AT&T ‘Unlimited’ Customers Still Awaiting Their $12 Payout More Than A Decade After Being Throttled And Lied To
from the a-nation-of-wrist-slaps dept
In 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for selling “unlimited” wireless data plans with very real and annoying limits.
The lawsuit noted that, starting in 2011, AT&T began selling “unlimited” plans that actually throttled upwards of 90 percent of your downstream speeds after using just two or three gigabytes of data. AT&T spent years trying to wiggle out of the lawsuit via a variety of legal gymnastics.
In late 2019, AT&T finally agreed to a $60 million settlement with the FTC without actually admitting any wrongdoing. Consumers who were lied to and ripped off for years were supposed to get $12 each. It’s now 2023, and AT&T’s still trying to find all of the customers AT&T lied to more than a decade ago:
Current subscribers were given a credit on their accounts and many former subscribers were mailed refund checks. Now AT&T is working to disburse the remaining $7 million to former customers it didn’t have contact information for.
Don’t pull a muscle or anything. U.S. residents who were AT&T “unlimited” customers between October 1, 2011 and June 30, 2015 can file a claim with the FTC. Just remember not to spend it all in one place.
The pathetic payout could have been worse had AT&T succeeded in flinging these folks toward binding arbitration, a system advertised as more effective than class actions despite being demonstrably even more lopsided and pathetic. AT&T’s 2010 Supreme Court victory ensured that forcing customers into binding arbitration using mouse print legalese is now acceptable standard practice for companies nationwide.
Wireless carriers have been advertising “unlimited” plans and then lying about their very real limits for the better part of twenty years now. Many are still doing it and will continue to do it. Why? The penalty is always a tiny, tiny, fraction of the money earned by being misleading. The only real lesson here for AT&T is that stalling and litigation can easily blunt accountability for misleading or predatory business practices.
Since this case started, AT&T has also had a very successful run gutting most FCC oversight during the Trump administration (including popular net neutrality rules), ensuring the company’s less likely than ever to be held meaningfully accountable for its extremely detailed history of lying to and ripping off its own customers (and the government).
Filed Under: broadband, ftc, network management, throttling, unlimited, wireless
Companies: at&t
Appeals Court Tells ICE Its Counterintuitive Tracking System Doesn’t Justify Jerking Around FOIA Requesters
from the stop-being-deliberately-obtuse dept
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), like nearly every government agency, doesn’t care much for FOIA requests or requesters. It generally takes a lawsuit to force the agency to comply with its FOIA obligations. And its day-to-day handling of FOIA requests is so uninspired, it couldn’t even come up with a reason to deny Mike Masnick’s fee waiver request.
Based on my review of your March 4, 2014 letter and for the reasons stated herein, I have determined that your fee waiver request is deficient because .
It will have to be (slightly) more responsive now. The Second Circuit Appeals Court has reversed a pretty terrible decision by the lower court in an FOIA lawsuit brought by the ACLU. The Appeals Court decision [PDF] opens up with the court’s attempt to explain ICE’s needlessly-convoluted incident tracking system.
ICE’s Enforcement Integrated Database (“EID”) is the agency’s “common database repository for all records created, updated, and accessed by a number of software applications.“ EID allows ICE officials, along with other law-enforcement components of the Department of Homeland Security, “to manage cases from the time of an alien’s arrest, in-processing, or placement into removal proceedings, through the final case disposition.” EID, however, does not store data on a person-centric basis; rather, it stores data in an event-centric manner. Thus, when a particular enforcement event occurs, ICE officers enter it into EID where it is stored with data recording similar events rather than with data pertaining to the same alien.
That’s a weird way of handling things, especially if ICE is interested in tracking people, rather than just incidents. And it is interested in tracking people. It just does the whole thing backwards. Immigration lawyers and advocates also need this information to help their clients — something that’s often only available via FOIA request. That possibly explains why ICE catalogs data this way. It doesn’t stop ICE from tracking immigrants across the database, as the court notes:
Nevertheless, ICE software does permit the agency to retrieve EID data on a person-centric basis. Specifically, with an appropriate identifier—here the alien’s A-Number—ICE can search on an ad hoc basis for all events pertaining to that particular alien.
