An Open Letter

It's time to put trust back into the digital world.

Every day, millions of Americans pick up the phone, open an email, or read a text message and have to ask themselves a question that never should have been necessary: Is this really who it says it is?

Scammers impersonating banks, government agencies, even public figures, have turned that uncertainty into a weapon. In 2024 alone, internet crime cost Americans over $16 billion a year — much of it built on nothing more sophisticated than a fake identity behind a screen.

Senator John Thune authored the TRACED Act, the law that forced voice providers to adopt STIR/SHAKEN caller authentication and gave the FCC real enforcement teeth against spoofed calls.

Senator Ted Cruz, as a senior member of the Federal Commerce Committee that oversaw that effort, has continued pushing for stronger anti-spoofing and anti-fraud protections in the years since.

And behind the scenes, the Industry Traceback Group — the private-sector consortium tasked with tracking illegal robocalls back to their source — has shown that cross-provider cooperation, not isolated platform-by-platform fixes, is what actually shuts bad actors down.

That model worked for phone calls. It's time to extend it everywhere.

That's why we're building Sender Passport — a universal sender identity verification framework for digital communication broadly, not just the phone network. Verified sender credentials, ISP-level enforcement at the network edge (end user), and a shared cross-provider database modeled on the traceback and revocation approach that STIR/SHAKEN pioneered — so a bad actor gets cut off everywhere at once, not just on whichever platform happened to catch them first.

This is the next revolution of the internet. Congress and industry can take the already-proven standards and win the next generation. We just have to finish the job.

Here's how you can be part of it: visit the project site to see the full framework — the architecture, the enforcement model, and the problem it's built to solve.

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If you work in telecom, network engineering, PKI, regulatory policy, or you've simply had enough of digital impersonation costing people their money and their trust — reach out. We need engineers, advocates, and allies willing to help take this from framework to standard.

The infrastructure for trustworthy communication doesn't build itself. Let's build it together with military-grade standards.