decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
True criminals? | 269 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The crime was embarrassing AT&T
Authored by: jbb on Tuesday, July 02 2013 @ 11:20 PM EDT
Although I believe corporations should been punished when they make private information public like this. If anyone should be punished for leaking the email addresses it should be AT&T not Auernheimer. It seems there has been an attempt (successful so far) to deflect the blame away from AT&T by going after the person who made their incompetence public.

As I said before, if you don't meaningfully punish corporations for releasing private information like this then they will continue to do it. If their mistake only hurts commoners then they have no incentive to fix it. OTOH, if the release of these email addresses is no big deal then why is someone facing 4 years of jail time and a $70,000 fine for it?

IMO AT&T should be punished for this and Auernheimer should be rewarded for shaming them, otherwise you are providing feedback that will lead to an unstable system. What you have now is a system where corporations can divulge private information with impunity while citizens who report such transgressions are severely punished. This is completely backward. We have reverted to a feudal society. In this case Auernheimer is being treated as a whipping boy and is being punished for pointing out AT&T's security lapse.

I agree with you that on as far as security lapses go, this one is very minor. That's what led me to wonder what the true crime was and why the law was being twisted and broken in order to punish Auernheimer so severely.

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

True criminals?
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, July 03 2013 @ 05:53 AM EDT
In the UK AT&T would [probably] have fallen foul of the Data Protection Act.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )