Judge bars unauthorized sales of phone records
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Pretexting rebuffed In a victory for privacy advocates, a federal judge has ordered a US company to pay almost $200,000 and barred it from selling the phone records of individuals' phone records without their permission.â¦
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The state will not be forced to create a paper record in case of recounts in elections on touch-screen voting machines, a federal judge ruled Monday.
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Decision exempts Vonage from Minnesota state telephony laws.
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The judge said she could not testify by telephone, as her lawyers had requested, at a hearing over her early release from jail.
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Florida will not be forced to create a paper record in case of recounts in elections on touch-screen voting machines, a federal judge ruled Monday.
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A federal judge has ordered a permanent injunction against a Rhode Island man after he allegedly sent millions of unsolicited short text messages to Verizon Wireless customers.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. district court has ordered a halt to an operation that allegedly added unauthorized charges to the phone bills of small businesses and nonprofit groups for Web sites services that, in many cases, they didn't know they had and didn't request, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said. Judge Kenneth Hoyt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas has approved a temporary restraining order halting the activity and freezing the assets of a group of businesses and individuals, the FTC announced Thursday. The FTC's complaint named defendants WebSource Media, BizSitePro, Eversites, Telsource Solutions, Telsource International, Marc R. Smith, Kathleen A. Smalley, Keith Hendrick, Steven Kennedy, John O. Ring, and James E. McCubbin, Jr. The defendants illegally billed thousands of customers, according to the FTC. The operation was a maze of interrelated companies directed by the people named as defendants, the FTC said. The operation used telemarketers to make cold calls to small businesses and nonprofits, and offered a âfreeâ 15-day trial of a Web site design. The customers were told there was no charge or obligation and that the Web site would be cancelled automatically if it was not approved by them. Whether the customers agreed or not to be billed after the trial, their phone bills were often charged. When consumers called to dispute the charges, the operators told them they had âverification recordingsâ of an employee authorizing the charges. The FTC said the operation is typical of fraudulent Web cramming operations -- by using sales pitches to employees who frequently lack authority to make commitments for their employers and failing to effectively notify consumers that a Web site has been set up. The operators repeatedly changed the names of their companies to avoid detection by telephone companies they rely on to bill consumers and to evade scrutiny from law enforcers, the FTC said.
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A U.S. court in Wyoming has ordered a Web-based information broker to stop selling telephone records without owners&#39; consent and to turn over nearly $200,000 in profits from the operation, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced Monday.AccuSearch, doing business as Abika.com, and owner Jay Patel used &quot;false pretenses, fraudulent statements, fraudulent or stolen documents or other misrepresentations&quot; to induce telecom carriers to disclose the confidential records, the FTC said in a news release.Judge William Downes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming ordered the company to stop selling telephone records in a Dec. 20 decision announced Monday. The judge also ordered the company, based in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to turn over information so that the FTC can notify the people whose telephone records were sold.Abika.com advertised that it could obtain the confidential phone records of any individual -- including details about outgoing and incoming calls -- and make that information available to customers for a fee, the FTC said in a May 2006 complaint. The FTC charged that the company&#39;s methods of obtaining phone records, including posing as a customer of a telecom carrier, violated the FTC Act, which bars unfair business practices.A representative of Abika.com didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comment. The company continues to sell such information&#160;as criminal, tax, mortgage, and driving records through its Web site.The defendants have appealed the order to the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.Downes found that the company&#39;s ways of obtaining phone records without consumers&#39; consent was &quot;necessarily accomplished through illegal means,&quot; and that defendants knew that the phone records were being obtained surreptitiously.The company&#39;s actions caused major problems to consumers, including serious health and safety risks experienced by some consumers from stalkers and abusers; economic harm associated with changing telephone carriers and upgrading security on their accounts; and a host of &quot;substantial and real&quot; emotional harms, the judge said.Consumers had no way to avoid these harms, he wrote. &quot;In fact, the evidence presented before the court indicates that confidential consumer phone records were sold through Abika.com despite considerable efforts by consumers to maintain the privacy of those records,&quot; the judge wrote.Finally, the court found no countervailing benefits to consumers or competition that could be derived from the defendants&#39; practice.Downes also rejected the defendants&#39; claimed immunity under the Communications Decency Act, a federal statute that confers immunity on interactive computer service providers for publishing information content provided by a third party. The judge found that the argument failed partly because the defendants participated in creating the content they sought to have immune from prosecution, the FTC said.
