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The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

mchap.io

81–90 of 230 posts

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#81
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I give the uranium back and they want to search my house anyway they better have a warrant

Okay, but if you demand a warrant to confirm you don't have uranium, you can't be surprised if they are going to treat you as hostile.

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Yeah, who the hell does this guy think he is? We want to explore every nook of his house and he gets uppity? Clearly something to hide.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#82
post #75
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple affidavit under perjury should absolutely suffice. How do you know I didn't upload it to S3, some torrent, IPFS, or elsewhere? I'd tell them to fuck off if they want to lay hands on my computer.. or at least come back with a court order.

Yes, I did indeed sign an affidavit.

And did you have to sign it? What would have happened if you hadn't? Why do you have to sign a legally enforceable document because some idiot messed up?

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>… and refused to cooperate with the third party auditor Well, yeah. No way I am letting someone scan and archive my drives/data to correct their mistake. They broke other people’s privacy and now they want to break mine? Pound sand. Even if they could prove my drives had been wiped, that would do nothing to prove it had not been otherwise copied elsewhere.

This is not how the law works. If enriched uranium shows up at your door, you don't just get to hold onto it just because someone screwed up.

> If enriched uranium shows up at your door, you don't just get to hold onto it just because someone screwed up.

Yeah but that's because there are specific laws regulating possession of certain materials (NBC capable, explosives, drug precursors).

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#85
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call the city asking for the writer to agree to a warrantless search "acting in very good faith".

A warrant is only required for a police search. You can agree to have anyone search your property as a resolution to any legal agreement if you want to.

A warrant is required for all government search, and I can just as easily waive my right for a warrant w/ the police.

In fact, a workers for the municipality is the very last government level Id want snooping in my house. Next thing I know Im getting fined for having the wrong colored bathroom tiles.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#86
post #82
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did indeed sign an affidavit.

And did you have to sign it? What would have happened if you hadn't? Why do you have to sign a legally enforceable document because some idiot messed up?

Not OP, but signing it probably made the mess immediately disappear. Even if there was no legal requirement, the stress and potential expenses are not worth it if the data was genuinely deleted.

Taking a moral stand has costs that not everyone can bear.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#87
post #22

The most interesting part of this story is the potential legal risk of holding onto the records that were improperly disclosed. Had the author not notified the city that they had royally screwed up by divulging far more sensitive information than they had realized, they likely would have never realized the error, and he would have been free to do whatever he liked with the data. But once he notified them of their err…

>But what about data? Mere information?

Everything is mere information.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#88
post #4

wow! in Europe, this request 1. From address 2. To address 3. bcc addresses 4. cc addresses 5. Time 6. Date correlates person-related information (who was in contact with whom at which date and time). storing it, let alone processing it is only admissible on a need to know basis. even if you jump through the hoop of an officer acting on behalf of Seattle is not a person any more, which is a stretch already, even then…

Generally agree with this.

Whoever the author is has a totally different view of "metadata".

Metadata from my perspective would be "general amount of emails", (possibly) "address blocks (just involved, not from/to/bcc/cc)", "time frames" (with large window averaging), (maybe...) "very vague categories".

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>… and refused to cooperate with the third party auditor Well, yeah. No way I am letting someone scan and archive my drives/data to correct their mistake. They broke other people’s privacy and now they want to break mine? Pound sand. Even if they could prove my drives had been wiped, that would do nothing to prove it had not been otherwise copied elsewhere.

This is not how the law works. If enriched uranium shows up at your door, you don't just get to hold onto it just because someone screwed up.

Uranium is illegal to possess and is a tangible object. Data is intangible and can be copied. If Matt gave into a request to search his hard drive, said search could extend into other devices, online accounts, etc. And that wouldn't even prove that he no longer possesses the data
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