Do you have any idea what charges these may be? IFAIU, there're no laws which make it criminal to share information.

If even a single byte leaked, I guess the charges can include being accessory to identity fraud?

Criminal charges assume intent, and it's very hard to think that facebook as a company had intent of committing identity fraud.

Crimes do not always require intent. It depends on what the statute says specifically.

Yes, there're such crimes, but there aren't so many of them.

There are lots of crimes that require a mental state less than intent (either recklessness or criminal negligence, mostly, though there are some strict liability crimes, and the weird case of “malice aforethought” for common law murder which is narrower than recklessness but just slightly broader than only intent.)

Recklessness and negligence require some understanding of what you are doing and that it's wrong. So, it's really hard to commit them by mistake.

> Recklessness and negligence require some understanding of what you are doing and that it's wrong.

Negligence specifically does not, it only requires the existence of a duty of care (except not in specialized cases, that of reasonable care, which doesn't mean you are aware of risk, but that a reasonable person in your place would be.) Recklessness requires conscious awareness and disregard of risk, but not awareness of wrongness.

Harms from recklessness are mistakes, while recklessness itself is not, but negligence is quite normally a mistake.

You know data often leaks and leads to identity theft and yet you slurp it down anyways and freely share it around. Sounds reckless and negligent to me.

Since it appears the investigation is focused on information sharing agreements between Facebook and "device manufacturers" I would suspect criminal wiretapping.

But of course there's always the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which is so broad that it could potentially apply to just about anything anyone has ever done via an internet connection.

Doesn't a grand jury meet after charges have been filed? Or is federal different than state in that respect?

No. After charges are filed you go to court. Grand jury votes on the charges.

I thought grand jury meets before charges are filed so they can authorize access to documentation and such things?

IANAL, but grand juries do a lot of work before the charges are filled. For example, they check whether there's a probable cause for a search warrant.

Do you know how grand juries are selected? I find it weird that I've been selected for a trial jury a bunch of times but never a grand jury.

Get a bigger hat, it's right there in the name.

AFAIK, they are selected the same way as trial jury. I think the main problem is that there's less need for grand juries since they process information much more quickly than trial juries.

Yeah, I was kind of writing that under assumption "if it would have been found criminal".