US Senate Clears Pretexting Bill For Bush's Signature
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- As one of its last acts this year, the USA Senate Friday night cleared for President George W. Bush's signature legislation that will make it a federal crime to fraudulently obtain a person's telephone records.
Passage of the measure effectively killed parallel efforts to hold telephone companies themselves more accountable for the disclosure of such information. The bill also includes an exemption to the new rules for "any lawfully authorized investigation."
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee member Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the latter exemption was appropriate.
"We want certain safeguards, and the legislation has such safeguards, but you can't stop law enforcement from actually pursuing an investigation," Schumer said shortly before the Senate voted on the bill.
But several congressional aides questioned whether a legitimate investigation could have been hamstrung by the anti-fraud rules if the exemption hadn't been in the bill.
In any case, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., plans to revisit the issue next year, after he becomes chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee.
Dingell pressed for the tougher bill this year, but the bill was pulled from the House schedule by GOP leaders.
At the time, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., noted that the bill hit the wall about the time USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had been secretly collecting the phone-call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon Communications and BellSouth Corp.
Rumors that an exception to the bills for "intelligence gathering" was being sought further fueled concerns that the government was planning to try to continue to obtain Americans' phone records "without due legal process," Markey wrote in a May 11 letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. Markey is the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
Reigniting those rumors was a "take-it-or-leave-it" offer in late summer to Dingell and other Democrats that included an exemption for intelligence operations.
Dingell rejected the offer. But according to his staff, Dingell plans to renew his efforts to pass the broader bill next year.
Telephone companies oppose the broader bill, which would have increased penalties on telephone carriers for failing to adequately protect their customers' telephone records.
Under the broader bill, fines for carriers, or their affiliates, would have increased to a maximum $300,000 per violation, up from $100,000. Multiple violations could have resulted in a maximum fine of $3 million, according to a description of the bill supplied by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The Consumers' Union backs the Senate-passed bill, but says "more needs to be done to require phone companies to protect consumers' private phone records before they fall into the hands of bad actors."
The bill drew renewed interest this summer in light of news of the techniques used by Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) investigators in tracking down a boardroom leak.
The bill applies to anyone who uses fraud to obtain telephone records. It specifically mentions "pretexting," a technique by which scam artists posing as telephone customers acquire the customers' telephone calling records.
Investigators hired by Hewlett-Packard used pretexting while also directly spying on board members and reporters covering the company to find out who on their board was leaking information to the press.
-By John Godfrey, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-6601; John.Godfrey@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires "
Posted to the site on 11th December 2006
