The repair shop almost certainly retains ownership of unclaimed deviced after some period of time. The shop owns the laptop. The data is theirs to do with as they please and they chose to publish it (at least, that's the story). No hacking necessary.
> The data is theirs to do with as they please. No hacking necessary.
I'd love to see the jurisprudence on this. If there are any photos, do they also get the copyrights? Can they share any nudes they find? How about that Adobe license?
As a non-lawyer, it is clear that owning the medium doesn't mean you own the information on it (or the cloud wouldn't be a thing). If we agree on that, then logically, it is possible to exfiltrate information that does not belong to you without authorization, which I think can be called "hacking".
I made no such argument - I was establishing rules around ownership of information when the medium belongs to someone else, seeing that you cannot hack your own information (gp's argument)
I was more asking about what Twitter's view is. If they consider copyright violation to be hacking, and they have a rule against hacking, do they ban all copyright violation with that rule.
Considering copyright violation to be hacking seems pretty out there to me, and I haven't seen clear evidence that Twitter actually holds that point of view.
Ownership of data is not the same as ownership of publication rights. However, the pictures and emails in question were clearly not copyrighted or licensed.
If transferring ownership of a physical data storage device does not constitute transferring ownership of the data stored therein, then I don't know what does.
When it comes to the cloud, that sounds more to me like leasing storage rights, but I'm no lawyer.
However, the pictures and emails in question were clearly not copyrighted or licensed.
I think you misunderstand US copyright law. With few exceptions, almost all pictures and emails are copyright by whoever took the picture or wrote the email. Is there some reason that these would not qualify?
>Is there some reason that these would not qualify?
I believe excerpts of pictures or emails taken for news reporting qualifies as fair use. It's not like they showed the whole picture, they just cropped his face with the crack pipe in his mouth. Likewise, the full emails where they discuss illegally peddling influence and pay for play with all the headers wasn't published. Just select emails with enough metadata to give context.
Copyright doesn't supersede the first amendment right of free press. At worst, the NYPost is on the hook for $150,000 per violation. They can probably make that much and then some on the scoop. It may be worth it to them, even if they lose on a fair use argument. It's a huge scoop in October of an election year.
All true, in my not-a-lawyer opinion. The important addition is that "fair use" is a defense that allows the use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances. Like a book review that includes an excerpt from a novel, the underlying material is still protected by copyright. It doesn't mean the material is "not copyrighted"---the whole reason fair use applies is because it is protected by copyright. Practically all emails and photos that contain any element of originality are protected by copyright.
However, the issue has not been well tested in courts. The piece ends by saying "Congress should act to clarify whether and when forwarding an email infringes the author’s reproduction right in the work."
Usually the embarrassing information is published before the embarrassed party is aware that their dirty laundry is about to go public. Once the information is out there, a copyright infringement suit is usually an irrelevant or losing move for managing the politician's image. I would rate this story worse for Biden if he filed a copyright infringement suit against the computer repair guy or the Post, for example. Using copyright could prevail legally yet lose in the more politically important court of public opinion.
US news publishers are not prohibited from publishing copyrighted information for the purpose of making the news. That’s part of the First Amendment.
Whether the repair shop owner had copyright to the content is totally irrelevant. He had legal possession of the drive, and handed it to a journalist who found something newsworthy on it.
Almost every single major story every told in modern history will contain essentially the same type of information transfer, and it is not illegal for the journalist to use this information or publish it if it’s newsworthy.
Sometimes a source can go to jail for sharing the information. But almost certainly that won’t happen in this case, because there is no evidence that the repair shop owner did anything wrong. In fact, he was the one who called the FBI!
>Whether the repair shop owner had copyright to the content is totally irrelevant. He had legal possession of the drive, and handed it to a journalist who found something newsworthy on it.
No. He handed it to a lawyer working for the President of the US' personal lawyer (Rudy Guiliani), not a journalist. Guiliani handed it to the NY Post and then worked with them.
Not following the details of the story, but has anyone suggested that Hunter dropped off the laptop himself?
Stealing a laptop and causing a bit of damage to initiate a costly repair, then leaving it with a shop under an assumed name seems like a solid Mitnick-level hack to me.
