Suppose you were hacked and harassed using the data stolen Theoretical situation for a cybersecurity course discussion (something of a table-top game): Suppose you are researching a politically controversial topic and someone hacks your computer and starts collecting your browsing history and personal information. Then they use it to discretely harass you. For example, you receive e-mail, mail or texts coming from or addressed to names involved in your research (e.g., if it were chemistry, you might get a postcard addressed to &quot;Lavoisier&quot; or a text asking you to participate in a study of a new erectile dysfunction drug), or your address book is stolen and your boss gets an inappropriate text from someone with the same first name as you. This continues without you being able to get any idea of the source. None of it is directly threatening so it's not something that makes sense to call 9-1-1 over. You don't want to be a &quot;Karen&quot; or be a man in front of cops complaining about the names printed on your mail, and your friends and family laughed it off a long time ago. But after a few years and some &quot;bad luck&quot; you wonder whether these things have been more than just &quot;gags&quot;. You submit an FBI report through an online form but never hear anything back. What kind of lawyer do you seek? What are your legal options?
There is really no point in hiring a lawyer until you can identify a culprit. Lawyers can't sue people until they have a way to serve the person at fault with legal process. You need an IT professional instead.
This would be wire fraud, which is any type of fraud committed using electronic communications (the term originally comes from the use of telegrams to commit fraud... just like how &quot;wiring&quot; money devised from paying the bill at one telegram station and having the bill collector take an equal amount of money from a different station.). Wire Fraud is basically a fraud crime over electronic communications, so it doesn't matter how you defraud someone, the fact that you did it in this manner is guilty... using a bank system to fraudulently create more money in your digit account would qualify. The bank would be the victim since it does have a set amount of money in assets that it owes to its customers (account holders) and Federal Insurance (which prevents the Bank Run scene in &quot;It's a Wonderful Life&quot; from happening) requires the bank to carefully keep books. Additionally, Wire Fraud comes with a $100,000 fine against the perpetrator for committing the crime where a financial institution is a victim, so it's in the Bank's interest to report a sudden income surge of fake dollars to the authorities lest they have to pay the fine out of their own pocket, risk their federal insurance, or lose their consumer confidence with account holders (who will pull their money and go to a more honest bank).
No, it is not illegal. The company has no standing to punish you for that. Companies can't sue random people for sending random email... that was largely settled under the (YOU)-CAN-SPAM Act, when in the guise of standardizing US anti-spam laws, spam was largely legalized and state laws were pre-empted and barred from existing. However, all the other laws still apply Laws on harassment, for instance. Sometimes people with mental illness think another human &quot;owes them&quot; a relationship (which kind of misses the point of what a relationship is, but never mind that). And those people, who sadly are an all-too-common cliché, tend to act badly in very predictable ways. As such, we have plenty of laws on the books (and plenty of family court judges who have seen it all) to dispense consequences to the misbehavior and protection to the victim. All those laws really don't care in which medium one might violate them: sky-writing, naval light signal, email, whatever.
I don't think any appellate court has given an opinion on whether encryption creates a reasonable expectation of privacy. This is not surprising as only recently has it come to light that the government may have weakened encryption protocols and asked for backdoors in order to aid in decryption. However, Orin Kerr, professor of Law at George Washington University School of Law wrote this article in 2001. He argues that encryption does not create a reasonable expectation of privacy. He says: the Fourth Amendment regulates access, not understanding. Once you introduce your communication into third party systems (or the garbage :P), they may give it up to the government. If the government happens to be able to understand that communication, so be it. He shows how this conclusion is consistent with how the courts have ruled on "reassembly of shredded documents, recovery of deleted files, and the translation of foreign languages". Note that the reasonable expectation of privacy test is only one of the tests used to determine whether a search or seizure is reasonable. Another test is the "trespass" test which deems an interaction to be a search per se if there is a trespass on a person's personal effects. It was used before Katz and was reiterated recently in US v Jones (2012). Regardless, your question is still meaningful because the two tests are used alongside each other.
Most of the question has nothing to do with the law, it's about technical how-to or how-does, which should be asked in Information Security SE. There are two possible legal questions: is it legal to break into a computer system and take a database of passwords, and it is legal to acquire such a database obtained by someone else. As should be known in the US, per 18 USC 1030, breaking into a computer is illegal in the US. Given that, it is extremely unlikely that Google illegally breaks into other computer systems to obtain passwords. The aforementioned law criminalizes accessing computers without authorization, not (just) &quot;taking&quot; stuff from computers without authorization. The law does not criminalize receipt of illegally obtained material. Passwords are not protected by copyright. If Google were to induce someone to break into a computer system to get passwords, that would be legally actionable, however there is no law penalizing innocent receipt of illegally-obtained passwords (insofar as they are not protected by copyright). It is not illegal to access the dark web, at least in the US (probably it is illegal in Saudi Arabia). Using stuff gotten from the dark web can easily be illegal (e.g. logging in to someone's bank account, or forging a passport). There are many services which monitor the dark web and report breaches, which is totally legal.
