:30 and 9:30. that's easy let's have that call out. it's going out as a congregation. and there's a lot more that are in the red and what we find in the red dhaka categorize them in two ways. one, they are the obvious phishers a call them spam but it's obvious garbage and we get that out right away and they stick out like a sore thumb.

but we also filter out a lot of the unintentional on wanted robocalls. a small-business owner that has his customers' phone numbers and he feels he has the right because they are his customers to call them because they've done business with him, and what we have to do is explain no, you can't do that. they have to have given written permission to receive promotional messages from you. we are sorry and they get mad at us a lot and get upset because revenue but we block a lot of these to every day. we are out there having to educate people what they can and can't do. so, that's it. and another way is simply just asking questions. where did you get these phone numbers from? people either have a good answer, this is mike congregation with these are all the students in my school. or it becomes obvious. now, obviously kevin's organization and david's

organizations can't do this with their customers, but we can. it's what we do to try to stay on the up and up. the other thing is a lot of times because you can't spoof the caller id and we do put our clients caller id on the call because of a school was calling no one wants to see a message from call-em-all, a lot to see the school was calling. so if it is a dead-end or nobody takes it up is just one more red flag we can use to shut these people down. with each of our clients, we maintain an opt out list so they all have their own we call the client specific do-not-call list. what we can then do is monitor the opt out across the range of clients. we've got 30,000, tens of thousands using our service, therefore we kind of have an idea what the norms are coming and we can watch when we make a broadcast on behalf of a client if they have a higher than normal out lawyer in terms of the number of people would opt

out that is a red flag that says look at what the client is doing. why these people are rejecting it and let's get the traffic off of our service. so, that's sort of some highlights of what we are doing among other things to try to keep people off, keep these robocalls off of your cell phone and your home phone. but what i'm talking about, i am just one organization and this is just my viewpoint and what we have done. but we have to remember i think the biggest violator, and i would assume rachel from card member services is not coming through to a company like mine. these are people that don't really care about law and they are willing to do whatever. they are basically doing what ever they want to do. as we have to be careful as we are talking about these solutions not to throw the baby out with the bath water if you will. we can have all kinds of regulations and mandates all of these things the we do to every company we are aware of the fact

is i don't think that would stop rachel from cardmember services because that company or the individual organization doesn't care to follow the law. that is one of the big reasons i'm here is to try to represent the good things that happening within this industry. so, thanks for your time. robert? >> thank you so much. our first question is you have posed a lot of challenges. what do you think can be done to bring down the number of bad robocalls that are brought barraging consumers? >> i think -- i don't think there is any single solution to the issue. i think when you look at a lot of these issues that are out there today such as robocalls,

you have to get it kind of holistically. i think one aspect of this, consumer education is critically important, and i know the ftc has done a lot of great work on that and of member companies are doing a lot of great work on that. and i think it's important for consumers to understand that while there may not be perfect tools out there, there are things they can do to limit the impact of the calls, so as an example, use caller id. if you don't recognize the phone number, don't pick up the phone. don't engage them and certainly don't press one or two. so i think that's important. and then the last two things that i would mention to address this issue i think targeted enforcement against some of these bad actors that's always a

great thing to go after. and then third, i think things like this, things like ads our members are involved with, working collectively with all the stakeholders on this issue to try to find solutions, because i think that brad is right. it's not going to go away and, as we've got to kind of work together collectively to address the issue as best we can estimate i was excited to year. i think was stevan before hand, and having talked about authenticating the users on the initiation of the calls. and that's the kind of thing that i would be the first one standing in line. authenticate me. check me out. go, and we want to represent our people was doing the right thing. and that's exciting to me, and hearing the future of where things are going. as far as where individuals

though an individual consumer hearing from me we are maintaining a client do-not-call list and you were hearing advice not just to opt out but hang up. i would educate the consumer to do what i would do and listen to read it is an obvious ridiculous, if it is rachel from cardmember services, that is ridiculous. hang up immediately. if it is your school calling and you check your e-mail every five minutes or try to go to the website and you don't want them to call you, of doubt. no problem. so, you kind of have to use a little intuition on these calls to determine whether this is a legitimate call you care not to receive opt out. it's obvious garbage, just hang up. >> i must be the only guy in the room that hasn't gotten a call from rachel. [laughter]

