Patriot at work again

[Throbbinwood]

WASHINGTON - Numerous federal and local law
enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and
warrants designed to protect civil liberties and
gathered Americans' personal telephone records from
private-sector data brokers.
These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on
the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts
online, tricked phone companies into revealing
information and even acknowledged that their practices
violate laws, according to documents gathered by
congressional investigators and provided to The
Associated Press.

The law enforcement agencies include offices in the
Homeland Security Department and Justice
Department — including the FBI and U.S.
Marshal's Service — and municipal police departments
in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Utah.
Experts believe hundreds of other departments
frequently use such services.

"We are requesting any and all information you have
regarding the above cell phone account and the account
holder ... including account activity and the account
holder's address," Ana Bueno, a police investigator in
Redwood City, Calif., wrote in October to PDJ
Investigations of Granbury, Texas.

An agent in Denver for U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, Anna Wells, sent a similar request on
March 31 on Homeland Security stationery: "I am
looking for all available subscriber information for
the following phone number," Wells wrote to a
corporate alias used by PDJ.

Congressional investigators estimated the U.S.
government spent $30 million last year buying personal
data from private brokers. But that number likely
understates the breadth of transactions, since brokers
said they rarely charge law enforcement agencies any
price.

PDJ said it always provided help to police for free.
"Agencies from all across the country took advantage
of it," said PDJ's lawyer, Larry Slade of Los Angeles.

A lawmaker who has investigated the industry said
Monday he was concerned by the practices of data
brokers.

"We know law enforcement has used this because it is
easily obtained and you can gather a lot of
information very quickly," said Rep. Ed Whitfield,
R-Ky., head of the House Energy and Commerce
investigations subcommittee. The panel expects to
conduct hearings this week.

Whitfield said data companies will relentlessly pursue
a target's personal information. "They will
impersonate and use everything available that they
have to convince the person who has the information to
share it with them, and it's shocking how successful
they are," Whitfield said. "They can basically obtain
any information about anybody on any subject."

The congressman said laws on the subject are vague:
"There's a good chance there are some laws being
broken, but it's not really clear precisely which
laws."

James Bearden, a Texas lawyer who represents four such
data brokers, compared the companies' activities to
the National Security Agency, which reportedly
compiles the phone records of ordinary Americans.

"The government is doing exactly what these people are
accused of doing," Bearden said. "These people are
being demonized. These are people who are partners
with law enforcement on a regular basis."

The police agencies told AP they used the data brokers
because it was quicker and easier than subpoenas, and
their lawyers believe their actions were lawful. Some
agencies, such as Immigrations and Customs
Enforcement, instructed agents to stop the practice
after congressional inquiries.

The U.S. Marshal's Service told AP it was examining
its policies but compared services offered by data
brokers to Web sites providing public telephone
numbers nationally.

None of the police agencies interviewed by AP said
they researched these data brokers to determine how
they secretly gather sensitive information like names
associated with unlisted numbers, records of phone
calls, e-mail aliases — even tracing a person's
location using their cellular phone signal.

"If it's on the Internet and it's been commended to
us, we wouldn't do a full-scale investigation,"
Marshal's Service spokesman David Turner said. "We
don't knowingly go into any source that would be
illegal. We were not aware, I'm fairly certain, what
technique was used by these subscriber services."

At Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spokesman Dean
Boyd said agents did not pay for phone records and
sought approval from U.S. prosecutors before making
requests. Their goal was "to more quickly identify and
filter out phone numbers that were unrelated to their
investigations," Boyd said.

Targets of the police interest include alleged
marijuana smugglers, car thieves, armed thugs and
others. The data services also are enormously popular
among banks and other lenders, private detectives and
suspicious spouses. Customers included:

_A U.S. Labor Department employee who used her
government e-mail address and phone number to buy two
months of personal cellular phone records of a woman
in New Jersey.

_A buyer who received credit card information about
the father of murder victim Jon Benet Ramsey.

