As fax moves into the 21st century with solutions like fax-over-email, the stigma of the technology being a system primarily of the past is slowly seeping away. However, some organizations still rely on traditional faxing, and it's proving to be a headache. A recent example would be Congress's current woes surrounding its fax fleet and Internet battle with activist group Fight for the Future.
Here's the back story: Congress is getting ready to vote on a new cybersecurity bill, and some activist groups aren't too happy about it. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is the latest effort from Congress to crack down on Internet security by encouraging the sharing of information between private companies and government organizations. However, opponents of the bill claim that it would give the government "unprecedented authority to monitor users and violate privacy," according to the International Business Times. The bill has already passed the Senate Intelligence Committee and is making its way through Congress despite the opposition.
"So far, the group has sent close to 100,000 faxes to the Senate offices, and it will take months to send the rest."
Here come the faxes
In order to prove a point that Congress is stuck in the past with bills like this, the activist group Fight for the Future has pledged to send Congress more than 6.1 million faxes over the coming months at a rate of tens of thousands per day, according to Motherboard contributor Jordan Pearson. The campaign is called "Fax Big Brother" and is garnering a lot of media attention as more people learn about CISA. So far, the group has sent close to 100,000 faxes to the Senate offices, and it will take months to send the rest. The group has eight phone lines with a dedicated server and modem, but that limits the number of faxes they can send.
"We're now scrambling to figure out how to get this huge deluge of faxes in in a timely fashion," said Evan Greer, the campaign manager for Fight for the Future. "Although we're tickled by the idea that their fax machines could be ringing off the hook for half of the next year."
The campaign will be looking to scale up its operations in the future in order to keep getting the message to Washington, D.C., that this bill violates Internet users' privacy. To Fight for the Future, that may mean adding more phone lines or modems and investing in more server space.
What does this situation teach us about fax solutions?
The stigma behind fax technology is that it's outdated – and that's why the activist group's protest hits home. Utilizing this kind of technology to prove a point works in Fight for the Future's favor, because Congress hasn't yet upgraded its faxing systems. The analogy here is that the "outdated" technology equates to Washington's antiquated notions on cybersecurity.
If Congress instead had fax solutions like fax-over-Internet-protocol systems, perhaps the impact of Fight for the Future's protest wouldn't be so relevant. Being able to fax over the Internet – sending emails to machines and vice versa – wouldn't take so long and would enable Congress to more easily receive all the messages the group is planning to send over the coming months without tying up phone lines and disrupting communications.
At the moment, Fight for the Future is encouraging people to send faxes directly from a form on its website and from Twitter. Users can simply use the hashtag #FaxBigBrother to send a fax to Congress. In this way, the group is juxtaposing high-tech FoIP solutions with traditional fax. Through this use of updated tech, Fight for the Future is hoping to show that Congress is behind the times when it comes to Internet technology.
That's a lot of paper
However, the amount of paper being sent through to Congress is still startling. Motherboard's Pearson calculated that 6.1 million faxes could be the equivalent of 720 trees, according to standards set by Princeton University. If Congress installed fax-over-IP systems, that would cut this number in half or better.
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