{"id":11693,"date":"2008-12-06T14:40:05","date_gmt":"2008-12-06T22:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2008\/12\/06\/11693.html"},"modified":"2008-12-06T14:40:05","modified_gmt":"2008-12-06T22:40:05","slug":"three-hoax-phone-calls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2008\/12\/06\/three-hoax-phone-calls\/","title":{"rendered":"Three hoax phone calls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It seems to me that the prominence of hoax phone calls has been increasing lately, though maybe it's just a fluke.<\/p>\n<p>And they raise the question: how can you tell whether a given call is authentic? Which raises all sorts of related web-of-trust and authentication issues, which resonate with issues in the computer industry as well.<\/p>\n<p>But I'm not gonna go into all that; just noting three calls that caught my attention recently:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A pair of Montreal comedians <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theaustralian.news.com.au\/story\/0,25197,24589705-5013948,00.html\">prank-called Sarah Palin<\/a> in early November, pretending to be French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and broadcast the call live on the radio. (There's an ABC News article that gives a little more info on <a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Politics\/Story?id=6168777&page=1\">how the callers reached Palin<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>About a week ago, during the terror attacks in Mumbai, Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari received a <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB122859535968285621.html?mod=googlenews_wsj\">call allegedly from the Indian foreign minister<\/a> that \"prompted Islamabad to put its air force on high alert before concluding the call was a hoax.\" That <cite>WSJ<\/cite> article adds: \"Pakistan officials provided few details of the call or how they discovered it was a hoax, but said they believed it was real because it showed up on their phones as coming from a number at India's foreign ministry.\"<\/li>\n<li>A few days ago, Florida Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen received a <a href=\"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/html\/politics\/2008471186_call05.html\">call claiming to be from Barack Obama<\/a>. She hung up on the caller, believing it to be a hoax. She then received another call from someone claiming to be Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel; she hung up on him too. It wasn't until she got a call from Rep. Howard Berman, who she apparently knows personally, that she learned that the first two calls had been real. (Another article I saw said that she had Berman tell her an inside joke about a colleague of theirs to prove it was really him.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I think what all this adds up to is that phone pranking is relatively easy and becoming more widespread; that it can potentially have major real-world consequences; that it can be hard to recognize; and that authentication ends up requiring contact with people you know and trust.<\/p>\n<p>From a different angle, I think these incidents suggest that we all need to be careful about believing that unknown callers are who they say they are--but also that sometimes they really are.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems to me that the prominence of hoax phone calls has been increasing lately, though maybe it&#8217;s just a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}