This is how it works in Australia, which means it's a pain for tourists as you need to provide a passport for ID and get it activated, as opposed to just grabbing one at an airport kiosk and being ready to go on your way to the taxi or train like most other places.
mc32•Jun 9, 2026
Don’t eSIMs solve this problem for tourists?
nickphx•Jun 9, 2026
Only if you do not require voice service.
naturalmovement•Jun 9, 2026
Apple — and now Google — have "solved" this problem for the government by removing physical SIM slots in US iPhones.
TylerE•Jun 9, 2026
Thus eSIM
vfclists•Jun 9, 2026
Doesn't an eSIM link the SIM to the phone's IMEI which is usually logged somewhere?
NoMoreNicksLeft•Jun 9, 2026
What problem were they hoping to solve with that legislation?
logicchains•Jun 9, 2026
The problem of citizens having anonymous internet connectivity.
rusk•Jun 9, 2026
The free anonymous internet was only ever a ruse to get people to use it so the CIA could spy on them. DARPA, folks, created a “free as in beer” global surveillance network and we all bought it.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
chopin•Jun 9, 2026
That's an illusion. Two days of location data and you can pin down the owner pretty well.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
stackskipton•Jun 9, 2026
Most of time it's billed as law enforcement fighting tool. If people can't have anonymous cell phones, once you capture one criminal phone number, you can quickly look at who they call and since they can't be burners, you figure out the criminal network.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
naturalmovement•Jun 9, 2026
> like most other places
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
joxdosba•Jun 9, 2026
Huh? At least in Germany, Spain and France all of the smaller shops fill in fake info without even asking.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
naturalmovement•Jun 9, 2026
I wasn't taking blatant fraud into account. I'm sure that's possible everywhere. I'd bet you can buy cigarettes without the tax stamps in the same shop too.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
joxdosba•Jun 9, 2026
Sure, but if you’re a tourist in e.g. Barcelona trying to get a prepaid SIM, odds are the shopkeeper will not ask you for your ID despite being required to.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
lifestyleguru•Jun 9, 2026
Not a good example. In Spain they notoriously demand id/passport and make photo or copy of it, they do it "for the police".
joxdosba•Jun 9, 2026
That’s the legal requirement yes, I’ve never seen a shop insist on it. Most of them have autofill scripts for the KYC forms.
naturalmovement•Jun 9, 2026
Isn't the main topic of discussion here a legal requirement?
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
joxdosba•Jun 9, 2026
I’m just pointing out that in Europe the equivalent legal requirement is widely ignored, the same won’t necessarily repeat in the US, but it might.
naturalmovement•Jun 9, 2026
I would think most tourists would trust a carrier-branded store over Honest Jochen's Tobacco Emporium where you may or may not get a working SIM after paying cash.
joxdosba•Jun 9, 2026
Trust? Sure. They’re still more likely to buy their prepaid SIM from the shop that also sells bongs, they are on every corner after all.
ivanmontillam•Jun 9, 2026
Argentina doesn't also, you can just buy a SIM card off the newsstand.
dgellow•Jun 9, 2026
I mean. It’s the same, you just have to show your passport and fill a form. It takes 1minute to get it done, you can do it on your way to the taxi if you want. Though e-sim are more practical now
mothballed•Jun 9, 2026
I wonder what exactly are they hoping to achieve then? Anything that can be filled out in 1 minute in a taxi can be spoofed with an extra 30 seconds on the dark net buying dark IDs. So this does less than zero for crime, actually encourages more of it, while doing what exactly? It's madness.
nemomarx•Jun 9, 2026
Who says anything about crime? the goal is just so they can associate phone numbers with id cards in some fashion right?
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
voakbasda•Jun 9, 2026
Like so many laws, nothing to do with stopping crime, but an obvious push to strip the populace of its rights.
mothballed•Jun 9, 2026
"Law enforcement" and national security is given as the verbatim headline justification when you reference Australia's Communication and Media Authority[] for rules on ID collection.
