WASHINGTON – A man skilled in the operation of commercial wireless Internet networks was sentenced today for intentionally bringing down wireless Internet services across the region of Vernal, Utah, the Justice Department announced today.

Ryan Fisher, 24, of Vernal, was sentenced to 24 months in prison to be followed by 36 months of supervised release for intentionally damaging a protected computer. U.S. District Judge Paul G. Cassell also ordered the defendant to pay $65,000 in restitution.

Fisher was charged on Feb. 15, 2006, in a one-count criminal indictment. The defendant worked for SBT Internet, which provided Internet service to residential and business customers around Vernal using wireless radio signals between SBT’s radio towers and its customers’ wireless access points.

Fisher left SBT over business and financial disputes and went on to work for, and eventually own, another Internet service provider in the area. Fisher admitted that he then used SBT’s computer passwords to take control of SBT’s network and reprogram its customers’ wireless access points to cut off their Internet service, including the service of one customer who was relying on electronic mail for news of an organ donor. He intentionally reprogrammed the access points to complicate SBT’s repair efforts which resulted in jammed wireless Internet airwaves that affected others outside SBT’s network, including another wireless Internet service and its customers. In total, more than 170 customers lost Internet service, some of them for as long as three weeks, and collectively caused more than $65,000 in losses.

The case was investigated by the FBI. The case was prosecuted by Senior Counsel Scott L. Garland and Trial Attorney Josh Goldfoot of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Leshia Lee-Dixon and Jonathan Boyd of the District of Utah.

USDOJ - The Justice Department announced today that a superseding indictment was returned by federal grand jury in Salt Lake City, Utah, charging the parent company of gold and silver refiner Johnson Matthey Inc. with conspiracy to violate the Clean Water Act (CWA). The UK-based corporate parent, Johnson Matthey PLC is a diversified multi-national specialty chemicals producer.

On Mar. 22, 2006, Johnson Matthey Inc. and two senior company managers were charged in a 29-count indictment with conspiracy, concealment by trick, scheme and device, and violations of the CWA. Specifically, the defendants conspired to conceal the high level of pollutants they discharged by cheating on required tests and submitting false information about the amount of selenium released into wastewater. Today’s superseding indictment alleges that the parent company played a role in conspiring to conceal the release of the contaminated wastewater into the sewers.

The conspiracy charge carries a maximum fine of $500,000 for the corporate defendants. Charges in an indictment are merely accusations, and defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in federal court.

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Richard Lambert and Jared Bennett and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Aunnie Steward for the District of Utah, and Richard Poole, Trial Attorney in the Environmental Crimes Section of the Department of Justice in Washington.

The Village of South Elgin, Ill., has agreed to settle allegations that it violated the Fair Housing Act by refusing a permit to allow Unity House Inc. to operate a home for seven residents recovering from addictions to drugs and alcohol, the Justice Department announced today.

Under the settlement, which must still be approved by the United States District Court in Chicago, the village must allow Unity House to operate with up to seven residents recovering from drug or alcohol addiction. The settlement also requires the village to pay a total of $25,000 in damages to Unity House, $7,500 each to two residents who were not able to live in the home when the permit was denied, and $15,000 to the United States as a civil penalty. The settlement also requires relevant village officials and employees to receive training on the Fair Housing Act and requires the village to keep and maintain records for the next three years relating to other zoning and land use requests regarding homes for persons with disabilities.

“We are pleased that an amicable settlement was reached in this case,” said Wan J. Kim, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “All persons with disabilities deserve the right to be protected by federal civil rights laws.”

“This settlement should send a message to other communities that no municipality, driven by neighborhood opposition, can prohibit persons recovering from addictions from enjoying the benefits of living in the safe and supportive environment of a group home,” said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

Unity House is a group home for persons recovering from alcohol or drug dependency. Under the Fair Housing Act, persons recovering from drug or alcohol addiction are protected from discrimination in housing because they are recovering from addiction. Persons who are currently using illegal drugs, however, are not protected by the disability provisions of the Fair Housing Act.