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WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court turned away a challenge Monday to the federal do-not-call registry, ending telemarketers' bid to invoke free-speech arguments to get the popular ban on unwanted phone solicitations thrown out.    The court, without comment, let stand a 10th U.S...
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PROVIDENCE, RI Aug. 29, 2004 - A judge granted Verizon Wireless a permanent injunction against a Rhode Island man accused of sending millions of unsolicited text-message advertisements to cell phone customers in four states.
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A federal judge said investigators must have a courtâs approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.
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LOS ANGELES - A federal judge on Friday barred a Web site from peddling Paris Hilton's racy photos, videos, diary entries and other personal items.  U.S.
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A Virginia-based company has agreed to settle charges that it illegally sold confidential phone records, but federal law only allowed the government to collect $2,700, U.S. regulators said on Thursday.
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State Democrats seeking compensation in an Election Day 2002 phone-jamming scheme can argue that the GOP plot hindered their get-out-the-vote efforts, a judge has decided.
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A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.
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CROWN POINT, Ind. - A judge detained and questioned a row of spectators when a cell phone rang for a third time in her courtroom, later ordering two people to serve community service for contempt of court.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. district judge has struck down a part of the anti-terrorism-inspired Patriot Act that requires telephone and Internet service providers to turn over records to the government without telling customers. Judge Victor Marrero, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled Thursday that the Patriot Act provision that allows the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation toÂ obtain ISP and telecom subscribers' billing, calling, and Web surfing recordsÂ without court approval violates the U.S. Constitution. Marrero ordered the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to stop issuing so-calledÂ national security letters, or NSLs, requiring ISPs to turn over subscriber records. The NSL program prohibited ISPs from telling customers that they were being investigated. Marrero delayed the order pending a DOJ appeal of his decision. The NSL program under the Patriot Act violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as a restraint on free speech, the judge said in his 107-page order. The program also bypasses judicial oversight of the requests, Marrero said. The NSL program could allow the FBI to unmask the identity of Internet users posting anonymous comments, obtain all of the e-mail messages of an Internet user, and even find out all the Web sites a user has visited, Marrero said. "In light of the seriousness of the potential intrusion into the individual's personal affairs and the significant possibility of a chilling effect on speech and association -- particularly of expression that is critical of the government or its policies -- a compelling need exists to ensure that the use of NSLs is subject to the safeguards of public accountability," the judge wrote. The DOJ is reviewing the decision and considering its options, a spokesman said. The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit against the DOJ and FBI, praised Marrero's decision. "Courts have a constitutionally mandated role to play when national security policies infringe on First Amendment rights," Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, said in a statement. "A statute that allows the FBI to silence people without meaningful judicial oversight is unconstitutional." The U.S. Congress passed the Patriot Act less than two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Congress, under pressure from President George Bush, reauthorized the Patriot Act in 2006. Many civil liberties groups have criticized the law for being overly broad and targeting innocent U.S. residents. Marrero in 2004 ruled that the NSL provisions of the Patriot Act violated the Constitution because they amounted to unreasonable search and seizure. After the 2006 revisions to the Patriot Act, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sent the case back to Marrero for a ruling on whether the NSL provisions were still unconstitutional. The FBI's use of the NSL program, which existed before the Patriot Act, has ballooned since the law was passed, Marrero noted. In 2000, the FBI issued about 8,500 NSL requests, and the number of requests rose to 56,000 in 2004, he wrote. The NSL program's "most troubling" aspect, Marrero wrote, is that it attempts to bypass judicial review of law enforcement requests. The program "reflects an attempt by Congress and the executive to infringe upon the judiciary's designated role under the Constitution," he wrote.