Fraudulent use and possession of identifying information about an individual is unambiguously illegal in the United States
Federal Statute creating a general ban on possession of personally identifiable information (PII) in this context, please?
This is by all accounts a non-US hosting company (Ukraine is called out) and there's nothing to indicate a locality for the person publishing the website so there are likely jurisdictional issues here.
Past that, nowhere in the actual letter was PII referenced. It was certainly alluded to. But the lawyers reference "Private, personal, information".
To your other point about providing information? The website in its current form checks for the presence of a user-provided email address in the dataset, and returns a yes/no along with an explanation of why presence in in the database isn't an automatic indicator of being an active user.
The route that ALM's lawyers are taking is to send heavily caveated, non-legally binding demand letters to someone that they hope doesn't have competent legal counsel, and will therefore comply because "lawyers saying scary sounding things."
Frankly, they'd probably get a better response if they sent a letter saying "look, there's no legal basis for us to ask this, so we're not going to threaten, but you'd be doing an awful lot of people a solid if you took this content down."
First, if you're depending on news agencies to be "fair and unbiased", you're doing it wrong.
Second, some of the people in those news agencies are likely ALM Customers, and as such will have run afoul of the morality clauses in their employment agreements, and hence have a vested interest in ensuring the data never gets looked at too closely.
Chances are good that if you're actually filming something like this, you're in the middle of a good sized adrenaline dump, and working through an adrenaline dump isn't something most civilians are used to. Shaking hands is one sign of that.
For years, people have been told "don't get involved, call the police"
For 20+ years now, the public has been told - starting early in grade school - "don't get involved, don't try to catch the bad guy, don't take matters into your own hands." It starts in school, where you'll be suspended without question if someone else punches you and you _don't_ respond.
"Evans said that should never happen. “I’d also like to see some legislation that if a cop is on the ground struggling with someone, like he was the other night and everybody is videotaping, someone should be held accountable for not stepping up and helping them,” he said."
Someone standing around video taping is almost certainly of a generation that has been raised from cradle-age with the "let the police handle it" training. And now we've come to it's logical conclusion. You won't over-ride that type of indoctrination with a law and wishful thinking.
At most, you might expect someone to call 911 on behalf of the officer being beaten. Since that's what they've been trained to do.
Or, maybe she's just young enough not to have lived through Reagan and Nixon's respective presidencies at an age where their actions were meaningful.
Because in history curriculum these days, recent US history is getting a pretty hardcore white-wash, with lots of focus on what the US did that was good, leaving little to no time left over to focus on shortcomings.
Well, for what it's worth, they didn't summarily execute Grandma or her daughters. And presumably there were no pets in the house to be executed either, since there's no mention of dogs being shot out of hand.
Frankly, given the totality of the circumstances described by the court, the occupants of the house should consider themselves extraordinarily lucky to be alive.
That you can trust on the say-so of a random stranger you met on the internet? Well, I guess it depends on your use case.
Truecrypt was one of the few projects out there that was generally considered sufficiently trustworthy for non-coders and non-crypto geeks to feel comfortable using for storing information that could get them jailed or killed.
Using a single letter posted online to destroy trust in TrueCrypt was truly a master stroke. :(
or he does know what "possibly cracked" means, but the reporter taking the quote doesn't, and neither does the lawyer the reporter was interviewing.
This story was probably abstracted and dumbed down 7 or 8 times _before_ it got to the reporter, and that assumes the reporter wasn't outright lied to.
The internal conversations would have gone something like:
Tech guy: "Yeah, boss, as you'll see on page 273 of my report, we used a keylogger and screenscraper to get his.."
Boss: "Um, what? a keyscraper? what's that? Wait, you mean you scraped stuff off his keyboard? So that means we used Bio...statistics? Or DNA?"
Tech guy: "No, no...Listen. So, um, yeah, we cracked his password"
Boss: "Ok, so we've cracked truecrypt. Awesome. I'll tell my bosses."