I think the most likely scenario is that he went on a bender (he has well known substance abuse problems) and locked himself out, dropped it off to get it fixed, and forgot about it. This seems much more plausible than some of the other extremely complex theories which assume that, ahem, Rudy Gulianni (of all people) was able to plan a years long scam to procure this particular computer.
Is there any evidence the computer is legit? The only indisputable thing is the photos right? And those could have been hacked from anywhere. Or am I missing something? (I haven’t studied it much)
Or, none of the leaked data came from the "computer" in question. Hunter's iCloud backup was hacked, Burisma's internal emails were breached by the GRU last year. Combine those two sources, mix real correspondences with some forgeries, and blame it all on a single laptop a MAGA supporter happened upon in rural Delaware.
Yeah, sure, certainly plausible. But that's a lot more complicated than a guy who has a substance abuse problem doing things with his computer that a guy with a substance abuse problem would probably do (btw Hunter is sober now, I think).
You missed my sarcasm. If you believe son of the Vice President abandoned his laptop in rural Deleware to a Trump supporter to eventually give it to the Trump campaign, I have several bridges in NY to sell you.
Wouldn't it classify as hacking if the data had any encryption? Bypassing encryption to reach copyrighted media would be a DMCA violation if nothing else.
No clue if any encryption was used though, and either way the doxxing restriction could stop it.
It's not hacking to decrypt your own data. The argument is, and the precedent set by law supports, that failure to pay for and retrieve the device after a set period of time transfers ownership. It's basically the legal grounds of "finders keepers"
People keep asserting that ownership of the data passed to the shop owner, but it's not at all clear that's the case.
1) Assuming Biden did bring and abandon the laptop, what do state laws generally say about data ownership? What does Delaware law say about it?
2) We can't assume it was Biden who brought the laptop. Suppose it was stolen: naively, I'd guess ownership can't pass to the store owner, because the person who brought it didn't own it in the first place. But who knows: IANAL. What if the laptop was legitimately owned by someone not Biden, but they stole Biden's data and moved it to the laptop before abandoning it?
3) Again naively, it appears that the shop owner definitely and Giuliani potentially distributed intimate videos of Hunter Biden without his consent. That would seem to run afoul of revenge porn laws, which are on the books in both Delaware (as of 2014) and New York (as of July 2019).
I don't know if the blanket assertions you're making are accurate or useful. At the very least, they need to be fleshed out, and there's way too little information available right now to say conclusively that the owner of the shop broke no laws.
Even if that scenario is true, there is zero evidence to corroborate it, nor has there been any concluded official investigation into the matter. I don't think it's fair for Twitter to execute that portion of their policy based on assumption alone.
There's zero evidence to corroborate anything, though, including plausible scenarios where publishing this information is either illegal or foreign electoral interference or both. And, as far as it goes, not even the Post's story has any evidence to verify it. Even the emails' authenticity is still in question, which would be trivial to verify if Giuliani and the Post simply released the raw emails instead of image files.
Meanwhile Steve Scully was suspended, reportedly because his twitter account was not hacked, as previously claimed, so sometimes the "hack" claims are spurious and need time to be sorted out.
"I sure hope this computer repairmen scans the data of our abandoned computer, realizes what it contains, and turns the data over to Rudy Giuliani or equivalent."
If the store owner was in on it, then he's taking a heckuva gamble on this working out right, with relatively little (known) reward.
However, the computer shop guy claims the laptop was dropped off in early 2019 and this article says the Russians hacked Burisma in November 2019. The email PDFs themselves provided by the NY Post are dated September 2019, so stuff doesn’t add up here.
There is no shortage of Republican operatives that will risk jail time to further their cause. See [1] for example.
And regarding the FBI, they were hoping that the FBI would open some sort of investigation, which would give the issue much more credibility. But that failed, so plan b was to just hand it over to NY Post.
If that were true, we would already be hearing denials about those emails. The fact that we haven't, indicates to me that they are instead going to tack on the "official Biden schedule shows he didn't meet with this guy" line because the emails are legit.
It's perfectly plausible that the Biden campaign has no idea if they're authentic or not, because neither he nor anyone on his campaign were on them. The only people who actually know if they're authentic or not are Hunter Biden, the sender, and anyone who has the emails. Which, incidentally, includes the NYP, who could mathematically prove their authenticity instantly by simply publishing them in the raw. In fact, if the NYP did any due diligence at all, they already verified the emails themselves. Which raises the question: why are they publishing just the images?
