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Verizon Technician Is Accused of Selling Customers' Call Records and Location Data To Private Investigator (ap.org)
A former Verizon technician who worked in Alabama is being accused of selling customers' private call records and location data to an unnamed private investigator. Authorities said the data was sold for more than four years, from 2009 to 2014. The Associated Press reports: [Daniel Eugene Traeger] logged into one Verizon computer system to gain access to customers' call records, authorities said. He used another company system known as Real Time Tool to "ping" cellphones on Verizon's network to get locations of the devices, according to the plea agreement. He then compiled the data in spreadsheets, which he sent to the private investigator for years, the court records show. "Between April 2009 and January 2014, the defendant was paid more than $10,000 in exchange for his provision of confidential customer information and cellular location data to the PL, an unauthorized third party," court records state. Though Traeger was based in the Birmingham area, the court records do not indicate whether the information that was sold involved Verizon Wireless customers in Alabama or elsewhere. He faces up to five years in prison, but prosecutors are recommending a lesser sentence since he accepted responsibility, according to terms of the plea agreement.
Government hates competition.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Why Richard Stallman refuses to use a phone i.e. surveillance device .
Surely he deserves to be in there with the Verizon tech.
Govt has no such monopoly. You have every right to self defense. Govt monopolizes the rule of law. Otherwise you get lynch mobs and witch hunts.
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He faces up to five years in prison, but prosecutors are recommending a lesser sentence since he accepted responsibility, according to terms of the plea agreement.
I thought the U.S. had a third party consent doctrine, whereby no warrant is needed if your data is stored with a third party, in this case, Verizon. So, I don't understand what they're being charged with in this case.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
a drop in the bucket for sure, but good to see somebody getting caught.
Technician should only have access to this information for accounts that were assigned to him.
love is just extroverted narcissism
They have common IT security practices.
If you think this is an isolated issue you are sorely mistaken. I'll bet this is a mainstay for PI's around the country. Especially since it took 4 years to catch him. My guess without details is that he got caught when he started using the Location system since that's not something anyone besides SysTechs and LEO would need.
and gets beaten to a bloody mess, and then sodomized by a gang of homosexuals
It seems like the days of demonizing font colors and backgrounds and /bin/ping aren't quite behind us. If they were the sentence might have been constructed more along the lines of-
"He used another company system known as Real Time Tool to get locations of devices on Verizon's network, according to the plea agreement."
Unfortunately, it seems the powers that be want people to be as afraid of college kids who experiment with /bin/ping as they were of those who experimented with Cannabis 50 years ago. Sure, maybe ping and/or Cannabis might be part of some evil criminal act. But they aren't the right parts of that evil criminal act to be focusing on. Unless of course your agenda is to keep the masses from being empowered with knowlege of how ping and Cannabis are not in fact conduits to satan, but in fact very beneficial in a vast variety of use cases, with very little risk of causing great harm, or even being the technically critical factors in some complex great harm.
have him wear a tracker for a few years after prison...with all telemetry data available to all the people he sold up the river.
That way, he can run around scared wondering if today is the day hes going to get punched in the face......Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back style.....
He faces up to five years in prison, but prosecutors are recommending a lesser sentence since he accepted responsibility, according to terms of the plea agreement.
He admits to doing the crime, he should have to do the time. Otherwise there is no incentive for other Verizon employees not to follow in his footsteps. The article mentions his accomplice only as an "unnamed private investigator" which tells me that the convicted scumbag (he plead guilty) is not cooperating with authorities. This PI needs to be placed in the cell next to this guy so they can stare at each other through the bars.
This is an example of why the cloud is bad. Even if companies are trustworthy, can that be said of every single employee in contact with your data?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Anyone who thinks this doesn't happen a few hundred times a day with every telecom carrier you can think of is a bit out of touch. And it's hardly worrying next to the people paying off NSA analysts, contractors, and interns...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
"Shortly after the charges were filed last week, Traeger pleaded guilty to a felony count of unauthorized access to a protected computer"
So yeah, those over broad hacking laws. Kinda sad to see 'em used for something I agree with.
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Everyone has a price.
Low paid call center employees just have a lower one.
You companies who seek to get the cheapest labor you can find would do well to remember this.
"I wonder how this open AP got connected to the corporate network ? "
Ea$y An$wer. . . . .
This is why these records should not be kept any longer than is necessary for technical and billing purposes. Of course, it also needs to be guarded properly while it is needed.