Opinion ID: 172353
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Provision of Telephone Records

Text: From February 2003 to January 2006 the Abika.com website advertised access to personal telephone records. The website stated that its customers could acquire details of incoming or outgoing calls from any phone number, prepaid calling card or Internet Phone, and that Phone searchers are available for every country of the world. Id. Vol. 4 at 1246-47 (internal quotation marks omitted). Abika.com's customers could purchase both cellphone and landline records. The website specified that cellphone records would detail the numbers dialed from a particular cellphone and generally include the date, time and duration of the calls made. Id. Vol. 2 at 475. Landline records would include the same information, save for the specific time at which calls were made. Acquisition of this information would almost inevitably require someone to violate the Telecommunications Act or to circumvent it by fraud or theft. The Act forbids telecommunications carriers from disclosing telephone records absent customer consent or the applicability of one of several exceptions. See 47 U.S.C. § 222(c)-(d). The Act provides as follows: Except as required by law or with the approval of the customer, a telecommunications carrier that receives or obtains customer proprietary network information by virtue of its provision of a telecommunications service shall only use, disclose, or permit access to individually identifiable customer proprietary network information in its provision of (A) the telecommunications service from which such information is derived, or (B) services necessary to, or used in, the provision of such telecommunications service, including the publishing of directories. Id. § 222(c)(1). (We note the additional exceptions below. [1] ) There is no dispute that the telephone records available on Abika.com constituted individually identifiable customer proprietary network information within the meaning of § 222, [2] or, more generally, that the Telecommunications Act barred disclosure of those records by telecommunications carriers. Although Accusearch (remarkably, in our view) maintained that it relied in good faith on its researchers' commitment to obey the law in acquiring information, it represented that it ceased offering telephone records in January 2006 after learning that a subsidiary of one of its researchers possibly obtained telephone data fraudulently.