My bet is that the NYP didn't bother to verify the emails, because they don't even know how to do basic due diligence on these types of things. (I would guess they're authentic though, FWIW.)
Could be a "drip drip" play - wait for the people in question to explicitly deny the authenticity of the messages, then drop the raws for maximum impact. The longer they sit on this, though, the less likely that is, and I'm not sure if I trust the Post to be savvy enough for that kind of thing.
You're right - my comment was written under the assumption that the Biden camp has enough access to Hunter that they could verify the authenticity of the emails. I'll add: I would be shocked if that were not the case.
Regardless of my personal feelings about the NYP, my guess is they probably did verify to some extent and I agree that they are probably authentic.
I can understand the temptation of doing this sort of "slow the spread" if you're a social media platform faced with Trump, my worry is when that gets turned around and deployed against the Left, or against anti-trust, etc. I'm already getting near daily push notifications from Uber telling me which way to vote in California elections, I'm terrified of what the future holds where Twitter et al. can ban certain messages from even being sent to friends.
My mental model of Hunter Biden is a well-coiffed crack addict, who probably has said and done a thousand things and as likely as not has no clue what scams he was engaged in in 2015. He could potentially verify the emails; he could hem and haw out of embarrassment; he could lie; he could have himself lost access to the emails, which were, after all, downloaded onto the laptop he ostensibly lost.
And suppose you're a campaign operative, and you've been tasked with finding out from Hunter whether the emails are authentic or not. He swears that they're not. Next question: do you bet the campaign on his honesty?
> my guess is they probably did verify to some extent
Probably verifying to some extent is frustrating when it's trivial to mathematically prove authenticity via DKIM.
As far as social media and big tech goes, as soon as they took on this role of moral arbiters of the world, they signed onto an endless stream of these controversies. This is the world we live in now.
> he could have himself lost access to the emails, which were, after all, downloaded onto the laptop he ostensibly lost.
And suppose you're a campaign operative, and you've been tasked with finding out from Hunter whether the emails are authentic or not. He swears that they're not. Next question: do you bet the campaign on his honesty?
This was in 2019 - I'm assuming that the emails are backed up somewhere.
> they took on this role of moral arbiters of the world
Who gave them this role? I certainly didn't and I will donate to anyone who supports taking this role from them.
> This was in 2019 - I'm assuming that the emails are backed up somewhere.
Where? The laptop was lost in 2019, but the emails are from 2015. At some point they were on his company's mail servers, though whether they're still there would depend on their mail retention policy, which in my experience is often as short as 2 years. Even if they do still have it, going from campaign to Hunter Biden to ??? to IT personnel can take awhile.
> Who gave them this role? I certainly didn't and I will donate to anyone who supports taking this role from them.
I mean, if you're on Facebook/Twitter/etc, you are giving them this role, it's just a tradeoff you find acceptable for convenience.
That isn’t a credible argument. Why would Hunter Biden, whose dad is running for President, leave his laptop at a Trump-supporting discount computer repair shop without paying with (supposedly) incriminating emails on it? It’s so convoluted... it only makes sense if you wanted to fabricate cover for illegally hacking someone’s data (or more likely, modified and/or falsified data) and releasing it. As it is, the computer repair shop doesn’t own copyright of the PII and has no right to release it.
He's left valuable stuff before. He left his wallet and a crack pipe in a rental car that he returned. Some people are just forgetful.
Aside from the leak, it's also not the loss that it would be for most of us. He's rich. He had some sort of iCloud backup thing (sorry not a Mac user) to restore all the data, so he wasn't missing anything. Picking up an old laptop wouldn't be worthwhile if a replacement arrived before the old one was repaired.
The loss is that he left (supposedly) incriminating data on a laptop. That is incredibly valuable no matter how rich he supposedly is. It's just not a credible argument.
(And again, note that the repair shop owner never saw who dropped off the laptop. He just inferred it was Hunter Biden because there was apparently a Beau Biden sticker on the laptop.)
Have you ever interacted over a period of time with a crack addict?
