Or maybe we should fix the phone system. Something is terribly broken when my connection to YouTube is better protected and authenticated than when I'm talking to the IRS over the telephone.

You’re only ever talking to the IRS over the phone if you initiate the call. Ideally the phone system gets fixed but that’s likely to not happen any time soon. Now you need to deal with current reality. Nobody should trust that any incoming call, purportedly from a business or government, is from who they say it’s from either verbally or through caller ID.

Why stop there? Why not fix human communication? Or how about we fix human behavior so there are no bad actors? Education may be hard, but scrapping and rebuilding a century-old communication standard in use by billions is harder.

I used the IRS example because the IRS never calls you. This is only known through experience, i.e. education.

On irs.gov, it says:

> However, there are special circumstances in which the IRS will call or come to a home or business, such as when a taxpayer has an overdue tax bill, to secure a delinquent tax return or a delinquent employment tax payment, or to tour a business as part of an audit or during criminal investigations.

So the IRS might call if you owe taxes.

Surely moving from unsecured to a secured phone system can't be that big of a deal. In the US at least, we have experience something similar when we went from analog to digital television.

Add a secured mode of telephone calls and then telephone owners choose if they want to receive calls or messages from unauthenticated callers.