Skip to main content

Would-be whistleblower indicted for keyboard tap

SecurityFocus HOME News: "A former claims adjuster for a U.S. insurance company is the first to be charged under federal wiretap law for the covert use of a hardware keystroke logger, after he was caught using the device while secretly helping consumer attorneys gather information to use against his own company.

Larry Ropp, 46, was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on a single count of endeavoring to intercept electronic communications. Ropp is accused of installing a 'KEYKatcher' keystroke logger on the PC of a secretary to a vice president at the Bristol West Insurance Group where he worked. The KEYKatcher attaches inline with a keyboard connector, and stores every keystroke in an internal memory for later retrieval.

In an interview with SecurityFocus, Ropp admitted to using the device, which he says he ordered off the Internet. But he defended his office skullduggery as a necessary evil to expose improper anti-consumer practices at the company. 'The FBI themselves use key loggers quite a bit,' he said. 'Here, I'm a whistleblower, and I'm getting the shaft.'

Ropp was working at Bristol West's Anaheim, California office last year when a state appeals court ruled that the company had been illegally canceling the policies of customers who were a single day late with their payments. Under California law, an insurance company must give 10 days notice before canceling a delinquent customer's automobile liability policy. Bristol West had been circumventing that requirement by issuing 'cancellation notices' with every bill, before payment was due, so that by the due date the 10 days had already passed.

'If it was due Tuesday, and you had an accident on Wednesday, you didn't have any insurance,' says Ropp. 'It was out-and-out a wrongful, illegal denial.'

A California appellate court ruled against Bristol West in January, in a lawsuit filed by a customer, Curtis Mackey, who'd been involved in an auto accident two weeks after missing a payment, and was consequently denied a claim. Without admitting wrongdoing, the company subsequently agreed to pay six million dollars to settle a separate class action lawsuit filed on behalf of customners whose policy was canceled without proper notice. "

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Jodie Lane Project Responds to City Council Testimony

The Jodie Lane Project : New York, NY -- February 12, 2004. The City Council Transportation Committee held a hearing today to investigate the causes of Jodie S. Lane’s tragic electrocution death on January 16th. The testimony revealed a startling lack of oversight on the part of the Public Services Commission, charged with overseeing Con Edison’s compliance with the National Electric Safety Code, last revised in 1913. With only 5 inspectors at their disposal, the Public Services Commission relies entirely on Con Edison to report safety problems. Because Con Edison only reports incidents resulting in injury or death, the PSC was aware of only 15 shock incidents in the last 5 years. Con Edison has acknowledged that it actually received 539 reports of shock incidents in the same period, effectively admitting to misleading the PSC by an order of magnitude. It is not only this discrepancy that is alarming, but also the fact that the Public Services Commission, charged with ensuring

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to