Crackhead does not think the same way or act in any sort of reasonable manner. Well sometimes they do and then next day they break into a house crack a woman on the head killing her and get put into prison. While having enough money in the bank to stay high for years. It does not make sense but that is what one former classmate of mine did.
Here is a good explanation of what likely happened[1]. The laptop shows up at this repair shop in early 2019, and the shop owner "declared that because he is legally blind, he could not identify the person who brought it in".
Supposedly, this blind shop owner then gains access to the computer (doesn't say how, was it unprotected?) and it contains lewd videos of Hunter (again, blind shop owner). So he copies the drive (which is likely illegal in Delaware) and then he reached out to the FBI, or the FBI reached out to him, or someone else reached out to the shop owner (i.e. Rudy) and told him to reach out to the FBI. We don't really know because they can't get their story straight on that one.
Months later, and the FBI still hasn't announced an investigation, so they go to Plan B and Rudy hands the (likely illegally ) copied hard drive over to the NY Post.
Even if you believe their story, the shop owner likely broke some laws by copying and handing over PII to NY Post. But I am personally more inclined to believe that either the laptop was planted by someone, or that shop owner (who is an avid Trump supporter) was in on the ruse, and that the laptop/source material was not accidentally left by Hunter.
Hunter Biden's iCloud backup was hacked, which isn't too hard. Combine those real photos with some real (and some fake) emails the GRU hacked from Burisma last year, you have a ready-made "October surprise".
The degree in which you "fall for it" is the degree in which you want to see Trump reelected. No one that could fog a mirror would normally believe such nonsense.
The FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop (or really repair shop owner's, since he didn't pick it up or pay the $85 repair bill) since December of last year. This should be fairly easy to corroborate. That's why we aren't hearing on-the-record denials. There's a lot more where that came from, and it's likely real.
How? The laptop does exist, so at a minimum this is not an outright fabrication, allusions to which I've seen several times in the comments here. The veracity of the photos of crackhead Hunter seems to be also beyond reasonable doubt. As is the fact that he was magically getting millions of dollars for things he has no expertise in, for some reason. The veracity of emails can likely be confirmed by the FBI using DKIM.
A better question would be why this did not come up during the impeachment hearings. There's some exculpatory evidence on that laptop.
FWIW, using language like 'crackhead Hunter' is a pretty strong tell that you are a troll. If you want engage in debate on HN, I suggest you clean it up a bit.
And to answer your question, the intelligence community believes that this is GRU disinformation[1]. So that is why this wasn't used in the impeachment hearings. And also why the FBI is not investigating this.
There's literally a picture of him with a crack pipe in his mouth. He's factually a crackhead.
Also, you might want to avoid such categorical statements, because one of Devon Archer's business associates has recently flipped and provided his emails as well. Those corroborate the "China" arc of the story. Note that the story you linked is a repost of a WaPo story, which itself has no on-the-record corroboration from ODNI, FBI or DOJ. So I'm pretty sure it's fake news.
Images can be faked. Videos can be faked. I can make a deepfake video using open source tools with a few hours of work. There is a video floating around on the internet that shows Trump in a hotel with women peeing on the bed. Mainstream news doesn't report on that video because the origin of the video is uncertain. NY Post has made zero effort to verify the authenticity of the documents they have. And they are a right wing tabloid, so have no prior credibility to trade on.
And please post links to your sources. Until then, I am going to go out on a limb and assume that the reason you are not doing so is because they are also coming from sites with little to no credibility.
Authenticity of the image is not disputed by Bidens. :-) Hunter Biden also left drug paraphernalia in the rental car when returning it. There's a police report to that effect. His history of addiction to illicit drugs is even corroborated by CNN, which would gladly sweep it under the rug, if it could. Seriously, this is not a good hill to die on.
> The repair shop almost certainly retains ownership of unclaimed deviced after some period of time. The shop owns the laptop. The data is theirs to do with as they please and they chose to publish it (at least, that's the story). No hacking necessary.
The "repair shop" is almost certainly a poorly-convinced backstory as to the origin of the hacked materials.
The repair shop almost certainly retains ownership of unclaimed deviced after some period of time. The shop owns the laptop. The data is theirs to do with as they please and they chose to publish it (at least, that's the story). No hacking necessary.