_A buyer who obtained 20 printed pages of phone calls
by pro basketball player Damon Jones of the Cleveland
Cavaliers.

The athlete was "shocked to learn somebody had
obtained this information," said Mark Termini, his
lawyer and agent in Cleveland. "When a person or
agency is able to obtain by fraudulent means a
person's personal information, that is something that
should be prohibited by law."

PDJ's lawyer said no one at the company violated laws,
but he acknowledged, "I'm not sure that every law
enforcement agency in the country would agree with
that analysis."

Many of the executives summoned to testify before
Congress this week were expected to invoke their Fifth
Amendment rights against self-incrimination and to
decline to answer questions.

Slade said no one at PDJ impersonated customers to
steal personal information, a practice known within
the industry as pretexting.

"This was farmed out to private investigators," Slade
said. "They had written agreements with their vendors,
making sure the vendors were acquiring the information
in legal ways."

Privacy advocates bristled over data brokers gathering
records for police without subpoenas.

"This is pernicious, an end run around the Fourth
Amendment," said Marc Rotenberg, head of the
Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information
Center, a leading privacy group that has sought
tougher federal regulation of data brokers. "The
government is encouraging unlawful conduct; it's not
smart on the law enforcement side to be making use of
information obtained improperly."

A federal agent who ordered phone records without
subpoenas about a half-dozen times recently said he
learned about the service from FBI investigators and
was told this was a method to obtain phone subscriber
information quicker than with a subpoena.

The agent, who spoke only on condition of anonymity
because he is not authorized to speak with reporters,
said he and colleagues use data brokers "when he have
the need to act fairly quickly" because getting a
subpoena can involve lengthy waits.

Waiting for a phone company's response to a subpoena
can take several days or up to 45 days, said police
supervisor Eric Stasiak of Redwood City, Calif. In
some cases, a request to a data broker yields answers
in just a few hours, Stasiak said.

Legal experts said law enforcement agencies would be
permitted to use illegally obtained information from
private parties without violating the Fourth
Amendment's protection against unlawful search and
seizure, as long as police did not encourage any
crimes to be committed.

"If law enforcement is encouraging people in the
private sector to commit a crime in getting these
records that would be problematic," said Mark Levin, a
former top Justice Department official under President
Reagan. "If, on the other hand, they are asking data
brokers if they have any public information on any
given phone numbers that should be fine."

Levin said he nonetheless would have advised federal
agents to use the practice only when it was a matter
of urgency or national security and otherwise to stick
to a legally bulletproof method like subpoenas for
everyday cases.

Congress subpoenaed thousands of documents from data
brokers describing how they collected telephone
records by impersonating customers.

"I was shot down four times," Michele Yontef
complained in an e-mail in July 2005 to a colleague.
"I keep getting northwestern call center and they just
must have had an operator meeting about pretext as
every operator is clued in."

Yontef, who relayed another request for phone call
records as early as February, was among those ordered
to appear at this week's hearing.

Another company years ago even acknowledged breaking
the law.

"We must break various rules of law in acquiring all
the information we achieve for you," Touch Tone
Information Inc. of Denver wrote to a law firm in 1998
that was seeking records of calls made on a calling
card.

The FBI's top lawyers told agents as early as 2001
they can gather private information about Americans
from data brokers, even information gleaned from
mortgage applications and credit reports, which
normally would be off-limits to the government under
the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act.

FBI lawyers rationalized that even though data brokers
may have obtained financial information, agents could
still use the information because brokers were not
acting as a consumer-reporting agency but rather as a
data warehouse.

The FBI said it relies only on well-respected data
brokers and expects agents to abide by the law. "The
FBI can only collect and retain data available from
commercial databases in strict compliance with
applicable federal law," spokesman Mike Kortan said
Monday.

[SharkieJones]

[Hippie3]

what does that have to do with the patriot act ?
and why did you paste that here with no link to the source?
i know you didn't write it...