On Mon, 15 Jul 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
I'm watching a CNBC report about the NASDAQ market and proposed fixes to certain alleged abuses about stock recommendations, bid-ask spreads, brokers, etc.
One of the "industry" proposals involving taping the phone calls of NASDAQ brokers. (The proposal: 10% of all calls to customers would be recorded for later review.)
Many phone calls are recorded already, not under the premise of law enforcement (or some sort of legal regulation), but under the notion of quality assurance. At what point does QA become "call escrowing" and does the SEC's regulatory powers make it so it can't "escrow" calls for quality assurance purposes? If Merril Lynch decides to record calls for QA purposes, can the SEC subpeona those "records" if it suspects illegal activity? If everyone's willing to patronize those businesses that record calls for "QA" purposes (I tried not to and then gave up since nobody else seemed to give a shit), will the SEC's quality assurance efforts be met with the same lack of care by the consumers? Or maybe they'll actually *LIKE* it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |Just as the strength of the Internet is |Mark Aldrich | |chaos, so the strength of our liberty |GRCI INFOSEC Engineering | |depends upon the chaos and cacophony of |maldrich@grci.com | |the unfettered speech the First Amendment|MAldrich@dockmaster.ncsc.mil | |protects - District Judge Stewart Dalzell| | |_______________________________________________________________________| |The author is PGP Empowered. Public key at: finger maldrich@grci.com | | The opinions expressed herein are strictly those of the author | | and my employer gets no credit for them whatsoever. | -------------------------------------------------------------------------