Sarkozy Kicks Off Criminal Investigation Into Blog/Twitter Reports He Had An Affair
from the thin-skinned? dept
And we were always told in the US that we spent too much time worrying about which politician was having affairs, while in France, it was pretty much expected that politicians had mistresses. Yet, apparently, Nicolas Sarkozy is so upset about online rumors, repeated on blogs and on Twitter, that both he and his wife have had affairs, that a criminal investigation has been kicked off. Under what law? Apparently the claim is that this would be a "fraudulent introduction of data into a computer system." That seems like a stretch. These are just internet rumors. Most people let them go. At the very least, I could see a libel claim -- but a criminal investigation for "fraudulent introduction of data into a computer system" just seems like massive abuse of power and overkill.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: france, nicolas sarkozy, rumors, twitter
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And it would put many blood sucking lawyers out of business
Brilliant!
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That's a law?
What if I enter a fake name into my contact list on my phone?
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Re: That's a law?
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Re: Re: That's a law?
However, I still contend that there are plenty of reasons to enter fraudulent data into a computer. If someone IM's me asking for my phone number, I can't give them an incorrect number?
We must be missing some information on the law in question. If it really is as broad as Mike's article suggests, it can't stand up for long.
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Re: That's a law?
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Re: Re: That's a law?
Gain does not have to be defined only as monetary.
One could argue that it is fraud to enter bogus data into the NYT site in order to read it.
Such a law would be bogus, so it violates itself and therefore should be tossed.
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For frak's sake
And how does Sarkozy have access to computers? He's well over three strikes.
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Re: For frak's sake
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Is he saying it's HACKING?? :P
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Sarkozy
Perhaps we should be throwing him in jail and taking away his internet access.
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Uh oh...
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sarkozy
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translation misunderstanding
To clarify a bit what happened here, this rumor came out right at the moment of the regional elections in France, so he kicked off this investigation to get to know who originated the gossip. No one is likely to ever actually get convicted. The inestigation is just meant to find out who tried to politically unstabilize Sarkozy.
It actually IS "massive abuse of power" (not the first and probably not the last) but that's all there is to it.
Nobody gives a shit who bangs who anyway
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Quite simply, it's slander
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