The Devil Inside the Beltway: The Shocking Expose of the US Government’s Surveillance and Overreach Into Cybersecurity, Medicine and Small Business

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In 2008, Michael Daugherty, CEO of LabMD, a private Atlanta-based cancer detection facility, received a call from Tiversa, a Pittsburgh-based data security firm, stating that they had obtained a 1,718-page patient health information file belonging to LabMD through a peer-2-peer (P2P) network. Tiversa wasn’t about to divulge any further information about its acquisition until LabMD bought into their unsolicited lawyer-fee services. Daugherty had no idea that his polite refusal to Tiversa’s assistance would lead to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and thereby thrusting him into a nightmarish four-year journey Inside the Beltway – “an idiom used to characterize matters that seem to be important primarily to U.S. federal government officials, its contractors, lobbyists, and the corporate media who cover them, as opposed to the interests and priorities of the general U.S. population.” (Edited from Wikipedia).

Written with a “Jon Stewart flair” minus the colorful metaphors, Daugherty’s satirical humor isn’t simply for the sake of satire. He narrates a story that could easily be mistaken for conspiracy theory. If it wasn’t for the copious amounts of well-documented information directly connected with the ridiculously superfluous process that he had to undergo with the FTC, as well as the company’s development funds that were drained to cover traveling expenses, court costs, and the myriad of lawyers hired in an effort to, as Daugherty puts it, “make them (the FTC) go away,” Daugherty could quickly be labeled a nut case.

The Devil Inside the Beltway is not limited to Daugherty’s harrowing story. It is replete with enough factual information about the FTC that would make our Founding Fathers voluntarily turn in their graves just to hide their utter shame over a system they painstakingly sculpted that has gone awry. As of January 29, 2014, Daugherty announced on his blog (http://michaeljdaugherty.com/) that “the debilitating effects of the FTC investigative practices and litigation have forced him to wind down operations” at LabMd. His story, which has “transcended” his own personal troubles and now turned him into a whistleblower, is not over. “What started with a phone call from Pennsylvania has turned into a call for action.” We will have to see what form that action takes.


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Author
Star Count 5/5
Format Hard
Page Count 504 pages
Publisher Broadland Press
Publish Date 24-Sep-2013
ISBN 9780985742201
Bookshop.org Buy this Book
Issue April 2014
Category Current Events & Politics
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