> I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total...
> the conviction was vacated by a higher court
> While the judges did not address the substantive question on the legality of the site access, they were skeptical of the original conviction, noting that no circumvention of passwords had occurred and that only publicly accessible information was obtained.
I did some reasearch though, and indeed there seems to be an untried case where, if it is obvious that the owner of the data wants to keep it secret, it isn't okay. It is in danish so you'll likely need som google translate or somesuch, search for URL hacking: https://projekter.aau.dk/projekter/files/305754822/Speciale_...
But as a rule, it is on par with an email sent to a wrong recipient. https://www.version2.dk/artikel/lovraad-slaar-fast-url-hacki...
It is considered on par with an email sent to a wrong recipient. There might be an exception though, but it is untried in the courts, AFAIK.
Dumping the contents of a far-right website that helped push for Insurrection against the US Government seems pretty tame by comparison.
Also, Weev is open and proudly a Nazi, so the optics of bringing him up while defending the rights of a Fascist website isn't great.
You think there's "zero public interest" in knowing that a large US corporation, with private information about a significant fraction of the American public, has neglected their obligations to protect that private information? And that they've ignored all pleas to treat the vulnerability with the seriousness it deserves?
>Also, Weev is open and proudly a Nazi, so the optics of bringing him up while defending the rights of a Fascist website isn't great.
How are his political leanings relevant to the question of whether accessing this data would constitute a crime?
It is a felony to open a mail envelope addressed to someone else. It doesn't matter that a butterknife can cut open the envelope, the intent is clear.
The issue comes with the posts that were deleted: they arguably have an expectation of privacy.
EDIT: And direct messages, if they work like Twitter, DEFINITELY have an expectation of privacy. If Parler has a DM-like system, they are probably illegal to access.
In this case it is still an unauthorised hack.
> While the judges did not address the substantive question on the legality of the site access, they were skeptical of the original conviction, noting that no circumvention of passwords had occurred and that only publicly accessible information was obtained.
It's a pity it didn't make it to full review on appeal to get a solid ruling on this.
