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To: username who wrote (31561)	1/21/1998 11:14:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

****OT***** AOL says Navy duped it to get subscriber data Reuters Story - January 21, 1998 20:10 %BUS %ENT %US %WASH %NEWS %POL %MIL AOL V%REUTER P%RTR (updates with court hearing, grafs 8-11) By Jim Wolf WASHINGTON, Jan 21 (Reuters) - Internet service provider America Online accused the U.S. Navy on Wednesday of duping it into disclosing data on a subscriber now at the center of a wide-reaching privacy lawsuit. In a statement, AOL said the Navy "deliberately ignored both federal law and well-established procedures for handling government inquiries" and used trickery instead in the case of Senior Petty Office Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh, 36, is suing the Navy and the Defense Department for allegedly unlawfully obtaining confidential subscriber data without a court order. He is not related to the convicted Oklahoma City bomber of the same name. On Jan. 5, the Navy ordered McVeigh's discharge for allegedly violating the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which bars U.S. military personnel from declaring themselves to be homosexual. Although McVeigh never publicly discussed his sexual orientation, he had listed himself as "gay" in the marital status section of an AOL online user profile. Summing up an internal investigation, AOL said a Navy investigator fooled a customer service representative by posing as "a friend or acquaintance" of McVeigh to confirm information the Navy had gathered elsewhere. "Our member services representative did confirm information presented to him by the Navy," AOL conceded. "This clearly should not have happened and we regret it." The Navy had no immediate comment. At a U.S. District Court hearing in Washington, government lawyers agreed Wednesday to delay the planned discharge of McVeigh until at least Friday. The voluntary delay was to give Judge Stanley Sporkin time to rule on McVeigh's emergency injunction motions seeking to prevent his discharge, his attorney, Christopher Wolf, said. Last week, the Navy had agreed to put off the discharge, initially scheduled for last Friday, until at least Wednesday. McVeigh has charged that the Navy investigator, Joseph Kaiser, and his supervisor, Lt. Karen Morean, breached his rights under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The law bars Internet service providers from knowingly releasing confidential information gathered online to law enforcement officers without a court order. McVeigh's lawsuit was the first to challenge government access to sensitive information maintained by an online service, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based group that monitors civil liberties issues on the Internet. In its statement, AOL said it was "instituting additional measures" to "reinforce our privacy policies and procedures" to employees who handle its more than 1 million subscribers calls a week. The Dulles, Virginia-based company, which claims to be the world's largest Internet online service, announced on Tuesday that it had expanded its reach to 11 million subscribers worldwide.