SLAPPed by Telemarketers

At the upper left corner of this page, you may have noticed a little box that reads "Phone Fraud: Report It! Stop It!" Clicking that box links you to a helpful website called 800Notes.com, a free, open-to-all clearinghouse of information about the telemarketers and other scammers who pester us by phone (sometimes even on our cell phones) in spite of the Federal Trade Commission's Do-Not-Call Registry.

If nothing else, it's comforting to share complaints with others, and occasionally something useful and actionable is learned about a particular caller. For example, one thread on this site revealed that it is possible to "spoof" a caller-ID system into reporting a number other than the one from which the call originates; that equipment to perform this task is commercially and readily available; and that no law or FCC regulation forbids this particular form of fraud, i.e. sending false data over a telephone system. Perhaps the rules will catch up with the technology, and this is one area where yet another government regulation might actually be useful, as there is no legitimate purpose for sending fake phone number data. You can block all unidentified, blocked or unidentifiable incoming calls; you can block calls from specific phone numbers; but you as a consumer have no way to defend against this practice.

Recently Julia Forte, the proprietor of 800Notes reported thus:

27 Jun 2008

Last week we received a letter from Thomas Georgianna, mynutritionstore's lawyer, in which he demanded the removal of unfavorable postings to avoid a costly lawsuit against 800Notes.com.

Apparently, our user received a call from the company and reported a bad experience. A few more consumers expressed their dissatisfaction. Although, the positive comments in the thread outnumber the negative ones, we have discovered that many of the “positive” responses appear to be posted by mynutritionstore itself.

When we replied that 800Notes.com cannot be held legally responsible for the posted material (such protection is provided by the Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act), Thomas Georgianna responded that in this case if we don't remove the postings they will sue the owners of 800Notes. He apparently hoped that the threat of expenses involved would drive us to comply with his demands.

In response to the threat Paul Alan Levy, a Public Citizen attorney, sent an open letter to Thomas Georgianna where he outlined the many reasons why this theory of forcing the website to shut down by increasing its legal expenses will not work.

This particular flavor of extortion is known as a SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) lawsuit. Heretofore, this practice has largely been confined to real estate developers attempting to shove through unwanted projects, by making it impossibly expensive for community associations to complain. Wikipedia defines the SLAPP thus:

A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation ("SLAPP") is a lawsuit or a threat of lawsuit that is intended to intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. Winning the lawsuit is not necessarily the intent of the person filing the SLAPP. The plaintiff's goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. A SLAPP may also intimidate others from participating in the debate.

According to New York Supreme Court Judge J. Nicholas Colabella, "Short of a gun to the head, a greater threat to First Amendment expression can scarcely be imagined." A number of jurisdictions have made such suits illegal, provided that the appropriate standards of journalistic responsibility have been met by the critic.

The acronym was coined in the 1980s by University of Denver professors Penelope Canan and George W. Pring. The term was originally defined as "a lawsuit involving communications made to influence a governmental action or outcome, which resulted in a civil complaint or counterclaim filed against nongovernment individuals or organizations on a substantive issue of some public interest or social significance." It has since been defined more broadly to include suits about speech on any public issue.
 

It's a damned shabby process, and in all but a tiny number of instances, unwarranted. (I would not object to a SLAPP being filed against a jump-up "community association" opposing something on disingenuous grounds, as has occurred in the case of a Muslim school proposed for a location about two blocks from my home. I have been following this matter for nine months. The community objections, specious and unrelated to the proposed school's operation, were dismissed by the zoning board. Unfortunately, the decision has been appealed to the next higher administrative authority, even though no new facts have been revealed since the hearing, and the community is not alleging any mistake or procedural fault on the part of the zoning commission. They are simply running up the costs for the property owners, who have already invested more than a million dollars in this neighborhood of modestly priced houses.)

It's worth your while to follow the two links in Julia Forte's dispatch. The first link is to the original thread that prompted the SLAPP threat. Scanning the messages, you will find a number of them appearing to defend the company in question. They are easy to find, as they are written in all-caps, a breach of internet etiquette. Forte did IP address traces on these messages, and learned that they all came from the company being complained about. The second link takes you to a letter in response to the threat, written on behalf of Forte and 800Notes.com.

I think this form of threat is of genuine concern to anyone who uses the 800Notes site--or to anyone who contributes reviews to sites such as ePinions and Amazon, blogs, or moderates a political listmail group. Hell, sooner or later you might find yourself SLAPPed for giving someone bad feedback on eBay!

I do all these things; have done so for at least three years. Of the nearly 1,000 blog entries I have published, only one has resulted in even a veiled threat. Reconsidering how I wrote that thread, I pulled it until I can re-write it in a way that does not specifically identify the parties involved, parents of a young murder victim in Baltimore whom I criticized for not having done a good job of protecting their teenage child.

As the fighter pilots remind each other, "watch your six."

tags: slapp  800notescom  telemarketers  darul uloom  woodlawn  

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