If I were a DA (District Attorney) looking out "stamp out" statutory rape, I would make the rounds of the hospitals, identify women who gave birth, or were impregnated when underaged, and go from there. But few, if any DAs, do this. No, you wouldn't. First, you have neither the time nor the budget to do this. Second hospitals are not public property, you would need a warrant which the court won't give you because you don't have probable cause to believe a crime has or is being committed. As a DA, I would of course, follow up on any complaints lodged by the victim, or even by her/his parents. And maybe I would prosecute a case where people were "caught in the act, or there were nude pictures, etc. May even an especially egregious PDA (public display of affection). No, you wouldn't. You would follow up on complaints to the extent that you have the time, budget and manpower to do so and you would prosecute cases where you believe that you have a reasonable prospect of getting a conviction and where prosecution is, in your opinion, in the public interest. In the real world, that means where the police hand you a brief of evidence that is a lay-down misere and (for statutory rape) where there is a real power imbalance between the perpetrator and the victim - giving 2 willing 15 year old kids the label of 'sex offender' for life is probably not in the public interest. But suppose there were no complaints or smoking guns. Could someone investigate based on something like a teenager "holding hands" with someone much older? To make the question objective, what has historically caused DAs to prosecute people outside of the above parameters? With some exceptions, it is not the role of the DA to initiate or conduct investigations of criminal actions - that is the role of law enforcement officers, usually for this particular crime, police officers. Notwithstanding, the general rule in western, liberal democracies (which the United States, with a certain generosity of spirit, can still be considered) is that citizens are allowed to get on with their lives without day-to-day interference from the state. That is, law enforcement officers do not 'go fishing' for crimes, they investigate crimes that they have a probable cause to believe have actually happened, either because they themselves saw it happen or someone has reported it to them as having happened. The term for having a law enforcement officer following you around waiting for you to break the law is 'harassment' and may itself be illegal. A law enforcement officer can initiate an investigation based on anything but as no law enforcement agency has unlimited resources, they tend to follow only those investigations that might lead somewhere. For example, it has been known for parents to hold the hands of their children and even to publicly display affection towards them and parents are often "much older" then their children - this would not generally be grounds for initiating a statutory rape investigation.
If the lawyer has legitimate concerns, his first port of call would be the ICO https://ico.org.uk/. Before the ICO will take his complaint further he'll have had write to you expressing his concerns and received a written response that presumably he is unhappy with, and wants to take the issue further. Most companies have a data compliance team who will have policies and procedures to log breaches like this and decide what course of action to take in response. Not every breach needs to be brought to the attention of the ICO, and they have a handy self assessment tool to see if you should report the breach. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/report-a-breach/ In your situation, I don't think this constitutes a serious breach which will require investigating. It's simply an admin error. If it is unlikely to pose a risk to any of the individuals they will say something like: You should keep an internal record of the breach as detailed in Article 33 (5) of the GDPR, including what happened, the effects of the breach and remedial actions taken. The definition of risk according to the ICO is: "This risk exists when the breach may lead to physical, material or non-material damage for the individuals whose data have been breached". So in this case I'd assume a simple apology (Bcc'd :) ) and a record of what happened, how it happened, and the action taken to prevent it happening again should suffice.
There is no such thing, legally, as &quot;an attack on someone's writing&quot;. The only way in which any use of one person's writing by another could be the subject of legal action would be if it infringed copyright. But individual words, short phrases, and individual numbers are not subject to copyright protection. In theory such things might be protected as trademarks, but that would give protection only if they were being used &quot;in trade&quot;, that is, to sell or advertise something, and then only if it is in the same industry or market. But a license plate is not selling anything. You may have assigned code meanings to particular numbers. Many people have done this before, using many different schemes or codes. It would be hard to demonstrate that a license plate is referring to your coded meaning and not to some other code. But even if the user admitted an intent to reference your use of a particular number, you have no legal cause of action. You might as well ignore such references, because you cannot do anything to prevent them. Plagiarism is not a crime, nor a tort when there is not copyright or trademark infringement, even if it is openly admitted. If you could prove harassment or some sort of stalking you might have a case, but nothing you have described (in the question or associated comments) comes close to that. If a police car actually hit yours intentionally or negligently you would clearly have a case, but the plate numbers would be no part of it. Response to recent comment: The source of authority (which is not the same thing as jurisdiction) to place license plate numbers on police cars is state MV laws and regulations. To the best of my understanding, such numbers are assigned automatically and sequentially, and have no reference whatever to anyone's blog or political statements. No evidence seems to be cited to show otherwise. The question asks What jurisdiction authorizes these reappropriations of my work/writing/speech? But no one authorizes tjhings that did not happen, and as far as i can see no appropriation occured. Jurisdictions, by the way, do not authorize things, people and organizations do. The question asserts: For my writing I coined &quot;317&quot; and &quot;037&quot; but no one can &quot;coin&quot; a number, and people use numbers in many ways. Use of a similar number on a license plate need not be a reference of any sort to a particular blog or writing.