From the New York Times:
The Pentagon and to a lesser extent the CIA have been using a little-known power to look at the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage within the United States, officials said Saturday.
The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.
I’m coming a little late to the party, but the case of Omega World Travel, Inc. v. Mummagraphics, Inc., (4th Cir. Nov. 17, 2006) raises some interesting issues about the Controlling the Assault of Non Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (“CAN SPAM Act”), 15 U.S.C. §§ 7701 et seq.
Omega World Travel sent 11 emails to an email address owned by Mummagraphics, a web host company. The emails each advertised a travel “E deal.” Mark Mumma, head of Mummagraphics, called John Lawless, the general counsel of Omega and instructed him to stop sending email. Lawless said the emails would stop. They didn’t. Mumma then sent a letter threatening Omega with a suit under CAN SPAM and state anti-spam laws. The emails finally stopped.
Hewlett Packard has agreed to pay $14.5 million to resolve a lawsuit by the California attorney general over its phone records scandal. From the New York Times:
Ever see those creditreport advertisements, the ones for freecreditreports.com (which aren’t free by the way)? According to the guy in the ad, everybody should know their credit score. And not only do you have a credit score, but you also might have a terrorist risk score. This score, called the Automated Targeting System (ATS), measures how likely you are to be a terrorist. From the AP:
I’ve blogged a lot about Internet shaming, and haven’t been too keen on the practice. Here’s the latest instantiation of the practice from the AP:
Over at the Chicago Law Faculty Blog, Brian Leiter has a post discussing Judge Richard Posner’s legal pragmatism. He writes:
Recently, in Barrett v. Rosenthal, the California Supreme Court held, similar to most courts addressing the issue, that bloggers are immune from being sued for “distributor” liability under defamation law. Under defamation law, the original speaker of a defamatory statement (a false statement that harms a person’s reputation) is liable. A “distributor,” one who further disseminates a falsehood spoken by another and who “knows or should have known” about the defamatory nature of a statement, is also liable. A federal law, 47 U.S.C. § 230, however, provides: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Most courts have interpreted § 230 to immunize the operators of websites or blogs against distributor liability for comments posted by others.
The NY Times has an interesting article about defamation law involving a lawsuit by a judge against a newspaper for libel. The article noted some interesting facts about the nature and cost of defamation litigation:
In Anderson v. Blake (10th Cir. Nov. 14, 2006), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit decided a case involving a rather egregious violation of a person’s constitutional right to information privacy. A victim was raped while unconscious, and she subsequently found a video of her rape. She reported the rape to the police and gave them the video. The police officer promised her that the video would remain confidential, but the officer later disclosed the video to a television station, which aired the video but at least concealed the victim’s identity.
For quite some time, banks and financial institutions have been using people’s Social Security Numbers (SSNs) to verify their identities. Suppose you want to access your bank account to check your balance, change addresses, or close out the account. You call the bank, but how does the bank know it’s really you? For a while, banks were asking you for your SSN. Your SSN was used akin to a password. If you knew this “secret” number, then it must be you. Of course, as I have written about at length, a SSN is one of the dumbest choices for a password. Not only is it a password that can readily be found out, but it is a password that’s very hard to change. Not a wise combination. People’s SSNs are widely available, and the data security breaches in the past two years exacerbated the exposure. A lot of legislative attention has focused on the leakers of the data, and rightly so, but not enough attention has been focused on the businesses that use people’s SSNs as passwords. If SSNs weren’t used in this way, leaking them wouldn’t cause the harm it does.
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