House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) said he plans to get a pretexting privacy bill to the House floor in the next two months.
Congress last year criminalized pretexing, but did not pass a related bill co-sponsored by Dingell and then-committee chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas) to impose regulations on wireless and wireline carriers designed to curb unauthorized disclosure of phone-calling data. The bill Dingell plans to introduce likely will be similar to the bill he co-sponsored last year.
The Federal Communications Commission recently ordered wireless and wireline telecom operators to improve their processes for safeguarding subscribers’ phone records.
The mobile phone industry argues carriers should not be saddled with additional federal regulations.
“We commend the Federal Communications Commission for acting on new safeguards to prevent unauthorized access to the personal telephone records of consumers,” said Dingell. “We will review the FCC rules, the committee’s hearing record, and stakeholder comments in an effort to perfect our legislation (H.R. 936, the Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act) and move it to the House floor this spring.”
As an aside to his pretexting bill, Dingell released a March 2 letter by Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox on Hewlett-Packard Co. The letter confirms that agency enforcement staff is investigating HP, which was at the center of a pretexting scandal last year.
The letter said SEC officials are investigating company disclosures regarding its own internal probe into alleged boardroom leaks, and the circumstances related to the sale of HP stock by CEO Mark Hurd and other company officials during the height of the controversy. However, the SEC has not made a decision whether to seek enforcement action against HP.