It does, however, make it extremely difficult for outsiders to do the same thing, much less gather all information relevant to their clients. The ACLU sought records from several incident categories and asked ICE to, basically, make the records sortable by person, rather than by incident type. ICE eventually handed over the records, but redacted the A-Numbers, making the spreadsheets completely useless to the ACLU.
ICE did this despite the ACLU asking that ICE replace A-Numbers with unique ID numbers, knowing that ICE considered A-Numbers exempt from FOIA requests. ICE refused to perform this simple task, instead replacing the A-Numbers with FOIA exemption codes.
ICE responded to the ACLU’s lawsuit by claiming (1) it wasn’t obligated to do this, and (2) it couldn’t do this.
In its motion for summary judgment, ICE conceded that an A-Number is “[t]he only piece of information stored in a row of IIDS data that connects an entry to an individual uniquely.” Notwithstanding, ICE submitted that, because A-Numbers are exempt as PII, and because the substitution of such numbers with Unique IDs would require the creation of new records—an obligation not imposed by FOIA—ICE’s production to ACLU without Unique IDs had satisfied its FOIA obligations. Further, ICE professed not to have a computer program by which it could create person-centric reports of electronic data, “i.e., with each row corresponding to an individual and showing that individual’s removals, detentions, etc.”
LOL. ICE is basically claiming it doesn’t own a spreadsheet program, despite handing the ACLU several spreadsheets in response to its FOIA request.
The Appeals Court says this is clearly ridiculous. Any identifying number could be used to allow tracking of immigrants across several incident categories. Since ICE claims its A-Numbers are personally identifiable info, it could swap that out with any other consistent identifier that would be non-exempt. Since this doesn’t change anything about the requested records, it’s not the creation of new records.
Providing deliberately useless information to FOIA requesters won’t fly either.
[W]e conclude that ICE may not rely on A-Numbers’ exemption from FOIA disclosure to deny the public equal access to non-exempt records. Rather, ICE must find an alternative means to provide ACLU with responsive person-centric access to non-exempt records.
Indeed, to hold otherwise could have the perverse effect of encouraging agencies to make exempt records the singular means for gaining access to non-exempt records responsive to a particular query and, thereby, effectively to conceal those records from the public, at least in the way responsive to the query. Such an outcome is contrary to the “clear legislative intent” underlying FOIA…
The solution is one the ACLU proposed. ICE can’t continue to be this obtuse.
A physical analogy may be useful. If an agency were to maintain non-exempt, person-centric records in a vault, the lock of which could be opened only with a combination of exempt numbers, the agency could not decline to produce documents from the vault by invoking the exemption afforded to the lock combination. Rather, FOIA would oblige the agency to open the vault itself and produce the responsive records. Or, the agency would have to change the combination to non-exempt numbers and thereby afford public access. So here, ICE must itself use A-Numbers to produce a spreadsheet of person-centric data for ACLU, see infra at 38-39, or, as ACLU here requests, ICE must change the “lock” combination numbers so that ACLU can itself access records in a person-centric manner.
ICE loses. It will have to be actually responsive to ACLU’s request, rather than just handing it a bunch of data while withholding the one thing that might make that data useful.
Filed Under: 2nd circuit, dhs, foia, ice, transparency
Companies: aclu
Stifling Free Speech Is Now A Core Plank Of The Republican Platform
from the free-speech-was-good-until-the-media-started-reporting-on-what-we-do dept
We just recently wrote about the reasons why Congress should move, right now, to codify the NYT v. Sullivan case into law. While considered mostly settled and uncontroversial, in the last few years there have been increasing attacks on this ruling, which has been one of the most important rulings in preserving and protecting free speech over the last half century. And some (Clarence Thomas) on the Supreme Court support dismantling it, which is why we think it’s so important for Congress to codify it into law.
