[liberationtech] Azerbaijan wants to register mobile phones

[planetary]

It might have had to do with the retailers being in close proximity to major military installations, and tense heavily trafficked border crossings.

We did misspeak a bit there - we were asked for SSN, but allowed to buy with a visually validated US state drivers' license / #, provided said matched the credit card. 

Credit card seems to almost always be the underlying basis of trusting our legal identity for corporate policies in the US, as it is often presumed in their risk modeling that the financial institutions' chain of legal ID validation can be relied on reasonably more than their direct authentication. 


On Jan 9, 12, at 2:38 PM, Jillian C. York wrote:

> That's odd.  I certainly know folks without SSNs (e.g., international friends visiting the US) who have succeeded in purchasing OTC prepaids, but I'm guessing they required a credit card.
> 
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 2:02 PM, planetary <planetary at plntry.net> wrote:
> Anecdotally, we've bought or attempted to buy packaged OTC prepaids on five of the US national carriers in the last quarter, held up for SSN each time no matter the retailer or venue or channel.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> +1-857-891-4244 | jilliancyork.com | @jilliancyork 
> 
> "We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality" - Vaclav Havel
> 
> 
> 

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