A tough California bill that would have prohibited companies and individuals from using deceptive "pretexting" ruses to steal private information about consumers was killed after determined lobbying by the motion picture industry, Wired News has learned.

The bill, SB1666, was written by state Sen. Debra Bowen, and would have barred investigators from making "false, fictitious or fraudulent" statements or representations to obtain private information about an individual, including telephone calling records, Social Security numbers and financial information. Victims would have had the right to sue for damages.

The bill won approval in three committees and sailed through the state Senate with a 30-0 vote. Then, according to Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the measure encountered unexpected, last-minute resistance from the Motion Picture Association of America.

"The MPAA has a tremendous amount of clout and they told legislators, 'We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading,'" Goldberg said.

Consequently, when the bill hit the assembly floor Aug. 23, it was voted down 33-27, just days before revelations about Hewlett-Packard's use of pretexting to spy on journalists and board members put the practice in the national spotlight.

Legislature records confirm that the MPAA's paid lobbyists worked on the measure. An aide to Bowen, who was forced out of the legislature by term limits and was elected Secretary of State, said the MPAA made its displeasure with the bill clear to lawmakers.

"The MPAA told some members the bill would interfere with piracy investigations," the aide said. The association "doesn't want to hamstring investigators."

The MPAA declined to comment for this story.

California went on to pass a much more narrow bill that bans the use of deceit to obtain telephone calling records, and nothing else. A similarly tailored bill languished in Congress this year, despite high-profile congressional grillings of senior HP employees.

Sean Walsh, past president of the California Association of Licensed Investigators and an investigator for 27 years, said his group opposed SB1666 because it was too vague and would have tied the hands of investigators looking into insurance fraud, child support cases and missing children.

"There's a public reason and benefit for some of this information to be available to legitimate licensed investigators," Walsh said. "Should it be available to everyone out there? Probably not. There are people that have legitimate need for getting this information in terms of an investigation, enforcing a court order and helping to return a child. Those are all very legitimate reasons and by excluding that you do grave disservice to the average citizen and to large corporations."

Walsh also said groups like the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America hire investigators who use pretexting to ferret out copyright infringers, such as vendors on the street who are selling bootleg copies of CDs or DVDs. In that case, investigators may use some ruse to find out where the discs originated. (Records do not indicate that the RIAA had a position on the bill.)

Ira Rothken, a prominent technology lawyer defending download search engine TorrentSpy against a movie industry copyright suit, says he didn't know about the lobbying, but can guess why the MPAA got involved. Rothken is suing (.pdf) the MPAA for allegedly paying a hacker $15,000 to hack into TorrentSpy's e-mail accounts.

"It doesn't surprise me that the MPAA would be against bills that protect privacy, and the MPAA has shown that they are willing to pay lots of money to intrude on privacy," Rothken said. "I do think there needs to be better laws in place that would deter such conduct and think that it would probably be useful if our elected officials would not be intimidated by the MPAA when trying to pass laws to protect privacy."

For his part, private investigator Walsh, whose current firm specializes in protecting the privacy of corporate clients, said he hopes lawmakers in 2007 take their time.

"Everyone wants a quick fix, but they don't see the ripple effect until much later," Walsh said. "Our organization has been successful at educating legislators by saying, 'Wait a minute, but look at how it effects X, Y and Z.' They have to see those tangents so that if they are going to go ahead and pass legislation, they do it in a responsible and educated way."