Carriers and carriage service providers (CSPs) must help law enforcement and national security agencies.
...
You must verify a customer's identity before you activate a prepaid mobile phone service. You can do this when the customer buys the service or when they try to activate it. The Determination on identity checks for prepaid mobiles lists the ways you can check a customer's identity.
Unfortunately I can't dig up the original debate from 1997 on the Telecommunications Act when the requirement appears to have been introduced. Would be shocked if it did not include similar language from the representatives shilling the requirement, though.
Has this changed recently? I thought I heard about this several years ago, but the last 2-3 times I've visited (in the last couple of years) I've been able to pick up a prepaid SIM from Colesworth without any ID check.
ibejoeb•Jun 9, 2026
It has been like that for at least 8 years, and probably longer. There are still stalls at airports, but you must provide ID.
LawnGnome•Jun 9, 2026
Interesting. Seems like this isn't very consistently enforced, then.
ibejoeb•Jun 9, 2026
You may have bought the sim card but never activated it. It's not the device itself that is restricted, just using it.
garyfirestorm•Jun 9, 2026
Isn’t this already a requirement? Can you really buy a burner phone/sim without providing identifying information?
hstaab•Jun 9, 2026
T-Mobile prepaid accounts for example
olyjohn•Jun 9, 2026
You can just walk in there with cash and walk out with a fully activated SIM without them asking for ID?
dgellow•Jun 9, 2026
Correct
sgt•Jun 9, 2026
Yes, I recall doing that. I'm a foreigner but I was in the US on vacation. Went to T-Mobile, so easy to get a SIM card.
tracedddd•Jun 9, 2026
not at all, it’s easy to buy cash only tracphone, mint, boost, etc. and there are plenty of explicit anonymous providers such as phreeli.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
dgellow•Jun 9, 2026
In the US you can buy a SIM card and activate without providing any information at the airport. At least in NYC. I was really surprised the first time
kgwxd•Jun 9, 2026
Why were you surprised?
ImJamal•Jun 9, 2026
Not who you were responding to, but most of the western world requires IDs already. The US is an outlier on this issue.
kotaKat•Jun 9, 2026
Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
Zigurd•Jun 9, 2026
I used to buy test phones for software testing at a bodega where they had a laundry basket full of phones, and they would sell prepaid SIMs no questions asked.
josefritzishere•Jun 9, 2026
Seems like classic regulatory overreach.
aaomidi•Jun 9, 2026
This is the pathway Iran is using to provide tiered internet btw.
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
standardUser•Jun 9, 2026
The Trump administration has been working overtime trying to build databases of people in this country. Leaving no stone unturned, legal or otherwise. I vaguely remember a time when American conservatives were against precisely this, often as a first principle. Maybe that's just an idealized memory on my part.
kgwxd•Jun 9, 2026
Spoiler: They were never against it, just biding their time.
ethagnawl•Jun 9, 2026
The American conservatives who can afford to be are effectively exempted. When they're not flying around on private jets, the ownership and metadata created by their cars, phones, etc. are obfuscated by layers of shell corporations.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
rirze•Jun 9, 2026
Fundamentally un-American.
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
rockskon•Jun 9, 2026
Well - it's not exactly a surprise that all these non-American countries engage in un-American practices.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
cwillu•Jun 9, 2026
American exceptionalism was always a lie; name an “un-American” practice, and I'll show you a piece of American foreign policy.
brightball•Jun 9, 2026
Violations of the US Bill of Rights.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
mindslight•Jun 9, 2026
A lie, or an ideal to try and live up to, depending on the context. In the context of discussing liberty-destroying privacy invasions it's an ideal, and we should not be so quick to dismiss it.
cucumber3732842•Jun 9, 2026
>Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S.
I need to know whether these other countries are rich western europe before I know whether to agree with you or to cook up some snide rebuttal.
Joking, obviously. And by "joking" I mean mocking a specific type of person and set of beliefs that is who is a) bad b) too common around here.
kgwxd•Jun 9, 2026
> many messaging apps require a phone number
But not all, so what's the actual point?
rirze•Jun 9, 2026
If a messaging app ever gets the attention of government regulators, it must succumb to this verification.
