FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Kevin Schmidt, 202-499-2414
kevin.schmidt@causeofaction.org
Cause of Action Statement on Federal Trade Commission’s Request for More Authority
WASHINGTON – Cause of Action (CoA), a government accountability organization, issued the following statement from Senior VP of Litigation Reed Rubinstein regarding the Federal Trade Commission’s request for Congress to pass legislation expanding the commission’s oversight and jurisdiction:
“For decades the FTC has been asking Congress for more authority and when denied the expanded jurisdiction, they choose to act anyway, defying lawmakers. The agency has shown a propensity to engage in burdensome and malicious investigations, including their most recent actions against LabMD involving data security, despite the fact Congress denied their request in 2000 and has never approved it.”
CoA is also defending LabMD against a complaint brought by the FTC based, in part, on allegations that a third party was able to obtain data from LabMD’s computers through the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing program LimeWire. LabMD argues that the FTC lacks the authority to regulate patient-information. The FTC has attacked LabMD without publishing any data-security regulations or standards and with the knowledge that LabMD’s data security practices are regulated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS has never suggested that LabMD violated any patient information data-security regulations or requirements.
Last month, CoA filed a Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on behalf of LabMD, seeking to stop the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) extralegal abuse of government power.
The lawsuit along with the previous filings on behalf of LabMD, can be found here.
About Cause of Action:
Cause of Action is a non-profit, nonpartisan government accountability organization that fights to protect economic opportunity when federal regulations, spending and cronyism threaten it. For more information, visit www.causeofaction.org.
About LabMD:
LabMD is a cancer detection facility that specializes in analysis and diagnosis of blood, urine, and tissue specimens for cancers, micro-organisms and tumor markers. You can find out more about their battle with the FTC here.
To schedule an interview with Cause of Action’s Executive Director Dan Epstein, contact Kevin Schmidt, kevin.schmidt@causeofaction.org.
