ATT goes after cell phone pretexters
Commercial services that make use of pretexting to obtain cellphone records hav caused widespread concern across the blogosphere, in particular after one blogger, John Aravosis bought the cell phone records of Gen Wesely Clark through one of the services in order to highlight the problem.
Opinions as to the legality of these services differ. The companies providing the services strenuously protesting that their activities were legal right up to the point where they stopped offering the services and disappeared. USA Today reports that AT&T has brought a lawsuit against 25 service providers.
Regardless of whether the practice is legal or not the business model is clearly unacceptable as a matter of public policy. If new laws are required they will be passed. The difficulty in preventing this type of activity is not in passing legislation but in enforcing it. Law enforcement is process based, the recognition and rewards for applying existing process to secure convictions are unfortunately much greater than the rewards for developing new process to defeat novel types of crime.
Perhaps what we need is some sort of national level cyber-crime unit tasked specifically with investigating emerging crimes and chosing the cases to be addressed by their novelty rather than traditional criteria. What I know about Internet crimes is scary, but the crimes I don't yet know about, or know about but can't yet measure worry me even more.
