The writer has fessed up to reading a lot of the emails. As evidenced by summarizing the content (e.g. cheating spouses, zabbix etc.). Wouldn't the responsible thing to do be stop reading the emails once you realise what is going on?
A search for "(Fuck|Shit|Bitch)" can go a long way.
For what it's worth, I used to work at an investment bank spending 30hr/week diving through logs with unix tools, so finding interesting information quickly is something I've learned to do quickly.
At the first indication that the data was not what you requested and contained more than you - or they - bargained for you should have stopped looking at it and alerted both the sender and the relevant data protection authorities in so far as those are a functioning entity where you live to tell them they have an 'accidental disclosure' on their hands. Essentially your blog post documents something that is pretty strong proof you are not able to deal with confidential information properly.
I guess if all that is in those records I’m going to commend the Seattle IT department for their ethics at least.
It’s amazing what people think they can put in emails/messages and have stay secure...
One citizens communications with the city should not automatically result in disclosure of the fact that that person communicated with the city to other citizens.
The fact that a communication took place in itself is information, and correlated with things like timestamps and who in the city was contacted a large amount of sensitive information will leak out.
In this case, it took about a week for them to take it seriously. Like last time, it wasn't until I was explicit that they took it seriously.
There are a number of moving parts here:
- The disclosure was clearly not the intended result
- The recipient could - and in fact did - realize this
- The recipient was in contact with the sender
- The recipient had some easy means to redress the situation
Given all of the above, if you then dig in and start looking at the data I think you are crossing a line. At a minimum a legal professional should have been consulted before further examination of the data, once it became obvious something was wrong.
In the end it would have been down to a judge to decide whether that crosses the line in a criminal sense but I would be loathe to find out the hard way. Pick your battles and all that.
The idea that the OP is at fault for looking at data which the city had already published has no basis in law.
Having legally downloaded the data he looked at it. There's no crime there either.
This simply isn't true. If someone accidentally sends you information that you know you shouldn't be privy to, you should delete it. Unless perhaps you are Nelson Muntz.