I don't know any way to avoid this.
axus•Jun 9, 2026
Free, anonymous political speech is the bedrock of American freedom. Also, guns
em-bee•Jun 9, 2026
there still are a bunch of viable messaging apps/services that work without a phone number:
matrix, wire, deltachat, threema, maybe jabber/xmpp (depends on their support of encryption). any others?
throwaway27448•Jun 9, 2026
We're already forced into the credit bureaus. Into traffic cameras. Into using credit cards and banks. The idea the state would let us actually say things online anonymously (or to each other) is completely unrealistic: we must be tagged and tracked through our lifecycle.
rusk•Jun 9, 2026
They’ll get around to guns eventually …
greenavocado•Jun 9, 2026
They're already trying to regulate the shape of guns to effectively outlaw everything but the bullet.
rusk•Jun 9, 2026
Hopefully they tax th bejeesus out of bullets too. Who was the comedian “imma gona pop a cap in yo ass, but first imma set up a layaway”
fridder•Jun 9, 2026
Chris Rock. And honestly probably the easiest way for gun control
Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
user3939382•Jun 9, 2026
Open to the possibility that I’m just cynical but my faith is very low that these comment processes are anything more than a regulatory requirement for the illusion of due diligence which legitimizes the actual corporate lobbying and security state actually making the policy.
mothballed•Jun 9, 2026
I'm nearly certain commenting, at least from my monitoring of commenting on ATF rulemaking, achieves the opposite of what the commenters hope.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
pickleglitch•Jun 9, 2026
They require your name and address, so they will have a nice database of anyone who dares voice an objection.
Maybe a way around this is for intermediary companies to own the phone that happens to have service and then lease the phone.
voakbasda•Jun 9, 2026
And with that suggestion, a clause is being added to close that loophole….
giantg2•Jun 9, 2026
So it would be illegal to lend a phone to anyone, even just for one call?
iammrpayments•Jun 9, 2026
Had to buy one of these SMS activation services from a guy in Nigeria using a memecoin because claude decided to ban my account because they didn’t like my credit card brand and Claude requires sms activation for new accounts.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
giancarlostoro•Jun 9, 2026
I wish they would kill spam calling and texting instead.
dawnerd•Jun 9, 2026
Been getting two a day, clearly some ai voice robo call. We have all this technology yet these spam calls still persist.
mrsssnake•Jun 9, 2026
Regardless of this, I see phone network as a legacy thing that in perfect world should already be replaced with lightweight upgradeable calling protocol over IPv6.
fc417fc802•Jun 9, 2026
This would apply equally to said IP calling network since you'd need a SIM card to access the tower interesting strewn across the country either way.
StepBroBD•Jun 9, 2026
US of A’s Chinafication letsgooooooo
bebeidjdkrjrjr•Jun 9, 2026
It makes sense. If you are member of state supported terroeist group (antiva, mosab, alwuaide) just ask your sponsors for sims directly. Non state groups should not have access!
2OEH8eoCRo0•Jun 9, 2026
Good. Telecoms should have a duty to know who uses their networks.
tclancy•Jun 9, 2026
Let’s have your name and address then, citizen. Posters have a right to know who is commenting.
nancyminusone•Jun 9, 2026
The person using the network is the one who put a quarter in the payphone.
9cb14c1ec0•Jun 9, 2026
I expect the FCC to adopt this rule, and I also expect it to be challenged in court, on the basis that there are many other approaches to fighting spam calls that the FCC has not tried, but are much less intrusive.
ryanisnan•Jun 9, 2026
I hope you're right. I am not informed - is this typically how these decisions get challenged?
reaperducer•Jun 9, 2026
Good luck with this.
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
vfclists•Jun 9, 2026
It was only a matter of time.
The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.
Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.
downrightmike•Jun 9, 2026
They don't have that right, that's why Ben Franklin set up the USPS
brushfoot•Jun 9, 2026
No more anonymous driving, thanks to Flock. Soon, no more anonymous calls, thanks to the FCC.
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
grim_io•Jun 9, 2026
Worse, we are becoming a burden.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
mystraline•Jun 9, 2026
It was a terrible scattered movie, but they want Elysium.
They want the future setting of Unanimity in Cloud Atlas. Even that might be too much of an underclass.
discostrings•Jun 9, 2026
Let's not neglect the connected cameras appearing everywhere, increasingly backed with AI face recognition.
clint•Jun 9, 2026
> We should also abolish cash while we're at it.
Why do you think all the rich people (and by extension the oligarchy running this country) are pushing Crypto?
roysting•Jun 9, 2026
I don’t think pointing that out will get very far. People didn’t notice when “democracy” was pushed by the same people, in direct contradiction to the Constitution. “Democracy” was the lynchpin to neutralize the Constitution and usher in oligarchic control again, just like digital/programmable currency will complete the pivot of slavery into a total and global system. Why only enslave a few people when you can enslave all people with smoke and mirrors that will make them cheer on their own deception with amusement.
markstos•Jun 9, 2026
Flock is being rejected in a number of cities, thanks to citizens.
roysting•Jun 9, 2026
I am quite confident that there will eventually in any of those cities be some kind of major mass casualty type event that will be attributed to that rejection. I don’t hope for it and am sorry for all of humanity for what we are allowing to seemingly inevitably come about, but here we are; like cattle being herded to the feed lot. “But they’re saying they’ll feed you”, you will hear, “they don’t mean you ill. You should stop being a conspiracy theorists. This food is good.”
collinmcnulty•Jun 9, 2026
We’ll see how it goes, but we also have suits like this that push back on that narrative as if you’re going to say your tech protects against a certain kind of tragedy, and that tragedy actually happens and you didn’t protect against it, maybe you bear some liability.
Can even go to the bodega on foot anonymously, too many of my neighbors have ring cameras pointed at the street.
cucumber3732842•Jun 9, 2026
Every step of the way enabled by useful idiots who think that because each incremental step applies more/cheaper government violence to some class of petty deviants they don't like that it is worth doing even if the overall trajectory created by the sum total of the steps is bad. Selfish jerks.
Great. As if telecoms can be trusted with customers' id. AT&T left my name, address, social security etc in an improperly secured database for others to have, and they tried to open accounts with it; they had retained the information after I closed my account, and they denied the information was coming from them for years before they finally admitted it and gave us all a quarter to call someone who cares and a year of credit monitoring.
downrightmike•Jun 9, 2026
And your pin is 1234
functionmouse•Jun 9, 2026
does nothing to fight spam; only polices lawful users
they call that "anarcho-tyranny"
XYen0n•Jun 9, 2026
After the implementation of SIM card real-name registration in China, scam calls can accurately state your personal information.
bigbuppo•Jun 9, 2026
This sounds like a great thing for people that beat their domestic partners. Make it harder for their victims to escape.
a34729t•Jun 9, 2026
We should allow privateers to go after spammers, and get the seized assets. And spammer is then tortured appropriately. Satan could run a successful single issue campaign on this in the most religious state in the US.
t1234s•Jun 9, 2026
This is probably part of the larger scope of the system wanting to require ID to even boot a computer let alone connect to the internet.
27 Comments
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
[] https://www.acma.gov.au/support-law-enforcement-and-security...
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
I need to know whether these other countries are rich western europe before I know whether to agree with you or to cook up some snide rebuttal.
Joking, obviously. And by "joking" I mean mocking a specific type of person and set of beliefs that is who is a) bad b) too common around here.
But not all, so what's the actual point?
I don't know any way to avoid this.
matrix, wire, deltachat, threema, maybe jabber/xmpp (depends on their support of encryption). any others?
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express
Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.
Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
Why do you think all the rich people (and by extension the oligarchy running this country) are pushing Crypto?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-...
they call that "anarcho-tyranny"