• mozz
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    11 months ago

    A key under a doormat is freely available to anyone who knows to pick up the mat. Does that mean it’s automatically legal to pick up the mat, find the key, use it to open up the house, and go inside?

    • Sonori
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      11 months ago

      In that scenario how do you propose that the key under the mat is any different than if the door wasn’t locked in the first place?

      What if one of the workers at the business invites you in to quietly look around? Should you still be arrested for trespassing if it turns out that specific worker didn’t have permission to invite you in?

      • mozz
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        111 months ago

        In that scenario how do you propose that the key under the mat is any different than if the door wasn’t locked in the first place?

        Surely you are joking

        What if one of the workers at the business invites you in to quietly look around?

        This is actually an excellent analogy. Yes, if one of the workers says hey I happen to know there’s a key at such-and-such location; don’t tell anyone I told you, and then you take it from there you an go in and look around, that to me is clearly criminal. You know you’re not supposed to be there.

        The analogy of keys <-> login credentials is a pretty good one. You can make a case “hey I was just walking around, I’m allowed to walk around” and that’s reasonable, just like accessing random URLs or opening dev tools. That’s all legit. Until you encounter a locked door and overcome the locking mechanism in some fashion when you know you haven’t been given access by the owner to be there, at which point it’s clearly unauthorized access. It doesn’t matter if the lock is pretty easy to pick or the key is poorly hidden.

        I mean, you can make a case hey I’m a journalist and me accessing this stuff is in the public interest. And that sounds pretty accurate in this case. I’m just saying the “he had to break in to get access to it” side of the argument sounds pretty accurate as well.

        • Sonori
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          111 months ago

          Surely you are joking

          No. Trespassing is generally considered trespassing even if the door is unlocked. Your the one arguing that it makes a difference if the door is unlocked or if the door is locked by the key posted in plain sight.

          As to the other point, it’s more like they were with you, or at least as close as you can be when we’re talking about internet stuff. If one of your friends in the same industry says, hay, i’d like to show you something, let yourself in, we keep the key hanging from a nail right next to the door, it would be resonable to expect you were allowed to be there.

          We are talking about one journalist being invited into an another news agencies archive. This isn’t that uncommon of an occurrence, otherwise no agency would otherwise know what footage was available to license from their competitors.