Navy, AOL settle privacy case
The settlement the Navy and a sailor accused of being gay based on his AOL profile closed a chapter in a landmark privacy case.
The attorney for sailor Timothy McVeigh announced today that the Navy agreed to drop its legal appeal and settle the case, which had become a thorn in the sides of both the Pentagon and the world's largest online service.
According to the terms of the settlement, McVeigh will retire Aug. 31 with full benefits at the rank he would have achieved if he had been able to stay in the military--master chief petty officer E9--for his planned 24 years until 2004.
The Navy had ordered McVeigh discharged after AOL violated its own privacy policy by confirming to a naval investigator that an anonymous user profile in which the word "gay" was used to describe a member's marital status belonged to McVeigh. The Navy already had obtained the profile but needed to link legally it to McVeigh to make its case. The investigator, by his own admission, pretended to be a friend of McVeigh.
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Navy in January, preventing it from discharging McVeigh, ruling that the Navy broke federal law by asking for the information.
"With respect to gays in the military it sets a clear limit on how far the military can go in investigating its own," said Wolf, who practices with the firm Proskauer Rose.
AOL disagrees. As the government has increasingly turned its eye toward Internet legislation that covers everything from privacy to encryption, companies have tried to convince legislators that the industry can regulate itself.