What's the distinction you're drawing between "committing a crime" and "something a little nefarious" -- what's something "a little nefarious" that would warrant an FBI raid?

Not a Trump guy, but yes 1 example of many. But if we go with BLSS' apparent way of thinking on this, we should just take Trump's defense as gospel and not examine any information from the prosecution.

Update - looks like this will go to trial.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/hillsborough/2025/04/14/tam... /

I could not read the Tampa Tribune article because it was behind a paywall. Here's another article about the case: https://tinyurl.com/mpux8zzz

Kind of an interesting moment for this case. The Trump admin is suing CBS accusing them of deceitfully editing an interview with Kamala Harris while Fox News is trying to put a journalist in prison for releasing footage of an unhinged Kanye West interview where Fox News edited out anti-semitic rants and then ran the segment with the following lead in:

“Is West crazy?” Carlson asked at the top of the first interview. “You can judge for yourself as you watch what we are about to show you. He has his own ideas… But crazy? That was not our conclusion.”

“Not crazy,” Carlson concluded after the interview. “Worth listening to, even if you disagree with him.”

We'll see if Burke broke the law. But I tend to think more information is better, and that it's a pretty slippery slope if Burke is convicted. Fox's behavior here was far more eregious than CBSs and I think journalists creating accountability is a good thing. But that's just me.

Sorry, I mixed up my Trump campaign threats against CBS. I had thought that the Kamala transcript was leaked by a CBS employee, but I was mixing it up with the story that came out on conservative media (then disappeared) about a whistleblower who was going to prove that CBS gave Kamala debate answers.

But either way, I'm unconvinced that the government deciding that a journalist accessing information on a server with others' credentials should be illegal in a good thing. And if that's where this case ends up, there are some pretty scary implications for modern journalism.

Generally, journalists have been provided protections when publishing illegally accessed materials -- provided they didn't play a direct role in acquiring those materials and the materials contain public concern. That's based on Bartnicki v. Vopper, where a citizen illegally recorded a union negotiation call and dropped the recording in a journalist's mailbox. In Burke's case, according to the co-defendent who pleaded guilty, Burke was sent these credentials by the dude who plead guilty.

I think it's a pretty interesting question as to how you define a journalist's role, but it seems pretty arbitrary to me that the difference between legal and illegal in this case would be based on who actually took the action to login & download what they found. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked plenty of different journalists ended up with photocopied copies. You could easily make the case that downloading a video's basically the equivalent of making a photocopy, no?

It feels like things can get pretty dicey for journalists here. And that doesn't seem great to me.

Your interpretation's a lot stricter than the courts, for what it's worth. The Supreme Court's also ruled to reign in the CFAA a bit because there's concern that it's not nearly narrow enough. It was written before the internet, after all.

But it should be an interesting case -- thus far courts have basically punted on how "unauthorized access" is defined. And that's before you even consider the First Amendment rights provided to Burke as a journalist. The content he accessed was on public URLs -- the URLs were designed to be hard to find, but in previous cases courts have ruled that those are "speed bumps" and the intent to hide them is not the same thing as making access unauthorized.

Ultimately, it seems like Burke used a publicly published password to find access to a bunch of public URLs. He probably wouldn't have found those URLs without the password, but the URLs themselves weren't protected.

Thinking about it more, I don't think your house metaphor or my photo copy analogy is right. It's more like Burke walked up to a building, looked under the doormat, saw a key and unlocked the door, only to find that the building was just a facade and there weren't any other walls.

A pretty key part of that analogy was that the doormat was in front of a building missing 3 walls. The security failure isn't where you put the key, it's that you live in a house with no walls. The question it raises legally is whether you can reasonably expect security in that scenario.

What was stolen? There are court cases that do not interpret what Burke did as theft. What was downloaded was on a public link that anybody with the URL could access; previous cases have ruled that simply creating a very complicated, complex link that's still publicly accessible is a "speed bump" (their word) and does not make the content any less public. And that downloading/viewing/sharing that content is not theft.

So this is a really unique case where Burke accessed feeds that were set up in a way that other courts have ruled he has a right to because they were public and on the open web. But he seems to have found those feeds by logging into a site using credentials published somewhere on the web.

Hence my analogy of unlocking the door of a house missing three walls. Had he walked around the back of the house, it's pretty clear how courts would rule as there's already case law. And that's what's super weird about this case -- if you put a password in front of a bunch of public URLs, are they less public?

You're acting like he typed in a random URL for funsies and it popped up some interesting info. If he obtained login data with the intent to secure information, that's really all there is to it. I don't care about your empty walls analogy, and at this point we are so deep in this analogy the picture I have of this hypothetical building we've created is like something out of a Christopher Nolan film.

That is really rich after you immediately declared him innocent while I was the one saying maybe we should wait and hear more details before we dismiss it as 1st amendment infringement. We are debating on the details of what has been alleged, nothing wrong with that

Don't know enough to have an opinion on this, but I appreciate the dialogue between the two of you. It really gives a better context to the case. Also refreshing to read two diverse opinions on a message board without any level of bashing or belittling. Keep it coming, I'm enjoying it.