State Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, says that legislation he wrote would not only make “pretexting” illegal but would ban the buying and selling of personal phone records.
Pretexting has gained national attention after Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it hired private investigators to obtain the personal phone records of members of the company’s board of directors during an investigation into media leaks.
Sen. Simitian has been working on his bill, SB 202, for more than a year. It passed the Legislature in August and is awaiting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature.
“The issue came to my attention in the summer of 2005,” Sen. Simitian said. “I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a law on the books that you couldn’t buy or sell someone’s phone records.”
When he began investigating the practice of obtaining someone’s personal phone records he found “literally scores of companies (on the Internet) where you could buy somebody’s phone records for $129.99.”
The bill would ban pretexting, the obtaining of another person’s phone records by impersonation or deceit, in addition to banning the buying and selling of personal phone records. First offenders could be fined as much as $2,500 and be sentenced to a year in jail. If signed by Schwarzenegger, the law would take effect January 1.
— Bay City News
