Petaluma author suing AT&T

Class action lawsuit seeks to prevent company from giving personal information to spy agency

June 28, 2006

By DANE GOLDEN
ARGUS-COURIER STAFF

Carolyn Jewel of Petaluma is a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, alleging that the telecommunications company is unlawfully giving records of her personal communication, along with that of many others, to the National Security Agency.

The case stems from a December New York Times story that said the NSA had been data-mining the records of numerous telephone calls and Internet communications, searches that were done without warrants but with the help of the telecom companies. Later articles said the records of billions of voice and data communications had been analyzed, much of the traffic between the United States and overseas countries.

The government has objected to the lawsuit on national security grounds.

Jewel, a native of Petaluma who moved back a few years ago, is one of several plaintiffs named in the case. She's been using AT&T's Worldnet dialup service since about 2000. Although she doesn't use the Worldnet e-mail account, she does use several Web-based e-mail accounts, including Yahoo and Gmail, that transfer data over the Worldnet network.

"When I'm connected to AT&T Worldnet, which I have to do in order to check any e-mail or go to any Web site, that flows through AT&T. And because of these allegations of how they allowed the NSA to split their lines, it also goes to the NSA," she said.

"Basically, if this turns out to be true, the government has access to every e-mail I've sent or received."

Although by day Jewel is a Microsoft SQL Server database administrator, at night she writes fiction. Her first four books were romance novels, but her latest book, "A Darker Crimson," is about vampires in a dark futuristic world.

And when you're researching how to kill vampires in the future, your Internet research can take you to some pretty weird Web sites, she said, such as those discussing advanced or obscure weaponry.

"I have to kill off characters all the time," Jewel said. And she feels that she should be able to do her job without being subjected to government surveillance.

Additionally, in her research or in responding to reader inquiries, she often ends up in e-mail correspondence with people all around the world, discussing a wide variety of topics.

"I get e-mails from readers all over the world," she said. "If someone from Indonesia e-mails me, should I be worried about that? If we start talking about what is the perception of Islam in the U.S., I should be able to have that conversation at my computer without fear."

Asked what she hopes will happen as a result of the lawsuit, Jewel said that "If the government is absolutely convinced that it needs this information, it has proper authorization to do it if it's really necessary. And if it's not necessary, then they shouldn't do it."

(Contact Dane Golden at dgolden@arguscourier.com)

Last Friday, AT&T changed its privacy policy to state that AT&T, not the customer, is the owner of data transmitted over AT&T's network. The company's new privacy policy can be found by going to http://help.sbcglobal.net/article.php?item=8620, then selecting "dialup" and "sbcglobal.net."