faith see my credit report i suppose. listen, i, too, in the earlier discussion some of the solution will come in the technological form of fame on repudiate double foley authenticating identifier so that i mentioned in my portion of this that part of the challenge is identifying as an operator who is sending me this traffic and that is often difficult to determine and there are i would spare you, but the last there are groups like addis and others so finding a way as an operator when i am receiving traffic from some organizations that if it does go wrote in some way that i have a path to go back to that operator and say

you have a problem here. >> the next question comes from the audience, and it's directed to the industry representatives. what kind of risk is associated with the network congestion caused by robocalls? >> it can be significant. in fact, we do have these instances mass calling eve ensler and whether they are legal or illegal depending on the volume and on the location of where the call was taking place and the time of day, whatever factors they can have an adverse impact on a network such that a consumer in that area who may be trying to make a call is not able to complete the call because the network capacity is maxed out so it can

be a significant factor where due to the mass calling event some of the carrier's may have a file with the fcc saying we experienced in the event share etc. >> i think if there is network blockage that is blocking the robocall, too these guys are not dopes and they will figure out a rate on their calls the will keep their traffic at or below some threshold the would be problematic to continue to make the calls. they can distribute, again, the internet being everywhere they can drop that down in any number of switches and network. i suspect that because it is a problem for them as well as

consumers, that that is something they seek to mitigate as well. we have not -- even though we are the size of the wireless pipe as it were relative to that of the wireline pipe is a fraction so we as an industry are always very, very concerned about bandwidth and spectrum on those kind of issues. but it is something that has not been a particular played on the wireless industry. >> the next question comes from a listener online. they want you to speak about the economics and the money associated with robocalling and specifically what dipps are and

how they can make money that way. >> there's a lot of different ways that the scholars are making money whether it is through scanning, through the sale of the bogus services and what not and i think what the questioner is referencing there is the identification database, and basically the carriers will maintain a database for the call or write the numbers and when a phone number gets called, that caller identification number gets pushed to the person receiving the call that is why when a call comes to your house you see the caller i.d. number whoever is maintaining that database gets paid for pushing that call to the recipient and the network operator basically

pays that sea. its 700 but when you multiply that times tens of thousands and millions of calls it can add up. so i think that is what they are referring to, and it's one of many ways they are making money. >> does anyone else on the panel one to add to that? so the next question takes us from profits to penalties. should there be higher penalties for the illegal calls and is there some way that we can increase the cost of engaging in the calling? >> i can speak to that. you know, the penalty and a lot of cases with the sec's tcp a incident or $1,500 for an

intentional robocall to someone that shouldn't receive one, and i think those are sufficient enough. i have seen cases where one from call led to a class-action lawsuit that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend only at the end of the day to be disregarded and settled for its repentance. as an autodialer i would assure you that we are -- when i tell you that my employees are -- if you have any doubt, throw it out because the numbers are massive if you think about $500 per from call come and we call and say 10,000 people on a school district, the numbers have become i think kind of silly so certainly i think that penalties are there and sometimes allowing the class-action to be filed on

the simple basis of a phone call or a little much. the penalties are pretty stiff. you could ask the question about is there an effort to an up the enforcement of tcpa violations and that would be desirable to everyone in the space. >> i think we could arrange for that. the next question is directed to call-em-all. as a part of your compliance process, do you keep a blacklist of the ret operators so that they can be recognized and so that you know not to deal with them in the future? >> yes, we do. but the problem is how they are authenticating ourselves with

any e-mail address. so we make them clich and activate by clicking on an e-mail address but it takes you three minutes to set up a new e-mail address for this kind of stuff. there are several other things that they do that indicate to us sort of other red flags that like i said i don't care to go into because i don't want to tell them how to beat us, but we do everything. we send a lot of engineering time putting things in place, you know, sort of a blacklist of e-mail's not to use and a couple other things. >> the rest of the questions that i've got far better directed to the law enforcement panel. so do we have any other questions? >> there's one right here. >> i couldn't get in this room today without a driver's license

