🎣Why We Can't Catch More Fish and Why You Still Get So Many Robocalls📱

Let the Cameras Roll: It’s Time to Modernize Fishing Rules

Remember that the Supreme Court reversed the Chevron decision, which long gave deference to agencies’ interpretations of murky regulations? We imagine so. But do you recall the plaintiffs were a family fishing business from New Jersey objecting to being forced to pay for human observers on their boat?

If not (hand up!), their original complaint remains relevant today as the Natural Resources Committee holds a Wednesday hearing titled “Restoring America’s Seafood Competitiveness".

Partly at issue Wednesday is the ability for fishermen to augment human observation with technology.

Nearly 50 years ago, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act authorized agencies to, among many other things, require fishing vessels to carry human observers to ensure there is no over-fishing and to collect reams of data to inform future fishing quotas and other biological information.

As you can imagine, this can get expensive (up to $1,6000 per day) and produce incomplete results (only 77% of what could be caught was caught across a sample of nineteen countries – including the U.S.).

Technology – specifically, cameras like the ones built by Kentucky-based FlyWire Cameras – can fix this by reducing costs, delivering better data, and ultimately allowing fishers to catch more fish.

Fishers can use electronic monitoring currently … but only after they get past the 3-7 year application process. Perhaps that’s why they’re implemented in less than 1 percent of fisheries.

This hearing and a recent Trump executive order (which specifically cites tech adoption as an avenue to Make American Fisheries Great Again) can hopefully spur this to change. The tech is ready. The government just needs to catch up.

Hello, It’s Spam Again

Americans received 5 billion robocalls in April alone — 15 per person. Despite years of Congressional action, scammers have turned our communications infrastructure into a $25 billion annual criminal enterprise.

This week’s House Energy and Commerce hearing reveals why: regulation can't keep pace with scammers using technology to turn a profit.

Here’s why:

When telecom networks shifted to Internet Protocol systems, historical caller ID methods broke down. IP networks lack the built-in security of legacy copper lines, making it cheap and easy for scammers worldwide to spoof any caller ID they want. Meanwhile, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act's enforcement mechanism has backfired spectacularly. Instead of stopping scammers, it's created a lawsuit industry targeting legitimate businesses over technical violations.

What's Working: 

Industry-led solutions show promise:

• STIR/SHAKEN: Call authentication framework implemented by major carriers like AT&T and Verizon to verify caller legitimacy.

• Industry Traceback Group: USTelecom consortium that traces illegal robocalls back to their source, working with federal and state law enforcement.

• AI Detection: Carriers and operating systems are deploying machine learning to identify and block scam patterns in real-time.

What's Not:

Non-IP network providers have missed multiple deadlines to implement authentication systems, creating gaps that scammers exploit. Foreign-originated calls remain nearly impossible to trace or stop. And now AI voice cloning is supercharging the threat — it’s getting cheaper and easier for fraudsters to perfectly mimic family members' voices, and profitable to deploy AI-generated spam at scale.

What Congress Can Do

• Stop extending deadlines for authentication compliance.

• Reform TCPA to target actual criminals instead of legitimate businesses.

• Let industry innovation lead while government focuses on enforcement against bad actors.

The robocall crisis proves a simple point: America's open communications systems can be weaponized against us. The solution isn't to close them — it's to make our industry consortia and legal regimes smarter and faster than the criminals trying to exploit them.

Failure to Launch

We would be remiss if we didn’t express our disappointment in the withdrawal of Jared Issacman’s nomination to lead NASA over the weekend — just days from his expected Senate vote.

We don’t know exactly what happened but reports suggest this was a case of the petty turf wars that come to dominate government all too often — and leave our government in a perpetual state of mediocrity.

What we do know is this is a serious loss to America’s space-faring leadership. Issacman was the rare breed of successful entrepreneur, astronaut, and patriot dedicated to American leadership in space. And having someone like him at the helm is crucial as the space race continues at mach speed.

During President Trump’s inaugural address on January 20, he said “we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” That just got a lot harder to do.