The Future of Internet Privacy Depends on Thousands of New Jersey Police

LexisNexis spokesman Paul Eckloff disputes the freeze. The company saw that move as necessary to honor requests filed by Atlas users not to disclose their data. “This company could not dedicate itself more to supporting law enforcement,” he said. “We will support the protection of common sense.” But he described the Law of Daniel as overly punitive.

In Adkisson, the the people being punished were the police, judges, and other public servants he had met on his Jeep tour through New Jersey. Among them were police officers Justyna Maloney, 38, and her husband, Sergeant Scott Maloney, 46, who work in Rahway, a small town on the border of New York City.

In April 2023, Justyna was recorded by YouTuber who runs the channel Long Island Audit, which has over 842,000 subscribers. He often makes films of himself trying to force the police to behave badly, and Justyna asking him to leave the government office became his new virus. Fans flooded the Rahway police Facebook page with about 6,500 comments, including death threats, insults, and links to the Maloneys’ address and phone numbers on SearchPeopleFREE.com and the Whitepages. Scott says Facebook will not remove comments linked to contact information. Neither will the police department, citing First Amendment complaints. The tension boiled over.

In August 2023, Scott received documents demanding $3,000 or “your family will be responsible for paying me in blood.” The documents listed his sister’s name and address. An hour later, the same number sent a video of two people wearing snow masks holding guns at an unknown location. Atlas still wasn’t up and running, so Scott, determined to get all of his family’s contact information off the Internet, sat on his lakeside deck every evening for weeks, crushing Michelob Ultras to calm as he navigated drop-off forms. He made so many requests to Whitepages for his family that it prevented him from doing more.

Facebook comments related to the Maloneys’ address went down after they sued their managers last November for violating the Daniel Act. This past January, a federal judge ruled that the risk to the couple “far outweighed” the potential harm to the police department as a result of the probation complaints.

Since Adkisson was looking to sue the inconsistent data websites, he had no problem signing up the Maloneys as plaintiffs. And because Daniel’s law now made it possible, thanks to the lobbying of Atlas and the police union, to collect confirmed fines from data websites, Adkisson was able to find five law firms, including the famous national firms Boies Schiller Flexner and Morgan & Morgan, and others. lawyers who knew Daniel personally of the ‘Law of Daniel.