and going through a metal detector. just curious what your clients, your customers -- [inaudible] >> so the question was when we have driver's licenses and things to get in the room how do we verify or clients based on an e-mail address only? when they sign up with us there is far more than an e-mail address they provide, and all of that -- they give us a physical address, they have to give us a credit card, so we have as well as their name and we look at all of these things as a whole and listen to their messages and you are looking at their whole body of work but you are looking at all of it. we have screens set up for the staff to use that show all of this at once. they are looking at it and they are all college-educated folks, and looking at it it paints a bigger picture than just the

e-mail address. so my last question -- excuse me, my last answer may not have been clear enough to be in the picture for what we are doing to identify these folks. >> thank you very much. it's time for the break. [applause] we will have more in just a moment. before that though a quick look at some of our other programming coming up on the c-span networks. vice president joe biden is on a campaign through florida.

>> i have to be honest with you. i love these debates. these things are great. i think it's interesting that the president still doesn't have an agenda for the second term. don't you think that it's time for him to finally put together a vision of what he would do in the next four years if he were elected? he's got to come up with that over the weekend because there's only one left on monday. >> let's recap what we learned

last night. the tax plan doesn't add up, the jobs plan doesn't create jobs, the deficit reduction plan ads to the deficit. so everybody here has heard of the new deal, you've heard of the fair deal, the square deal, mitt romney is trying to sell you a sketchy deal. we are not buying it. >> a head of the final debate monday tomorrow night

back now to the federal trade commission for on illegal robocalls. federal law enforcement officials about the laws around the communications and how the public can best handle these types of calls. >> good morning. i'm with the federal trade commission division of marketing practices. it's my honor to moderate the second panel of the morning. and its law enforcement some, some questions have already arisen and it is no surprise whatsoever. a very distinguished set of panelists. my introduction will be brief since you all have biographees.

to my left is the attorney general from the state of indiana, well known as a compassionate consumer advocate. to his immediate left is well maxson the program manager and in his free time he is a staff attorney in the division of marketing practices. to his left is eric bash who i will refer to as an ftc recidivist. he's been in and out of the agency a couple times. now he is associate chief at the fcc's enforcement bureau. we are going to be slightly different format for the panel. what i'm going to do is ask a series of questions and ask each of the panelists to respond to them and i will even preview for you exactly where we are going to go and spend most of our time. we want to lay out the nuts and bolts, what is the state of the law and what are the legal parameters in which robocalls legitimate and illegitimate

operate under. then we will dhaka little bit about complaints and what we see on that front. what we see on that front and then we will spend the bulk of our time talking about the enforcement challenges and what it is we can do about them. let me start off and ask will to kick this off and ask what are the legal parameters that we operate with? says with the robocalls rules. we enforce and then when mr. bash speaks he will talk about the tcpa and there is a

lot of overlap. three basic protections in the telemarketing sales rule that are related but a little bit different. the first one is the national do not call that dates back to 2003 and it's what everyone generally thinks of when they think of the do not call, generally speaking businesses can't make sales calls to consumers whose phone numbers are on the national do not call registry. as you heard that over 200 million to numbers on the registry that includes cell phones and home phones, any phone can be registered, as many as you have and when businesses make sales calls to those numbers, generally speaking those violate the do not call rule so it is an entity specific portion of the rule so even if your number is not on but do-not-call list you can ask a company not to call you again and if they make another seals call to you then that violates the specific portion of the list

and that is true even if you have what they call an established business relationships even if you bought something from a company in the last few months and they try to call you again under the exception to the general rule you can tell them don't call me again and if they do that would be a violation of the entity specific role. the third part of that is the robocall which is generally speaking the businesses can't make sales based calls to consumers. those calls are prohibited even if your phone number is not on the national do not call registry. the only exception which i will talk about in the second is the consumer has provided the business with expressed and written permission to the robocall. so the types of calls that are not covered above a telemarketing sales role. they are generally not covered and debt collection calls, generally not covered. customer service and customer satisfaction calls, survey