Fighting illegal housing discrimination is a top priority of the Justice Department. In February, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales announced Operation Home Sweet Home, a concentrated initiative to expose and eliminate housing discrimination in America. This initiative was inspired by the plight of displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina who were suddenly forced to find new places to live. Operation Home Sweet Home, however, is not limited to the areas hit by Hurricane Katrina, but targets housing discrimination all over the country.

More information about Operation Home Sweet Home is available at the Justice Department Web site, . Individuals who believe that they may have been victims of housing discrimination can call the Housing Discrimination Tip Line (1-800-896-7793), contact the Department of Housing and Urban Development at 1-800-669-9777, or email the Justice Department at fairhousing@usdoj.gov

The federal Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin and disability. Since Jan. 1, 2001, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has filed 215 cases to enforce the Fair Housing Act, 97 of which have alleged discrimination based on disability. More information about the Civil Rights Division and the laws it enforces is available at .

NEW YORK – U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty announced today during a speech at a meeting of the Lawyers for Civil Justice in New York that the Department of Justice is revising its corporate charging guidelines for federal prosecutors throughout the country.

The new guidance revises the Thompson Memorandum, which was issued in January 2003 by then-Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson and titled the “Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations.” The memo provides useful guidance to prosecutors in the field through nine factors to use when deciding whether to charge a corporation with criminal offenses.

The guidance continues to require consideration of the factors from the Thompson memo but adds new restrictions for prosecutors seeking privileged information from companies. Specifically, it creates new approval requirements that federal prosecutors must comply with before they can request waivers of attorney-client privilege and work product protections from corporations in criminal investigations.

“Our efforts to investigate and prosecute corporate fraud in the past five years through the President’s corporate initiative have been tremendously successful,” said Deputy Attorney General Paul J, McNulty. “With this new guidance, we want to encourage corporations to prevent corruption through self-policing and continue to punish wrongdoers through cooperation with law enforcement.”

The new guidance requires that prosecutors must first establish a legitimate need for privileged information, and that they must then seek approval before they can request it. When federal prosecutors seek privileged attorney-client communications or legal advice from a company, the U.S. Attorney must obtain written approval from the Deputy Attorney General. When prosecutors seek privileged factual information from a company, such as facts uncovered in a company’s internal investigation of corporate misconduct, prosecutors must seek the approval of their U.S. Attorney. The U.S. Attorney must then consult with the Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division before approving these requests.

The guidance cautions prosecutors that attorney-client communications should be sought only in rare circumstances. If a corporation chooses not to provide attorney-client communications after the government makes the request, prosecutors are directed not to consider that declination against the corporation in their charging decisions. Prosecutors are told to request factual information first and make sure they can establish a legitimate need to go further before requesting a waiver of privilege to obtain attorney-client communication or legal advice.

The new memorandum also instructs prosecutors that they cannot consider a corporation’s advancement of attorneys’ fees to employees when making a charging decision. A rare exception is created for those extraordinary instances where the advancement of fees, combined with other significant facts, shows that it was intended to impede the government’s investigation. In those limited circumstances, fee advancement may be considered only if it is authorized by the Deputy Attorney General.

The changes announced today by Deputy Attorney General McNulty were made after careful review and numerous meetings with those in the business and legal communities who raised concerns about the Department’s guidance.

“We will safeguard every tool prosecutors need to fight fraud and continue our aggressive efforts in rooting out corruption in our financial markets to protect the interests of the investing public,” said Deputy Attorney General McNulty. “The Department supports the sanctity of attorney-client privilege. We encourage full and frank communication between corporate employees and their lawyers. With this new guidance, I will personally approve all future requests for attorney-client communications.”

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today proposed significant regulatory changes to make experimental drugs more widely and easily available to seriously ill patients with no other treatment options and to clarify the circumstances and the costs for which a manufacturer can charge for an experimental drug.