Tech guy: "um, yeah. whatever makes you happy."
The only conclusions you can safely draw from this article is a) they caught someone and b) he had information in a truecrypt volume that the FBI was able to access.
"First, if that wasn't the case, who would want to buy it? (Sad, but true.)"
The snarky side of me is thinking that since it's software, there's technically no reason "accident avoidance preference" couldn't be remembered by the vehicle as a driver profile preference, in the same vein as mirror adjustment, seat position, steering wheel adjustment, etc.
So, people who are willing to sacrifice themselves to save, e.g., a deer or a child could set it to the most "altruistic" setting, and sociopaths could set it to "maximum driver safety", with a variety of settings in between.
Maybe throw in some external visual and/or audible indicators to give folks in cross walks an idea of what to expect from the vehicle, behavior wise (green indicator and Barney's "I love you" theme song means you're ok to enter the crosswalk, red indicator and Flight of the Valkyries means you might want to wait a few seconds), and couple it with a cellular tie-in to your car and life insurance companies so they can adjust your coverage levels and rates on the fly, and you're all set.
The problem isn't in the primary use case "kid runs in front of car".
it's in the corner and edge cases: What happens if, in order to miss the child, you have to swerve into a group of children in front of a school? Or swerve off a cliff?
On the post: Ashley Madison Continues To Use Dubious Legal Takedown Threats To Try To Disappear The Data It Failed To Protect
Re: Re: Re: Posting PII IS a crime
Federal Statute creating a general ban on possession of personally identifiable information (PII) in this context, please?
This is by all accounts a non-US hosting company (Ukraine is called out) and there's nothing to indicate a locality for the person publishing the website so there are likely jurisdictional issues here.
Past that, nowhere in the actual letter was PII referenced. It was certainly alluded to. But the lawyers reference "Private, personal, information".
To your other point about providing information? The website in its current form checks for the presence of a user-provided email address in the dataset, and returns a yes/no along with an explanation of why presence in in the database isn't an automatic indicator of being an active user.
On the post: Ashley Madison Continues To Use Dubious Legal Takedown Threats To Try To Disappear The Data It Failed To Protect
Re: Do no harm.
Also, don't forget general (though not absolute) prohibitions against prior restraint.
In the US, at least.
On the post: Ashley Madison Continues To Use Dubious Legal Takedown Threats To Try To Disappear The Data It Failed To Protect
Re: Posting PII IS a crime
The route that ALM's lawyers are taking is to send heavily caveated, non-legally binding demand letters to someone that they hope doesn't have competent legal counsel, and will therefore comply because "lawyers saying scary sounding things."
Frankly, they'd probably get a better response if they sent a letter saying "look, there's no legal basis for us to ask this, so we're not going to threaten, but you'd be doing an awful lot of people a solid if you took this content down."
On the post: Ashley Madison Continues To Use Dubious Legal Takedown Threats To Try To Disappear The Data It Failed To Protect
Re: ALM or SONY
Second, some of the people in those news agencies are likely ALM Customers, and as such will have run afoul of the morality clauses in their employment agreements, and hence have a vested interest in ensuring the data never gets looked at too closely.
On the post: Woman Catches Cop Beating Handcuffed Suspect; Police Union First In Line To Shoot The Messenger
Re:
On the post: Woman Catches Cop Beating Handcuffed Suspect; Police Union First In Line To Shoot The Messenger
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yup. That's why you release it publicly first. Otherwise it gets buried in the legal process.
On the post: Boston Police Commissioner Wants Cameras Further Away From Cops, Criminal Charges For Not Assisting Officers
For years, people have been told "don't get involved, call the police"
Someone standing around video taping is almost certainly of a generation that has been raised from cradle-age with the "let the police handle it" training. And now we've come to it's logical conclusion. You won't over-ride that type of indoctrination with a law and wishful thinking.
At most, you might expect someone to call 911 on behalf of the officer being beaten. Since that's what they've been trained to do.