In that post, we noted that the idea of chipping away at it first started to gain steam when Justice Thomas pushed for dismantling NYT v. Sullivan, which would massively set back free speech by making it way easier for the rich and powerful to file bogus SLAPP suits to silence criticism or revealing news stories.
And for all the talk from Republicans pretending to support free speech lately, their rapid embrace of this plan to undermine NYT v. Sullivan is a massive concern. We noted that Republican politicians Devin Nunes and Sarah Palin have both been trying to overturn NYT v. Sullivan with some of their ridiculous defamation lawsuits.
Now it appears that one of the most popular Republican politicians, whom many are assuming is the front runner for the GOP’s 2024 Presidential campaign, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is making it clear that he’d get rid of the Sullivan standard if he could.
During the panel discussion on Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis accused the press of using Sullivan as a shield to intentionally “smear” politicians and said the precedent discouraged people from running for office. Would the current Supreme Court, he asked the panelists, be “receptive” to revisiting the case?
This wasn’t just some off-the-cuff thing by DeSantis either. It appears that DeSantis’ crew set up an entire event to agitate for killing Sullivan and making it easier for the rich and powerful to silence people through the mere threat of a ruinous lawsuit.
Of course, there was some hilarity, which the NY Times article highlighted, in that one of the panelists invited to help push for the overturning of Sullivan is Libby Locke, partner at Clare Locke, a firm who specializes in silencing the press (and brags about it constantly) often with very questionable lawsuits. It’s no surprise that Locke would want to overturn Sullivan… but as the NY Times article notes, her firm actually has taken one of the largest high profile defamation cases that… might actually be legitimate: Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News.
So, apparently, Republicans are conflicted:
Also on the panel was Libby Locke, a well-known media defamation lawyer who has pushed for judicial review of Sullivan, as well as state-level legislation that could make it easier for plaintiffs to bring and win libel cases.
Ms. Locke’s presence alongside Mr. DeSantis drew rebukes from many on the right, particularly Trump supporters, who noted that one of her firm’s clients is Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine company that has been the target of unfounded accusations of election fraud from the former president’s backers.
Ms. Locke’s firm filed a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News on Dominion’s behalf. Fox has invoked Sullivan as part of its defense. Last month, the Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch was deposed in the case, which is set to go to trial in April.
Of course, what this should do is help Republicans realize that NYT v. Sullivan protects all of us, and that its removal would lead to all sorts of media, across the spectrum, facing a flood of vexatious lawsuits. But it will be especially true for Fox News and others like OAN and Newsmax (not to mention Breitbart, Daily Wire, Joe Rogan) etc. — news orgs that, let’s say, are not as well known for their fact checking.
The simple fact is that the NYT v. Sullivan standard protects everyone‘s free speech, especially when people are speaking out against the most powerful people in society. It has been one of the most important levers for protecting free speech and making sure that the 1st Amendment actually matters.
If Republicans truly believed in free speech, they would continue supporting it (as they did until just recently). Instead, as part of their ongoing culture war nonsense, because they see that it also protects news orgs that they have decided are pure evil, like CNN, the NY Times, Washington Post, and MSNBC, they have decided to set it on fire, without caring how it will do just as much damage to their own speech, and that of their many favored news organizations as well.
Once again, what we’re learning is that the modern GOP does not believe in principles like free speech. They are motivated solely by what will cause the most pain for their enemies, no matter what damage they do to themselves in the interim. It’s pathetic.
That the party that is banning books, silencing teachers and other government employees, is now attacking a key 1st Amendment decision shouldn’t be surprising, but people should call it out whenever any Republicans pretends that their party supports free speech.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, defamation, free speech, gop, libby locke, nyt v. sullivan, ron desantis, slapp, slapp suits
Companies: clare locke
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