Forwarded From: blueskyat_private http://www.seattletimes.com/news/nation-world/html98/voic_090698.html Posted at 12:55 a.m. PDT; Sunday, September 6, 1998 Think all your voice mail is secure? Don't be so sure by Ashley Dunn Los Angeles Times The first signs of trouble at National Regulatory Services, a small consulting firm in Connecticut, were a series of odd complaints from customers that their phone messages were not being returned. Salesmen at the company were stumped by the complaints since they could never remember receiving the phone messages in the first place. Helplessly, they watched as their business dwindled and customers drifted away to other competitors who, presumably, at least returned their phone calls. It took months of digging before the company finally figured out that a former employee was tapping into the voice mail of the salesman he had once sat next to and deleting calls from potential customers, whom he would then call on his own. By the time Kenneth T. Kaltman was convicted last year, the damage already had been done - an estimated $1 million in lost business and an incalculable loss in the sense of privacy and security for those who worked at the company. Kaltman pleaded guilty in state superior court to one count of larceny and one count of computer crime. He was fined $2,500. "E-mail, phone, voice mail - I use them, but I don't put anything proprietary on them anymore," said Jacqueline Hallihan, the president of National Regulatory Services. "It's changed the way I do everything. I sit there sometimes and still wonder . . . who is listening?" Within the past handful of years, the walls of electronic privacy that had been so intricately constructed through technology have crumbled with an alarming regularity. Voice mail once seemed to be a trivial corner of modern communications, made up of endless messages in the game of phone tag or spousal reminders to please call home. But in the past few years, voice mail has proved to be a gaping hole of vulnerability, not so much for technical reasons, but human for ones - easily guessed passwords, careless password handling or no passwords at all. The Cincinnati Enquirer case The case that has propelled voice mail in the heated lexicon of electronic paranoia is the alleged theft of thousands of voice-mail messages by a reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer. Many of the messages were printed in an 18-page Enquirer report on Chiquita Brands International that appeared in May. The report alleged that the company sprayed dangerous pesticides on farm workers in Central America, used phony companies to obscure its ownership of land in some foreign countries, attempted to hide an effort by one employee to bribe Colombian officials and failed to take adequate precautions to prevent the smuggling of illegal drugs on its fruit ships. While the truth of The Enquirer's stories about Chiquita is still being sorted out, the impact of the intercepted messages has been enormous. Those messages have become the latest centerpieces in the evolving tale about the loss of privacy in the modern world and the general disarray in grappling with new forms of communications. The Chiquita case has become the most notable case of voice-mail interception not only because of the enormity of the theft, but also because the newspaper retracted all the stories, fired the lead reporter on the story and paid Chiquita at least $10 million to settle the issue. The company has denied the allegations of The Enquirer's report and filed a defamation suit against the lead reporter, Mike Gallagher. What has made Chiquita's case more complicated is that copies of the messages are believed to have been sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, opening the possibility of a battle in the tricky legal realm of electronic privacy. An evolving area of law Various federal and state laws, dating back to the late 1960s, ban the unauthorized interception of electronic communications. But even after decades, it is still an evolving area of law - one that at times seems uncertain about the new methods of communications that seem to sweep the planet every so many years. One case now pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals involves a worker at a Costa Mesa, Calif., company, PDA Engineering, who broke into a female co-worker's voice-mail box after discovering she was having an affair with a company vice president. The office worker managed the break-in by simply guessing that the password was the vice president's first name. The sport of listening to messages turned serious when the vice president, Richard J. Smith, left a message suggesting that he was involved in insider trading. The U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles was contacted and an investigation begun. Smith was convicted in 1996 of 11 counts of insider trading but he has appealed the case, claiming, in part, that his voice-mail messages could not be used as evidence. The 1968 Wiretap Act bars the use of any evidence gotten through an unauthorized interception of "communications by the aid of wire, cable, or other like connection." The act's suppression of unauthorized wiretap evidence sets a standard that is actually greater than that applied to other types of evidence, such as paper documents. In most cases, stolen evidence can still be used by law-enforcement agencies - and the media, for that matter - as long as they did not steal the evidence themselves. For example, if a person broke into a home and stole a weapon used in a murder, that weapon could be turned over to police and used in a trial as long as the police were not involved in the theft. Smith's case would be much easier to resolve if not for the passage of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was designed to include more recent methods of communications such as e-mail, computer files and voice mail. Within the amendments was a section specifically dealing with "stored wire and electronic communications," which had no requirement to suppress illegally obtained stored communications. The government has argued that Smith's voice-mail messages are stored communications and hence can be used as evidence. The point of this conflict is simply that the law is unsettled. It seems to create a hierarchy of privacy - with live phone conversations considered the most sacred and documents or voice mail seen as some lesser entity. -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
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