calls, but only if they don't contain a sales pitch. it's a survey call and it ends up trying to sell a trip or cruise or some sort of product, that's covered against the rules. political calls are not covered under the telemarketing sales rule if they don't include a sales pitch. there's special exceptions in the jurisdiction, and those types of calls are not covered. banks, phone companies, insurance companies, and then there's a separate exception for the calls to deliver a health care message made on behalf of the entity as defined by the privacy rule. so what calls are covered? the vast majority that are part of a campaign or plan to get consumers to purchase a product or service is the most general way to state. so if there is any part of that call that's designed to end up with a consumer purchasing

something, then that call was covered under the do not call rule or the entity specific rule. also includes charitable solicitation calls, the for-profit fund-raiser, the hybrid calls i mentioned in the survey and they pitch it as a political survey and some sort of survey about whatever topics they are interested in and then the ended with some sort of sales pitch and even companies with which you have an established business relationship can't robocall with a sales message. they establish business relationships exception does not apply to robocalls. also, companies that a sister facilitate those that place the calls are also subject to liability. this is the rule what we care about and we are here for today. the telemarketing sales rule prohibits the call that delivers

a pre-recorded message to consumers for a sales call. if it is a fall that falls within the ftc jurisdiction, the only exception is if they have written permission from the consumer if that specific seller and as you can see here there are several requirements for without written permission has to obtain it has to be a clear and conspicuous disclosure as a purpose to authorize the cellar to place the call and it has to come to the koschel the willingness to receive calls on the pre-recorded messages by or on behalf of the specific cellar. it can't be a general i'm agreeing to get calls from anybody and then lots of different telemarketer's all end up calling. that doesn't count. it can't be required as a condition of purchase and but written exception has to -- excuse me that written permission has to include the consumer's telephone number and signature. if they don't have all of this,

it is illegal. >> do you want to pick up on the fcc's viewpoint? >> yeah, just to start at the beginning, the source of the fcc rules come from the act of 1991 which you have heard people refer to this morning, and then the fcc has adopted implementing rules not long after that statute was enacted and the rules have changed somewhat over time in the last 20 years and including the most recent changes that have been. it's to harmonize the rules as closely as possible to the ftc rules and i will get to some

specifics in a minute. one thing to highlight for you at the beginning of is you heard well mentioned a certain entities are not subject to the federal trade commission telemarketing sales role largely because the jurisdiction of the federal trade commission under the telemarketing act with its jurisdiction under the federal trade commission act. the fcc rules are not limited and that raises some of the exemptions that you heard a well refer to those entities are not exempt from the fcc of what i am about to mention. so the general standard and prohibition that emanates from the telephone consumer protection act this codified in section 227 of the communications act is there can be no although donald or prerecorded voice call to an

emergency number or numbers that are designed to -- are basically for an emergency purpose like a doctor's office, law enforcement, that sort of thing so you can't make these calls to emergency numbers or patient rooms in that type of a facility and you cannot make these calls to mobile phone numbers or other numbers for which a consumer might be charged for having received the call and the only exception to those prescriptions that i just identified are if you are making the call for an emergency purpose were you have the prior expressed consent of the call. there's also restrictions on pre-recorded calls to what we call residential lines. let me state of this sort of in

the other way. calls can be initiated to residential phone lines and landlines they are made for an emergency purpose or for a commercial purpose that does not include telemarketing if they are not made for a commercial service if they are made to a person with which a caller has an established business relationship or if they are made by or for a tax-exempt nonprofit. and for those kinds of calls to fit in with the legal requirements that the fcc and forces, it's also the case certain disclosures have to be made to the called party, namely the person that is initiating the call has to identify who they are at the beginning of the call, and during or after the call they have to provide an actual phone number at which they can be reached.

so, just to state these requirements in a different way between landline and mobil, again, you can't make and although diebold or pre-recorded call to a mobile phone number and as it is for an emergency purpose were you have the prior express consent of the called party. and i wanted to mention when a prerecorded political voice call would be okay because that's something that we have heard people refer to this morning and when this can be okay is when they are made to a residential line that can't be made to a wireless phone number unless you have the called party consent and make the required disclosures identity to the caller as well as the telephone number at which the called party can be reached. you have heard me refer to the