p2p news / p2pnet: US police and intelligence agencies are increasingly looking to banks, ISPs and other companies for information and with that in mind, AOL, “maintains a special hotline that police or federal agents can call to help them with their queries and tailor their requests,” says the Wall Street Journal.

“Internet and financial companies also are frequently targeted by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, forcing them into situations where they must choose between customers’ rights to privacy and their own corporate desire to help the government without being seen as agents of the government,” it states.

“The situation is made even more complicated when the companies are government contractors, vying for federal business or in an industry subject to complicated regulation.”

The story says AOL has more than a dozen people, “including several former prosecutors,” handling requests a year from federal state and local police agencies, 24/7.

“For the last five years the company has published a ‘Law Enforcement Training Manual’ complete with information about how long the company retains basic subscriber information and unread email, to sample subpoena and court-order wordings to speed processing of the police demands,” says the WSJ.

And fights are sometimes inevitable, it observes, adding:

“Last year, the Justice Department demanded that AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft MSN and Google hand over customer search records in a bid to prove that filtering software doesn’t screen kids from online porn. Google refused, saying that the government was abusing its subpoena power by seeking information that had nothing to do with criminal prosecution. A judge ultimately ruled that Google need turn over only 50,000 Web addresses, not the one million originally subpoenaed.

“But even when companies can push back they are not always willing to do so. Because they are so heavily regulated, phone companies have a long history of contact with the federal government.

“And the government has long been one of the telecom companies’ biggest customers offering multimillion contracts for services.”

Also See:
Wall Street Journal – Requests for Corporate Data Multiply, May 19, 2006

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