On the post: Chicago's Secret Homan Square Detention Facility Way Worse Than Anyone Thought
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Because in history curriculum these days, recent US history is getting a pretty hardcore white-wash, with lots of focus on what the US did that was good, leaving little to no time left over to focus on shortcomings.
On the post: No Immunity For Cops Who Sent A SWAT Team To A 68-Year-Old Woman's House For Threats Delivered Over Open WiFi Connection
Re: Re:
However much it is, history says it won't be nearly enough to get tax payers attention.
On the post: No Immunity For Cops Who Sent A SWAT Team To A 68-Year-Old Woman's House For Threats Delivered Over Open WiFi Connection
Re:
Frankly, given the totality of the circumstances described by the court, the occupants of the house should consider themselves extraordinarily lucky to be alive.
And I mean that without even a touch of sarcasm.
On the post: Cops Caught Misbehaving During Pot Dispensary Raid Sue Police Dept. To Prevent Recording From Being Used Against Them
Re: Re: Obstruction of Justice
They were "utilizing a new, highly effective field test" to confirm the presence of schedule 1 drugs in the Pot Shop.
The test results are in...and they're apparently quite positive...
On the post: Possibly Cracked TrueCrypt Account At The Center Of Stolen Military Documents Case
Re:
That you can trust on the say-so of a random stranger you met on the internet? Well, I guess it depends on your use case.
Truecrypt was one of the few projects out there that was generally considered sufficiently trustworthy for non-coders and non-crypto geeks to feel comfortable using for storing information that could get them jailed or killed.
Using a single letter posted online to destroy trust in TrueCrypt was truly a master stroke. :(
On the post: Possibly Cracked TrueCrypt Account At The Center Of Stolen Military Documents Case
Re: Re:
It's not worthwhile to break the crypto. It's far more efficient to just work around it.
On the post: Possibly Cracked TrueCrypt Account At The Center Of Stolen Military Documents Case
Re: Re:
This story was probably abstracted and dumbed down 7 or 8 times _before_ it got to the reporter, and that assumes the reporter wasn't outright lied to.
The internal conversations would have gone something like:
The only conclusions you can safely draw from this article is a) they caught someone and b) he had information in a truecrypt volume that the FBI was able to access.
On the post: Cops Caught Misbehaving During Pot Dispensary Raid Sue Police Dept. To Prevent Recording From Being Used Against Them
Re:
Because in the words of the prophet:
War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery,
Ignorance is Strength
On the post: DailyDirt: Lethal Machines
Re: Re: Asimov himself
Damnit. Now I need to go reread the Robot Series and the Foundation books again.
On the post: DailyDirt: Lethal Machines
Re: Re: Re:
The snarky side of me is thinking that since it's software, there's technically no reason "accident avoidance preference" couldn't be remembered by the vehicle as a driver profile preference, in the same vein as mirror adjustment, seat position, steering wheel adjustment, etc.
So, people who are willing to sacrifice themselves to save, e.g., a deer or a child could set it to the most "altruistic" setting, and sociopaths could set it to "maximum driver safety", with a variety of settings in between.
Maybe throw in some external visual and/or audible indicators to give folks in cross walks an idea of what to expect from the vehicle, behavior wise (green indicator and Barney's "I love you" theme song means you're ok to enter the crosswalk, red indicator and Flight of the Valkyries means you might want to wait a few seconds), and couple it with a cellular tie-in to your car and life insurance companies so they can adjust your coverage levels and rates on the fly, and you're all set.
On the post: DailyDirt: Lethal Machines
Re: Re: Re:
Frankly, I'm just glad I'm not the engineer writing the code that makes the decisions.
On the post: DailyDirt: Lethal Machines
Re:
it's in the corner and edge cases: What happens if, in order to miss the child, you have to swerve into a group of children in front of a school? Or swerve off a cliff?
On the post: DailyDirt: Lethal Machines
Asimov himself
As written: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
The flaw was in the definition of "human being".
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