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Comment by JetSpiegel | Hacker News Reader

See, indoctrinating employees to dogfood your products has upsides. Even when the products are crap.

but the blogger was not an employee and they accessed the blogger accounts

The word here is investigators, I assumed that this was some legal entity (FBI?) doing it with court orders.

that's what I thought too initially but re-reading they say "corporate investigators" and, unless they are being very liberal with names, a corporate investigators is not someone who works for some public agency

Re-read it again. It mentions corporate investigators but there is nothing that suggests that they were the ones who looked through his hotmail account - that information provided by an FBI agent.

It's possible the events went like this:

1) MS get suspicious and investigate, (legally) find things which point to the suspect.

2) They confront the suspect who confesses.

3) They take it to the authorities who as part of their investigation get court orders to access his hotmail accounts.

But based on what is here there is nothing that says MS did anything illegal. That's not to say they didn't, just that that's not what these posts say.

It's just not written very clearly.

The blogger approached MS, so once they determined the code was authentic they could have easily got the FBI involved who then requested the information from the blogger's account.

But it doesn't read that way, it suggests that MS looked into it because it just says "investigators" and it's up to the reader to surmise what that means. My first thought it meant MS did the looking into the account mainly because there's no mention of a timeline of the actions taken. If it said something like "after MS authenticated the code the FBI was contacted who then requested a warrant to search through the blogger's account" then it would far more clear as to what was going on.

Makes me wonder if anyone bothered to ask the blogger if he would cooperate, as he did approach MS first, or if they just start looking through the person's account?

Later in the article they mention investigators again after the mention of criminal charges and then you can likely assume they mean criminal investigators.

that was my assumption too but the charging papers disclosed, as reported by the Seattle PI, make very clear that that's not the case:

- "prompting corporate investigators to dredge the Hotmail account the blogger"

- "While searching the blogger’s account, Microsoft investigators found an email"

OK, that's more worrying.

Obviously the guy was massively stupid using an e-mail service run by the people he was screwing over but it'll be interesting to see how this plays out (whether his employment contract covers it, whether that's legal and so on).

but that's another point: this was the blogger account and the blogger was not a MS employee

Yeah. Outrageous. IN the post snowden era, it is hard to understand how they could be public with such a detail.

If the truth were more worrying?

"Select id from attachments where introspective_function(part) contains 'LPCSTR'" as a scheduled task?

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