Raytheon Drops Internet Chat Suit
Filed at 6:35 p.m. EDT -- May 21, 1999
By The Associated Press
BOSTON (AP) -- When the Raytheon Co. suspected some
employees were chatting behind its back on the
Internet, the defense contractor took them to court.
Claiming 21 people were using aliases to divulge
company secrets, Raytheon got their real identities and
the Web talk stopped.
Now, after four of the workers quit, and the rest
entered corporate ''counseling,'' Raytheon this week
dropped the suit and on Friday claimed victory.
But critics say the company used the court to chill
free speech.
''We felt like our internal investigation had
accomplished what we wanted it to accomplish. It was
time to put the matter behind us,'' David Polk, a
spokesman for the Lexington, Mass.-based company, said
Friday.
''We are committed to protecting proprietary
information from being communicated on a public forum.
We think we've done that to a certain extent.''
In February, Raytheon filed suit in Middlesex Superior
Court against the 21 ''John Does,'' accusing them of
discussing such matters as rumored mergers and
acquisitions, impending divestitures and possible
defense contracts on a public Internet site run by
Yahoo! Inc. The company asked the court on Thursday to
drop the case.
The chatters used aliases like ''Rayman-mass'' and
''RaytheonVeteran'' -- names they may have thought
would protect their true identities. But Raytheon
obtained subpoenas against Yahoo! and other Internet
services, and Polk said Raytheon eventually learned all
21 names.
Polk said ''the vast majority'' were Raytheon workers.
They exchanged gossip about the company and its
executives, griped about Raytheon's stock price and
discussed business deals, finances and staffing. Like
much on the Internet, some of the comments were
speculative and inaccurate and some covered information
that already had been made already public.
Online privacy advocates accused Raytheon of misusing
the courts' subpoena power to get the chatters' names.
''It seems that the sole objective of Raytheon was to
identify these individuals,'' said David Sobel, general
counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
a Washington-based research group financed by the
nonprofit Fund for Constitutional Government. ''It
raises questions about the legitimacy of the way the
court's discovery procedures were used.''
Sobel said while it is not uncommon for companies to
try to identify anonymous Internet users, he said the
number of people in the Raytheon case appeared to be
the largest he had seen targeted by such an
investigation.
He said the situation illustrated the need for
standards to ensure that online anonymity is not too
easily compromised.
''I'm not prepared to say that it's the responsibility
of the Internet companies to fight these efforts, but
they do need to make sure that their subscribers are
given notice of these subpoenas,'' he said, noting that
some Internet companies don't even require a subpoena
to divulge information about their customers.
In the Raytheon case, America Online received
subpoenas. Whenever AOL receives such a subpoena in a
civil case, it has a policy requiring the customer be
notified and given 14 days to try to block the
subpoena. Only after that time has expired will the
company turn over the information, said AOL spokesman
Rich D'Amato.
However, he said targets of criminal investigations are
not given such a luxury.
Although the substance of Raytheon's order couldn't be
immediately confirmed, AOL is the most popular provider
of Internet accounts, so some of the chatters could
have had their names registered with AOL.
Yahoo!, which hosted the Raytheon chat site and was
also subpoenaed, has a general policy of attempting to
comply with subpoenas. Jon Sobel, the company's
associate general counsel, said Yahoo! does not inform
users when it complies with court orders, but is
considering doing so in the future.
Sobel said even when Internet users are notified that
someone has subpoenaed information about them,
anonymously fighting the order might involve the
expense of hiring an attorney, and in some cases,
dealing with a court in another part of the country.
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