Under the proposed rule, expanded access for experimental drugs would be available to individual patients, small patient groups, and larger populations under a treatment plan when there is no satisfactory alternative therapy to diagnose, monitor or treat the disease or condition.

"This proposed reform is carefully designed to balance several objectives," said Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, Acting FDA Commissioner. "One goal is to enable many more patients who lack satisfactory alternatives to have access to unapproved medicines, while balancing the need for safeguarding the individual patient. Another equally important goal is to ensure the continued integrity of the scientific process that brings safe and effective drugs to the market."

"FDA hopes this proposal will increase awareness in the healthcare community of the range of options available for obtaining experimental drugs for seriously ill patients," added Dr. Janet Woodcock, FDA's Deputy Commissioner for Operations. "By clarifying and streamlining the processes, FDA also hopes to encourage companies to make such drugs available, and reduce barriers for healthcare practitioners in obtaining them."

FDA has allowed many types of access to experimental therapies since the 1970's. Some of the larger programs, including those under the treatment IND (Investigational New Drug) regulations, were successful in enabling tens of thousands of patients with HIV/AIDS, cancer and cardiovascular diseases to receive promising therapies before the products were approved for marketing. However, the existing regulations did not adequately describe the full range of programs available, explicitly recognizing only emergency use for individual patients and widespread treatment use access for large groups of patients. FDA believes it is important that its regulations clearly reflect the full range of treatment use programs available to ensure broad and equitable access to experimental drugs for treatment use. The regulations covering when it is appropriate to charge for an experimental drug need revisions because they fail to account for the full range of circumstances in which charging should be permissible and because they have proven difficult to interpret in practice, resulting in confusion over what costs could be recovered.

The proposed rules, which are open for comment for 90 days are described in detail at the following CDER web address: (http://www.fda.gov/cder/regulatory/applications/IND_PR.htm) The most significant proposals would:

(1) Modernize applicable regulations to include all circumstances under which access to experimental drugs is permitted, including:

• single patients in non-emergency and emergency settings;
• small groups of patients; and
• larger groups of patients under a treatment IND. To authorize these expanded access treatment uses, FDA generally must be satisfied that the patient's serious or immediately life-threatening disease or condition has no satisfactory approved therapy; that the potential benefit for the patient justifies the potential risks; and that providing the therapy will not interfere with the drug's development.

(2) Make experimental drugs more widely available in appropriate situations by establishing criteria that link the level of evidence needed to support the use of an experimental drug to the seriousness of the disease and the number of patients likely to be treated with the drug;

(3) Revise the current regulation regarding manufacturers' recovery of the costs of an experimental drug to:

• clarify that such charges are permissible in a clinical trial only to facilitate development of drugs that promise significant advantages over existing therapies, and might not otherwise be developed because of their high cost;
• clarify that allowing charging for treatment use of an experimental drug is intended to facilitate and encourage access to drugs that might not be made available for treatment use unless a manufacturer is able to recover its costs.

The proposal also would simplify the cost recovery calculation by making clear that charges for an experimental drug used in a clinical trial may include only direct costs associated with the drug's development, and that charges for experimental drugs for treatment use may also include administrative costs of making the drug available for intermediate
patient populations and under large scale treatment INDs.

House Republicans had initially planned to terminate the agency in October 2007 through through HR 5122, transferring its mandate to the State and Defense departments. Democrats in the House introduced new legislation last month authorizing the agency for an additional year. The measure passed the Senate on Wednesday, and the House approved it by voice vote during its last sitting of the year on Saturday. Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO), who will take over as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in January, has already suggested that he will expand the scope of SIGIR in the new year.

US District Judge Thomas F. Hogan seemed skeptical of giving Rumsfeld immunity from the allegations, but also acknowledged that allowing the civil lawsuit to proceed would be unprecedented. He promised to rule quickly in the case. Rumsfeld resigned  from his position last month pending the confirmation of his successor. His resignation was quickly followed by the filing of a war crimes complaint against him under Germany's universal jurisdiction laws.