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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

> Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone [...] The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.

Which it clearly wasn't, right? I mean, okay, in this case, the message did get reviewed by another person, but that's obviously an exceptional circumstance.

If I write something down on a piece of paper, and someone else goes through my garbage and finds it, is my note "communication made in a manner in which another person may view it"? It was clearly intended to be a private note!

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It is worth mentioning that state law may not abridge people's rights which are protected under the Constitution. It is perfectly legal under US law to make any number of violent statements as long as they do not rise to the level of true threats.

https://icap.law.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/T...

I am not a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe this statement meets that bar.

Given that there's not really an objective measure of the trueness of a threat, this seems like the sort of thing that a court decides the merit of after charges, though.

Somewhat relatedly, I used to do tech support for a very large e-discovery vendor. The number of companies that configure their systems to archive (save, index and make discoverable) the contents of the /drafts folder in email clients is astounding. Surveillance of composition, rather than surveillance of communication, seems wrong.

The reason for doing that is to get all of the email in a system, as required by whatever rules apply.

Today I learned about "foldering"[1], which uses the drafts folder of email systems as a "dead drop" between multiple participants. It goes back to at least 2005.

Back when I was in IT, circa 2010, I learned that several of the users of our systems routinely relied on the "deleted items" folder of Microsoft Outlook as a filing system, with multiple gigabytes important files stored there. 8(

Our customs are routinely ignored by everyone else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldering

It was used by the subject of this book as well, which I think predates 2005.

The Spy's Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802125190

The reason so many people used the deleted items folder as a filing system is exchange didn't set a quota on that folder and by default would only get emptied by a manual emptying. So back in the days when a user could have a 100mb mailbox quota 'unlimited' space could start looking very attractive. Especially if that quota was 5 years old because the server hadn't grown with the times, since what business wants to spend money on a 'cost center' that won't improve profits.

Then these people didn't change their ways when they were given adequate space.

> Today I learned about "foldering"[1], which uses the drafts folder of email systems as a "dead drop" between multiple participants. It goes back to at least 2005.

Former head of the CIA, David Petreaus, was using the drafts folder of a shared Gmail account to communicate with his mistress.

I guess that’s easier than Dropbox

And, critically, not blocked by bluecoat, whereas Dropbox is.

Ai labs are 80% surveillance machines. I will never understand how people trust these services with anything personal, emotional, medical, financial, whatever.

I don't know why people are even discussing this case like these companies will do anything on behalf of a consumer or think ethically at all.

Bots mass read and file and report all prompts that get categorized a certain way. They store everything else regardless. This will never change. It will only be exploited more and more. That's how this type of technology is deployed and progresses. Look at any other parallel. Like cameras or microphones.

I gave up trying to avoid to be surveilled. It takes a lot of energy, I lose out on too much utility, I make it into the data anyway transitively from sources I don't control, and finally I don't feel any more interesting than the rest of the world. If I get uniquely screwed over somehow, so be it.

There's a famous quote about that...

I don't think it's worth dedicating even 2% of someone's day to avoiding surveillance. But I do think it's sad how many people don't realize all the utility they are gaining is lost once surveilled. There are ways around majorly bad surveillance activities that don't cost much money or time. The 80-20 is completely worth it.

Are you saying AI might become the Big Brother?

I assume you are kidding. But yea and it's not might, it's the point.

It's the only thing capable of being that. So yes.

> If I write something down on a piece of paper

At some point I think these sorts of analogies break down, as the setup becomes too foreign to what we're more concretely used to.

In this case: there is no pen or paper which can store what you write on a replicated set of servers across the world, with an accompanying ToS telling you how that will be treated/used.

Although I have little sympathy for this women (both her intent and stupidity), I do agree this is a dangerous thing.

But that's because you are a technologist who understands how servers work and has to think about where data lives. Meanwhile, mainstream software design increasingly blurs the line between local and remote and makes it hard to tell what is what. How can she be expected to know?

Anthropic itself is legally a person, whereas your bin is not.

>another person may view it

LLMs seem to be moving toward personhood.

And after all the LLM learns from user posts too, and if everybody starts posting their darkest desires, fantasies, plans it may skew the "alignment" to say the least. Lets hope that the AGI level doesn't necessarily come with cheating, lying, religious fervor, power lust or whatever other sideeffects have been observed in human intelligence.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic state in their terms and policies that they can access, retain, and review user inputs and conversations (yes by either an LLM or a human). So I guess at this point it is now up to a judge (or a jury) to determine if the person is dangerous.

The logical next step would be, to create psychological profiles of each user and relate those to authorities.

Selling analogous profiles of companies using their services to the highest bidder would be another idea.

Whether intentionally or not, they market their product as suitable for all kinds of things that it clearly isn't when input is being used that way.

Hopefully we at least get some cool Tom Cruise action scenes when we create our own shitty version of Minority Report

That's the previously logical step - that's already happening, which is why we have this story.

If the threat was to a private citizen and not the sheriffs office, I don’t believe charges would have ever been brought

It unfortunately is - and at least where I live it would go through to court and may reach a conviction on that. But I think it's clear here that she didn't intend the "others may view it part." While it's true that Anthrophic staff may read it, she didn't intend for Antrhopic staff or anyone else to read her messages. Ergo, she didn't intend for anyone to be threatened

I think Anthropic did the right thing to report it due to valid safety concerns. And if they had found credible plans for her to attack I think she can be charged with attempt. But just using AI as a diary I think the prosecutor's office is reaching beyond what the law allows but unfortunately I think there is a possibility that she may be convicted.

> "may view it"

If we assume that "may" here means "could somehow" and not "is authorized to", the legal action after revelation seems correct as written (ignoring whether the person viewing it has any relation to the person being threatened) unless the law gets struck down as unconstitutional. The question is only whether Anthropic should or should not report it.

> "If I write ... It was clearly intended to be a private note!"

The law as written doesn't appear to distinguish about intent of privacy. Also, if you're in the habit of writing notes to yourself, I guess maybe don't write down the one that says you're going to shoot up the sheriff's office.

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