The FTC’s response to LabMD’s motion for sanctions (pdf) is now available online. FTC’s response begins:
Respondent’s Motion, which exceeds the applicable word limit and regarding which counsel never met-and-conferred with Complaint Counsel, seeks relief that the Commission’s Rules do not authorize. If there were a legal basis for Respondent’s relief, its baseless claims regarding Complaint Counsel’s evidence ignores its own admissions regarding practices that cause or are likely to cause substantial injury to consumers, including its admission that a 1,718-page LabMD document containing Social Security numbers, health information, and other sensitive personal information for more than 9,300 consumers (“1718 File”) was available for sharing through LimeWire installed on a LabMD computer.
You can access the full filing on FTC’s site (99 pp, pdf).
Multiple IP addresses???
I think Tiversa’s CEO testified that there were about four IPs (or maybe more). That has been disputed by LabMD’s CEO who says that they were not able to find the 1718 file anywhere when they searched. He also alleges that FTC never independently verified claims about where the file was found. His position has been that the file was hacked or stolen from his server. The FTC’s position is that if the file was available for sharing on P2P (Limewire), that is sufficient for them to pursue a data security enforcement as it put thousands of patients at risk of significant harm.
Heh… 😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella This does not help eh?
In practice, this method of searching on the gnutella network was often unreliable. Each node is a regular computer user; as such, they are constantly connecting and disconnecting, so the network is never completely stable. Also, the bandwidth cost of searching on gnutella grew exponentially to the number of connected users,[12] often saturating connections and rendering slower nodes useless. Therefore, search requests would often be dropped, and most queries reached only a very small part of the network. This observation identified the gnutella network as an unscalable distributed system, and inspired the development of distributed hash tables, which are much more scalable but support only exact-match, rather than keyword, search.[citation needed]
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/limewire-wireshare-tips-tricks/81811-how-force-ultrapeer-better-searches-whether-using-pro-basic.html
I wonder if the CEO of LabMD performed this trick.