DISCLAIMER: If at all possible it would be cool if GD-worthy and Pit-worthy discussion about Fox News were kept out of this thread and we all just tried our best to focus on the facts.
Anyway, about this story: Fox News ‘Mole’ served with search warrant; laptop, iPhone seized ~ tldr: Some fellow gets an associate-producer job at Fox News and collects (or tries to collect, depending on your point of view) embarrassing inside info on them and secretly feed it to other news outlets; gets “outed” and fired; and is now being sued.
Did this guy commit any crimes? Fox is alleging grand larceny, petit larceny, and computer tampering, FWIW. Based on the facts I’ve been given it looks to me like the only “crime” he’s guilty of is being a terrible employee (of Fox, anyway). It’s not like he set their office on fire or infected their computers with malicious code or anything. But I fully admit there may be something I’m not getting here.
Virtually all employment contracts stipulate confidentiality to some degree. So they’ve got a strong basis to sue on that alone, depending on the details of the contract and his actions. It doesn’t require that there be any criminal aspect to have a civil judgment there.
Computer tampering suggests that he didn’t just see and reveal information that was made available to him as part of his job, but had to have installed malware, exceeded his permissions, etc.
Larceny makes sense if they are accusing him of stealing information.
He also made the mistake of selling the video he stole. Normally it is hard to put a price on something like that but the perp here made it easy by selling two videos for $2500 each and the law he broke has $2500 as its threshold where things get serious.
Virtually all employment contracts include overly broad terms which are partially or completely legally unenforceable. This is rather particularly and notoriously the case with nondisclosure clauses. Of course, the fact that the agreement isn’t as favourable to the company as it wants to be probably won’t prevent them from suing, or threatening to sue; if this causes the employee to back down it will have served its purpose.
Information can’t be stolen. The media upon which the information is stored can be stolen, or the information itself can be copied without authorization. I’m not aware of any law which treats the latter as larceny.
Yes, this kind of thing would be handled by claims such as misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and the like, not larceny.
It’s true that at common law, one element of larceny was asportation – you had to take away the property. That would seem to defeat larceny as applied to information.
But.
On a federal level, we have the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C.§ 1030 et seq. Among the acts it prohibits is knowingly and with intent to defraud, accessing a protected computer without authorization, or exceeding your authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthering the intended fraud and obtaining anything of value.
That’s not larceny, I grant, but it’s a crime, and it’s punished by a fine or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.
It’s most definitely a crime, and I believe that the C.F.A.A. also provides for civil claims. But such violations are usually called “hacking” when speaking informally, not “larceny.”
So now we know that in New York, unlawful duplication of computer related material and criminal possession of computer-related material are both possible charges.
Salon.com ran a few excerpts of this book. He doesn’t reveal any huge secrets, at least nothing that would come off as a big surprise to anyone who knows much about Fox News - I’m sure no one here would be shocked to know that Bill O’Reilly is a major asshole IRL.
But, it a fairly entertaining account of workaday life inside the FoxNews machine, and he does offer some interesting tidbits on the decisionmaking process there, along with some good anecdotes about O’Reilly (whose show he worked on).
