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Amazon Hit With Class Action Over Zappos Data Breach
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2012/01/18 10:05
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Shoe retailer Zappos is facing a national class action suit one day after it warned customers that its servers had been hacked.
On Monday, the Amazon-owned shoe company sent a mass email stating that 24 million customer accounts had been breached. The incident resulted in hackers obtaining names, phone numbers, emails, encrypted passwords and the last four numbers of customer credit cards.
The lawsuit claims Amazon violated a part of the Fair Credit Reporting Act by failing to properly encrypt and secure customer information, and seeks unspecified damages for 24 million customers.
The lead plaintiff in the case is a Texas woman but the suit was filed in federal court in Louisville, Kentucky on the grounds that Amazon has servers located in that state.
As these type of hacking incidents have become more common, so too have related lawsuits. So far, though, few of these lawsuits been successful because customers have been unable to show that they have been harmed by the data breaches.
The Kentucky lawsuit appears based in part on a novel legal theory that customers will now be more susceptible to phishing and other online scams because hackers have their email. It also alleges the plaintiffs suffered emotional distress. Other high-profile data breach cases such as one involving Sony’s Play Station have been based in part on state consumer laws.
Although courts have been reluctant to find that customers have been harmed by data breaches, there is evidence this may be changing. A security publication recently reported
that an appeals court allowed customers to claim they suffered harm in the form of having to buy insurance for identity theft.
Some media publications this week praised Zappos’ for having a pre-arranged plan to respond to the data theft. The company claims that its customer credit cards remained secure because they were stored in a separate server. |
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MT court restores corporate campaign spending ban
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2012/01/01 10:53
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The Montana Supreme Court restored the state's century-old ban on direct spending by corporations on political candidates or committees in a ruling Friday that interest groups say bucks a high profile U.S. Supreme Court decision granting political speech rights to corporations.
The decision grants a big win to Attorney General Steve Bullock, who personally represented the state in defending its ban that came under fire after the Citizens United decision last year from the U.S. Supreme court.
The Citizen's United decision dealt with federal laws and elections — like those contests for president and congress, said Bullock, who is now running for governor. But the vast majority of elections are held at the state or local level and this is the first case I am aware of that examines state laws and elections.
The corporation that brought the case, and is also fighting accusations that it illegally gathers anonymous donations to fuel political attacks, said the state Supreme Court got it wrong. The group argues that the 1912 Corrupt Practices Act, passed as a citizen's ballot initiative, unconstitutionally blocks political speech by corporations. |
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Del. court says ex-HP CEO can't keep letter secret
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2011/12/31 13:09
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Former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd will have to make public a letter detailing sexual-harassment allegations that led to his ouster.
The Delaware Supreme Court, the state's highest, ruled on Wednesday that Hurd's lawyers didn't show that disclosing the letter would invade California privacy rights. The ruling said information that is only mildly embarrassing is not protected from public disclosure. The letter, it added, does not contain trade secrets or non-public financial information that would qualify.
Although the letter goes into embarrassing detail about Hurd's behavior, it does not describe any intimate conversation or conduct, the ruling said. Some sentences, concerning Hurd's family, were ordered redacted, but no one appealed that part of a lower court's decision, according to the ruling.
Celebrity attorney Gloria Allred sent the letter last year on behalf of Jodie Fisher, who was hired to help with HP networking events and later accused Hurd of sexual harassment. Although an investigation did not find any sexual harassment, it uncovered inaccurate expense reports that ultimately pressured Hurd to resign. Hurd now works as co-president at rival Oracle Corp. |
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Appeals court upholds sentence of former deputy
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2011/12/30 10:09
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An appellate court has upheld a four-month prison sentence of a former Shelby County Sheriff's deputy involved in a fatal crash.
The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals this week rejected the petition of Alvin Dortch, who was convicted last year of filing a false report, according to The Commercial Appeal. Dortch was acquitted by the trial court of a reckless homicide charge.
In 2008, Dortch shot out the tire of a fleeing DUI suspect whose car crashed moments later, killing him. Investigators didn't discover that Dortch had fired at the vehicle until they reviewed dashboard video more than 12 hours after the incident. |
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Operative gets prison for bilking NYC mayor
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2011/12/19 11:17
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A political operative convicted of bamboozling Mayor Michael Bloomberg out of hundreds of thousands of dollars was sentenced to prison Monday un a case that brought the billionaire politician to the witness stand and gave the public a behind-the-scenes look at his campaign and City Hall.
John Haggerty agreed to pay $750,000 in restitution to Bloomberg in addition to his prison term of 1 1/3 to 4 years.
Haggerty, a veteran Republican campaign consultant, was convicted in October after a trial that jurors called a crash course in the workings of politics. Besides the business-mogul-turned-mayor, the case drew in the state's third-largest political party and featured a coterie of Bloomberg insiders sketching their roles in his political, philanthropic and business affairs.
Since starting my career, I've worked hard to make a reputation in the world of politics and government as a dedicated, honorable individual. Today, my reputation is destroyed, Haggerty told the judge in a strong voice. If I could do it all over again, I would certainly do it much differently than I did.
He walked out of court briskly, without handcuffs, after state Supreme Court Justice Ronald Zweibel pronounced a sentence he said he felt necessary to restore the public's confidence in the electoral process and to serve as a deterrent. Haggerty's lawyers said they planned to ask an appeals court to let him out on bail during a planned appeal. |
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Court schedules week of health care arguments
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2011/12/19 01:16
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The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will use an unprecedented week's worth of argument time in late March to decide the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's historic health care overhaul before the 2012 presidential elections.
The high court scheduled arguments for March 26th, 27th and 28th over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which aims to provide health insurance to more than 30 million previously uninsured Americans. The arguments fill the entire court calendar that week with nothing but debate over Obama's signature domestic health care achievement.
With the March dates set, it means a final decision on the massive health care overhaul will likely come before Independence Day in the middle of Obama's re-election campaign. The new law has been vigorously opposed by all of Obama's prospective GOP opponents. Republicans have branded the law unconstitutional since before Obama signed it in a March 2010 ceremony.
In an extraordinary move, the justices are hearing more than five hours of arguments over the health care overhaul. In the modern era, the last time the court increased that time anywhere near this much was in 2003 for consideration of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance overhaul. That case consumed four hours of argument.
The Supreme Court will start the week of arguments that Monday with one hour on whether court action is premature because no one yet has paid a fine for not participating in the overhaul.
Federal law generally prohibits challenges to taxes until they are paid. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., ruled earlier this year that the penalty for not purchasing insurance will not be paid before federal income tax returns are due in April 2015, therefore it is too early for a court ruling. |
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