[Anti-Bubba182]

Below is the relevant section of the law and the Registration and User Agreement.

Unlawful Access to Stored Communications 18 U.S.C. 2701.

"§ 2701. Unlawful Access to Stored Communications

(a) Offense.--Except as provided in subsection (c) of this section whoever–

(1) intentionally accesses without authorization a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided; or

(2) intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility; and thereby obtains, alters, or prevents authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section. "

Registration and User Agreement

"User Account Confidentiality: User agrees to protect user's account and password and not to disclose account information to any third party."

The WP did exceed an authorization to access FR by using anothers password(Forbidden under the Users Agreement which govern the access of users) to access FRmails and did not make any attempt to determine the rules of access to FR or presumably they would not have improperly used anothers password. They flat did violate section 2b of 18 U.S.C. 2701 in that they did not view, or observe the rules if they did view them. If the reporter was unaware of 2b of 18 U.S.C. 2701 it won't help. A professional at a large newspaper should know or should have asked.

The article additionally points out that for Mosk to legally use the MD4Bush account he would have needed to get the permission of FR first, which he certainly did not. The only other way legally is if Mosk was MD4Bush, which I doubt.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for the documentation and references.

So who will be the Compost's Mary Mapes, and who will be their Danny Blather?

[Gondring]

If they have clicked, you must convict!

[nopardons]

bttt

[Enchante]

WaPo violated the law it appears, and certainly violated the confidential user agreement between MD4Bush and FreeRepublic.... and certainly severely violated Steffen's privacy, since he had reason to rely upon the terms of the FreeRepublic user agreement - he was not posting the controversial comment on any open forum with public access, it was made in a 1-on-1 private email communication. Anyway, as everyone has pointed out, it is MD4Bush who was playing the active role of spreading rumors and Steffern who was merely giving a passive and PRIVATE "yeah I heard that too".....

This was an obvious set-up, and the gross journalistic misconduct in this case needs to be compared with the parallel behaviors of the various MSM journalists who were (while not accessing private emails, so far as we know) dragging Libby and Rove into their own cesspool of rumor-mongering about Valerie Pflame and then Libby gets burned because of MSM whores.......