I think there's a real argument that this data is in the public interest.
A good half the problems in the world are created when we try to force oversized round pegs through undersized square holes. Besides which, was Parler not the site that required excessive amounts of personal info just to sign up?
That means if authentication failed open, that could mean that this researcher has obtained access to reams of PII. Which they'll deny or state that of courae they didn't collect or look at, but the potential breach is large enough that doing something like this is so unconscionably reckless and stupid, it ranks right up there with the event that even has this site in the public eye in the first place.
Another brick through the stained glass windows of American civil discourse. We don't even need other country's help to push us to the brink because of reckless moves like this.
Liberty is always opposed to security. How free we are depends on how worried we are. That's always the case.
By the way, lets look at some other circumstances:
Suspension of habeas corpus. Abraham Lincoln, Civil War. Half of country wants to clock the other half. Total existential threat.
WWI. Schneck v. United States. Cornerstone and terrible case for limiting free speech in order to silence opposition to the bloody draft.
WWII:Japanese internment camps. Labor cracked down on for striking and shutting down most of the wartime manufacturing supply chain. Existential threat.
2001: 3 buildings hit with aircraft. All liberties around airtravel basically cancelled. Heavy intensification of SIGINT intensifies, birth of widespread dragnet surveillance programs.
2020: A bunch of people waltz into the Capitol pissed as all hell because their concerns were not taken seriously. Rest of country is just fine. Suggestions to yeet civil liberties because think of the Congresspeople who had to continue their meeting elsewhere!
One of these is not like the others. Further, Congress is getting what it deserved. With the way they've spent years delegating increasing chunks of lawmaking to the Executive branch, ain't it grand the way they get reminded of why checks and balances were there in the first place?
Obviously we disagree on what it means when an angry mob chants about hanging the VP, breaches one of the most secure buildings in the country, and swears to try again.
This is obviously not an existential threat to you, but it is to the majority of the country, and certainly to our institutions.
> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?
> Zero.
> The planning was largely done on Facebook.
[0] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293?s=...
edit: bad formatting
> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?
No, and neither does Greenwald, because its not like Parler has a real-name-to-account lookup function he has access to, or authorities have compiled and released breakdowns of all the social media accounts of arrestees, etc.
At best, Greenwald is fallaciously treating absence of information about their Parler use as information of absence of such use, at worst he's just making stuff up.
> The planning was largely done on Facebook.
Planning, including for the violence, was done on Parler among a wide variety of different sites. Actual journalists who are interested in investigating and reporting facts, and who haven’t abandoned actual journalism for pure ideological propaganda like Greenwald, have covered this, including the content of specific posts:
https://theconversation.com/far-right-activists-on-social-me...
https://www.propublica.org/article/capitol-rioters-planned-f...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/01/07/capitol...
https://www.vox.com/recode/22221285/trump-online-capitol-rio...
Edit: I suppose not.
Lin Wood didn't say that on Twitter, because he had been previously banned on Twitter for similar rhetoric. Not sure about his status on Facebook, but Parler was absolutely where this stuff was happening.
The denial here is just wild. Like... this is all over the news.
Edit: some collated examples that just went by on my twitter feed, including the Wood threat: https://twitter.com/drewharwell/status/1348463074295107585