The defendant in a lawsuit that Occidental Petroleum Corp. filed last week is a question mark. But whoever it is will now know that the oil giant is hot on the trail.
The suit alleges a former or current employee sent e-mails that disclosed confidential information on Aug. 25. The e-mails were received by Occidental employees and executives at competitors BP, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil Corp., as well as people at the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates.
But Occidental doesn’t yet know the identity of who sent the e-mails, which allegedly gave the company’s trade secrets and business development plans to its competitors. The trade secrets centered on the development of an oil field, according to the suit, but it did not disclose the location.
Simply filing the suit against “John Doe” has helped Occidental’s cause. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kevin Brazile has granted the company the right to subpoena e-mail records to identify the sender.
“In this case, the individual used a Google e-mail account,” said Richard Kline, vice president of communications and public affairs at Occidental. “In accordance with Google’s requirements, we issued a subpoena. To protect the rights of their users, they won’t release information without a legal directive.”
The suit was filed by the San Francisco firm of Shearman & Sterling LLP. According to Gavin Manes, chief executive at the digital forensics firm Avansic in Tulsa, the Google information will likely include a name and second e-mail account for the sender, but this information will probably prove bogus. However Google has electronic indicators of where the specific e-mails came from. Those would normally be the identifying number of an Internet service provider, such as a phone company or cable TV operator. Occidental will then subpoena the ISP for more information.
The process could repeat itself for every time the e-mail changed from one computer to another, but eventually investigators can trace it back to the original machine.
Even then, Manes warned that the guilty parties will make the common defense that they were hacked or had a virus and never actually sent the message.
Occidental’s suit seeks an undetermined amount of money damages, compensation for legal costs and a permanent injunction against Doe to prevent further disclosure of secrets.
Russell Glazer, an employment attorney in the Los Angeles office of Troy Gould, who is not involved in the case, said the legal treatment of unknown defendants varies from judge to judge. Some judges have even issued injunctions against unknown persons.
But in this case, “even if Occidental gets a million-dollar judgment, it’s not going to do them any good,” Glazer said. “At some point, they will have to serve papers on the person they’re suing.”
The suit has implications for other companies. Kline noted that even though Occidental took the right steps first by making every employee and contractor sign a confidentiality agreement and second by filing the suit quickly it didn’t prevent the security breach.
Glazer said this type of case will become more common as the Internet age advances.
