Are sites that give unfiltered ADS-B data legal? Are plane tracking services such as ADS-B Exchange and TheAirTraffic that do not honor the FAA's Limited Aircraft Data Display program legal to use? Is it legal to operate a feeder station for one of these? Is it legal to run one of these services? In other words, is LADD enforceable?
Section 566 (&quot;RIGHT TO PRIVACY WHEN USING AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEM&quot;, page 3385) of the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act, the law which created LADD, says, Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Administrator shall, upon request of a private aircraft owner or operator, block the registration number of the aircraft of the owner or operator from any public dissemination or display, except in data made available to a Government agency, for the noncommercial flights of the owner or operator. This says nothing about creating legal obligations for anyone except the FAA Administrator, so it seems that LADD is not binding on anyone except the FAA. There is one case in which LADD is binding: the FAA's page on LADD says, Vendors who subscribe to FAA SWIM [System-Wide Information Management] Data feeds are bound by a Data Access User Agreement to filter any LADD participant from public display of aircraft flight data. Thus, flight trackers using FAA SWIM data are required to comply with LADD, even if they obtain data on the aircraft from another source. The wording of the FAA's site also implies that compliance is not mandatory for trackers that do not have agreements with the FAA to use SWIM data.
A law has to be "broad" to include a lot of possible crimes and intent of criminals and account for the good faith of non-criminals. "Intentionally access without authorization/exceed" is actually fairly specific; "intent" is the keyword. Someone making a mistake may have intent to login, but no intent to commit a crime. Someone confused by "different pages of demo and live accounts" can easily defend their actions by pointing out that they were confused. It's up to the reasonableness of the pertinent law enforcement and prosecutors to take into account the evidence that reasonable mistakes were made by little old ladies and not charge them with a crime. And for the most part, 98% of the time, law enforcement and prosecutors are reasonable.
Ark. Code 5-60-120 is very clear that the act of intercepting is a crime. Not just &quot;recording and using&quot;, not just &quot;recording&quot;, but intercepting in any way. Specifically: It is unlawful for a person to intercept a wire, landline, oral, telephonic communication, or wireless communication, and to record or possess a recording of the communication unless the person is a party to the communication or one (1) of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to the interception and recording. Intercepting is illegal, therefore it is not &quot;okay&quot;. Perhaps the &quot;sort of a lawyer&quot; was speaking of the probability of getting caught doing it.
First, it is highly unlikely that it would remain continuously exactly at 60,000 feet. I mention this because that altitude happens to be the boundary between Class &quot;A&quot; airspace, and Class &quot;E&quot;. (see graphic below) Class A airspace is the domain of a lot of commercial air traffic, so the FAA regulates it closely. Specific requirements for aircraft can be found in 14 CFR 91.135. If no prior coordination was made with FAA Air Traffic Controllers, and no clearance was explicitly given, the balloon would be in violation of this regulation at a minimum. Presuming it would drift above 60,000', it would still be in Class E airspace, which the FAA has jurisdiction over, even if the flight requirements are less stringent. Specific requirements for balloons can be found in 14 CFR Subpart D, 101.33, 101.35, 101.37, and 101.39. Presuming the Chinese did not comply, it would also be in violation of these sections.
In the UK and USA (and I imagine other jurisdictions) there have been laws that explicitly provide for orders obliging entities to (A) provide access or information and (B) keep the order secret. For example, in the USA the Stored Communications Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act and Right to Financial Privacy Act authorise the FBI to issue National Security Letters (Wikipedia, EFF, EPIC, Lawfare). These are an administrative subpoena, without prior approval from a judge, for meta-information (e.g. phone numbers dialed or email recipients addressed but not the content) of communications relevant to national security investigations. They typically contain a non-disclosure requirement prohibiting the recipient of the NSL from disclosing its existence or the FBI's demands. There have been challenges on First Amendment grounds to the non-disclosure aspect but, so far as I'm aware, they have all ultimately failed. Some of their non-disclosure requirements may eventually expire under other laws. In response, so-called 'warrant canaries' (Wikipedia) have been developed (and gone a bit further than the original idea) - these are intended to allow entities to relatively passively warn of such an order having been received if not the detail of the order. However, they can be legally risky in that they might be seen by a court as trying to circumvent the non-disclosure requirement and therefore breaking it.
I can't see any law that would make this illegal. If you don't like it, you can either pay the upgrade, or not fly Ryanair.
Surely such a well meaning albeit naive driver wouldn't stand a chance in court if they said that it's because they've a section 230-like protection. Because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act explicitly protects computer service providers from such charges. A driver is not a computer service provider, and the US legislature has never voted to offer similar protection to drivers picking up hitchhikers. You say that an email can easily be classified as fraudulent, but that's not true. Spam detection has gotten pretty sophisticated, but they still get plenty of false positives. They were a lot less sophisticated back in 1996 when the Communications Decency Act was passed.
Copyright Prominent at the bottom of the page is: © RealClearPolitics 2015 This is nice because it tells you who you have to approach for a licence. If it wasn't there the material would still be copyright you just wouldn't know who owned the copyright. Questions So: If I'm looking to build an app or write a book and I wish to use statistics, am I allowed to basically use their numbers as long as I cite where it is coming from? No, unless what you do constitutes fair use and I don't think it does. If I do make a profit from it, do I owe any royalties to the original scientists/surveyers? No, but you would owe whatever licence fee you negotiated with the copyright holder, ostensibly RealClearPolitics. Must I ask them for permission? Yes, unless you are OK with running the risk of being sued. Commentary I see books reference hundreds of studies all the time This is because they are generally protected by Academic Fair Use public polls should be open information to everyone The only public poll that I know of is an election and that information is available. What you are looking at is a private poll commissioned by and paid for by RealClearPolitics and it is their intellectual property; why should that "be open information to everyone"? commercial interests may be legally entangling Always