Ever wonder if whoever took the Parler information is in legal trouble? Parler is the social media platform used by the far-right fringe for discussing their woes and plans before and after the Insurrection. After it was taken down by Amazon Web Services for service policy violations, word came out that someone had found a way to scrape much or all of the information on the users and their posts from it – including deleted information.
Grayson Clary doesn’t think they’re facing any real legal trouble:
It’s worth handling carefully the sort of language that can get a person sued or prosecuted, and the Justice Department has, in fact, tried unsuccessfully to prosecute similar conduct under the federal anti-hacking statute: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). But what donk_enby seems to have done was really just scraping—automating the collection of the same information that a user with no special privileges could have retrieved by hand—and it can’t be said often or clearly enough that scraping is not a crime. That’s very far from saying, of course, that this conduct carries no risk; unfortunately, the fact that the best reading of the CFAA doesn’t punish this conduct hasn’t been enough to protect scrapers from litigation, or even criminal charges. (As Swift on Security put it, this argument “is not legal advice to enumerate random APIs.”) But the value of the Parler archive highlights, in that vein, the importance of shaking the clouds that still hang over techniques on which journalists and researchers have every right to rely. [Lawfare]
Makes it all feel a little Wild West, doesn’t it? It’s an Either know your shit or don’t come to play deal.
Maybe the best way to think of it is just like garbage cans – put a URL out there with unprotected data on it, it’s legal for anyone who can find it.
