Why has Congress failed Amy?

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SPECIAL REPORT

Part 1: Privacy under attack, but does anyone care?

Part 2: Survey: Privacy talk and action are poles apart

Part 3: 'La difference' is stark in EU, U.S. privacy laws

Part 4: Where rubber meets the road in privacy debate

Part 5: Celebrities: Canaries in the privacy coal mine

Privacy Lost: Complete coverage

Danger highlighted in 1998
In 1998, 15 months before Amy was murdered, I testified before Congress for the first of seven times through February of this year about the increasing use of social engineering (the proper term for pretext) by private investigators, illicit information brokers and identity thieves to steal private information. That first hearing in 1998 focused on the theft of financial records and resulted in a specific provision in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that made it a federal crime to use pretext to steal financial records.

In what can only be viewed as the most tragic of ironies, the act was signed into law 25 days after Liam killed Amy – only 39 days after Liam hired private investigators to find where Amy worked. Those investigators specialized in stealing financial records the law was designed to protect. To find Amy’s workplace address one of the investigators impersonated an insurance company executive to Amy’s mother and asked where Amy worked. As Amy’s mom stated, “I was made an accomplice to my own daughter’s murder.”

Instead of being a good first step in an ongoing legislative process to specifically outlaw the use of pretext, the law turned out to be the only step. Yet, the theft and sale of Americans’ private records is routine and growing in both scope and volume. At any given time thousands of private investigators offer Social Security numbers, financial records, phone records, utility (gas/power/water) records, cable and satellite television records, post office box records, and much more – usually stolen by pretext.

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All of this has been made known to Congress repeatedly from 1998 right through the HP hearings in recent weeks via multiple hearings and excellent reporting by numerous publications.

So the question remains. When is Congress going to stop the outrageous use of pretext by private investigators to steal Americans’ private information? For eight years Congress has been on notice of these practices and has only protected one category of private information – and even that law is now being routinely circumvented by private investigators. It is time for Congress to stop looking at the category of information stolen and start focusing on the tactic used by the thieves – pretext. It is time that Congress act to protect all private information by broadly outlawing the use of pretext to steal private, consumer, and proprietary records. It is time for Congress to do their job and stop failing Amy.

Rob Douglas is an information security consultant and has spent the past decade exposing the use of pretext by private investigators and identity thieves to steal customer account information maintained by consumer oriented businesses.

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