gsdofthewoods

This dystopian vision would require lighting the Fourth Amendment on fire and lead to widespread human rights violations of innocent people. Is corporate espionage a problem? Of course it is. Is it worth abandoning the principles of a free society for? Absolutely not.

Reuters has many employees in India, and the Khare legal threats are issued by a US firm, Clare Locke, that describes its attorneys as "media assassins" [1] who have represented Russian oligarchs and people like Matt Lauer.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/metoo-media-assassins-clare-lo...

The things you're citing are referring to two different investigations. One is the most recent one that only centered on Plainfield, NJ, which is what Gizmodo is reblogging. The one where they did not investigate Geolitica's effectiveness at predictions was a broader investigation in 2021.

Good analysis. One important caveat is that, while this may technically have been a CFAA violation, it's almost certainly not one the Department of Justice would prosecute.

Last year, the department updated its CFAA charging policy to not pursue charges against people engaged in "good-faith security research." [1] The CFAA is famously over-broad, so a DOJ policy is nowhere near as good as amending the law to make the legality of security research even clearer. Also, this policy could change under a new administration, so it's still risky—just less risky than it was before they formalized this policy.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-...

Apparently Germany is an exception. From the story:

> Representatives from Germany—a country that has staunchly opposed the proposal—said the draft law needs to explicitly state that no technologies will be used that disrupt, circumvent, or modify encryption. “This means that the draft text must be revised before Germany can accept it,” the country said.

Here's the raw data linked in the article: [1] https://airtable.com/shrodU77cgvD2e8dc/tblwELYkSA0fNXgKF

China's government said it originated in China, but it denied that it intentionally flew over the US for surveillance purposes: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/03/china-tells-us-to-remain-coo...

Signal's SMS registration codes expire after a few minutes, so you wouldn't even need to know the duration of the incident. Let's be conservative and say the codes expire after 5 minutes (it's probably shorter), then Signal is registering 380 devices a minute.