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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

What legal ramifications?

Are you saying it's a crime for someone else to accidentally add you to their chat?

Yeah, there is a crime defined for intentionally gathering national defense information, and that crime is called "espionage"; while the courts have found constitutional limits beyond what is in the text of the law that restrict when it can be applied, the application of those limits isn't super consistent in practice and the formal boundary could be changed by the courts at any time when the government is pushing it, and a journalist knowingly taking advantage of someone else's mistake to continue gathering such information would not be out of line of the situations in which the government has pursued charges for that in the last decade.

and a journalist knowingly taking advantage of someone else's mistake to continue gathering such information would not be out of line of the situations in which the government has pursued charges for that in the last decade.

Yes, that would be a crime, but that's not what the original comment said.

> mentioned the longer he stayed on more exposed he became to legal ramifications

I'm asking "if someone was added in error, why do legal ramification increase"?

Clearly being added in error then publishing a bunch of stories in a series would be a crime.

> I'm asking "if someone was added in error, why do legal ramification increase"?

No, that's exactly what I answered: the ramifications increase the longer he stays on, because the longer he stays on the greater chance it is seen as exploiting the error with intent to gain national defense information.

So if someone accidentally adds me to a Signal chat, which I stopped using so no longer check, and it goes on for years, I’m guilty of a crime?

I think you are arguing a moot point. It's not really about what happened, the law is mainly about the intent. He did not immediately leave because he did not believe this to be a genuine group. So he has no intend to do harm at this point. But once he becomes convinced this is real he now _intentionally_ receives classified information he's not authorised to have. So now it is _necessarily_ also a legal problem for him.

So in your case: Getting added to a random signal chat where you are not exposed to anything? You should be fine. At least it will be very hard to show any intent to violate anything. Though that isn't necessarily true either. E.g. one could imagine Signal usernames belonging to operatives being in that group. And starting to post or investigate those could still get you in legitimate trouble.

And yes, ignorance of the law does not necessarily save one either. But a central point in all prosecutions is some portion of criminal intent

No, the crime isn't staying in. The crime (if it is one) is choosing to stay in. If he reports on messages from 6mo ago with an auto-delete of 1wk, he was aware of it roughly 6mo ago (and taking it seriously enough to preserve things).

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