Where did they state their intent to crash the servers? The court cited something that could be interpreted in a number of ways. That, combined with other bizarre interpretations is why I think this is a bad ruling. The robocalls are a separate issue covered under a separate law, and therefore shouldn't be used as evidence of intent either. Then there's the notion that the simple, unsubstantiated notification that something is inconveniencing them is enough to override free speech rights. I really hope that's not the case. I would like to see what kind of horribly misconfigured mail server they were using that could be overloaded by such a paltry number of emails.

Yeah, that's the thing. They make it damn near impossible to prove most of the time. In this case, even though no intent to crash servers was apparently stated, the CoA chose to interpret some language to mean that, and to interpret the use of robocalling as further evidence of intent, even though that makes no sense. If they were guilty of violating the robocalling law, why aren't they being charged with that? If they aren't guilty of violating the robocalling law, then how does it show intent? The court seems to have manufactured the intent in this case, which is usually the one thing missing in most corporate cases. This ruling is just all-around bad.

Again, this goes to proving intent. I still don't see that being done. They were obviously trying to convey the outrage of their members at the company. The company may not have liked it, and it may have been some sort of burden for them to receive so many complaints, but the volume of mail we're talking about here isn't remotely close to being able to take down an email system unless it was set up horribly wrong. That's on the company. Just because they say it's overloading their system, doesn't mean that it actually is. If it actually was overloading the system, it's due to negligence on the company's part in not setting up their email server properly. This isn't some mom and pop operation we're talking about. Free speech should win out over inconvenience and negligence.

The intent was to convey the outrage of the union members and have their voices be heard by the management. Business-related emails sent to business email addresses. I've seen no real evidence of any other intent than that. Their free speech should trump the inconvenience to the company, especially for something as trivial to prevent as this. RICO charges for this would be complete bullshit. Hell, CEOs have to practically be caught red-handed eating live babies before they go to jail. Why should we have a double-standard here?

Voluntary in the sense that they still have business dealings with the union? Sounds voluntary to me.

Only if you aren't covered by one of the exceptions.

Not sure where you live, but that's not true in Texas.

Like I said, pretty much anything can be described as information. It's not what this law was intended for. We already have laws that specifically cover what you can and can't do with robocalls, so trying to apply this one is just wrong. And if you don't describe the phone calls as information, then they aren't covered under this law.

As far as the email is concerned, I think that the free speech of individuals outweighs the inconvenience to the company. Especially since they could easily address it themselves if they had even a halfway competent admin. Judging by the quick overload of their system, under a rather paltry load by most standards, they don't currently have one. The servers at my office have to fend off millions of spam emails per day. The thousands that were being sent by the union would probably barely get noticed by the server, and would be quickly cut off from the mail recipients once the admins were alerted.

Only if you define harm very broadly. Lots of things can be considered harm by someone. Me telling you that some restaurant stores their meat in the closet instead of the fridge harms that company, even if it's absolutely true. Just because it inconveniences the company doesn't mean that their employees shouldn't be allowed to send their complaints via email. Any halfway competent admin could have handled this volume easily.

It was employees complaining loudly and repeatedly about the actions of the company. It's free speech, and not their fault that the company's email servers were crappy and/or misconfigured. This was nothing like a real DDoS or spam attack. This was individuals clicking the buttons individually to send messages with their complaints, not millions of emails per hour being generated by a computer. Spam volumes are orders of magnitude greater. Something close to 300 billion spam emails are sent every day. Had they gone with the spam approach, they could have easily pumped out vastly more emails. From what I've read of this case, any halfway competent email server should have been able to handle it.

While the Republicans make a lot of noise about illegal immigration, they never seem to have the balls to really go after the consumption side of the equation and start prosecuting every company they can find that hires illegals. They're so gung-ho about it in the drug war, why not immigration as well? It's also kind of interesting that Obama is actually deporting more illegals per year than GWB did.

No, because DDOS and spam originate from an individual and are completely automated. These were many individuals sending many emails containing their complaints against the company through their union's server. They wouldn't be able to generate anything even remotely approaching spam or DDOS levels of traffic. It's only due to the lousy quality and configuration of Pulte's email servers that they were able to cause such interruption. I certainly wouldn't have expected that to happen from mere thousands of emails being sent.

I saw no hard numbers as to how many emails were sent, or how many members participated. Either way, it is trivial to block email from a given server, and filter out form messages. I don't see that they have any legitimate right to prevent individuals from sending as many messages as they like to their publicly accessible email server. As long as they aren't automating the process such that they are sent without human interaction in each message. Shoehorning this law into this situation is going to end badly.

It's not a solicitation under the law, because calls "to any person with whom the caller has an established business relationship" are expressly excepted by the law. I assume that's why they tried to use the CFAA instead.

Because use of the phone system is authorized implicitly for phone calls, subject to restrictions under laws such as the one I mentioned. Using the description of "a program, information, code, or command" to describe a phone call with an audio message is a stretch, and was not intended to be covered by that law. It only technically falls under it because practically anything can be classified as "information". The definition of "damage" is also ridiculously broad, to the point where it would plainly cover even minor inconvenience. Charge them under the law that was intended to cover this sort of behavior, don't make insanely broad interpretations of a law that was intended for this. That will not set a good precedent. Seems like we don't even need robocall laws anymore if this law is going to be interpreted in such an insanely broad way and applied to situations it was not intended to cover. The law of unintended consequences will certainly apply here.

Given the apparently lousy email servers and poor configuration, it doesn't sound like it would take much at all to flood them anyway. A few hundred pissed off employees sending multiple emails would probably be more than sufficient. I wouldn't speculate about any other tactics since none were even alleged by the company.

There are laws to cover that. Using the computer crime law seems inappropriate since there are already state and federal laws that are specifically targeted at robocalls. Such calls are legal if they comply with those laws.

From the article, it sounds like they were allowing people to send the emails from their server, the emails were not being automatically generated.

As long as they did it in compliance with federal and state laws, then I don't see a problem with it. If they didn't, then that's the law that they should be pursuing them under, not some computer crime law. If they were in compliance, then I don't think they really have a case.

I still haven't seen real evidence that the intent was to cause harm. The intent seems to have been to communicate the level of outrage by the employees by letting them send as many emails as they wanted to. As near as I can tell from the articles, each of those emails was sent by an individual, even though each individual was likely sending multiple emails. They were not just being cranked out by the millions like a spam server does. Seems like a legitimate use of a publicly accessible email system. I'm still rather amazed that their system was impared by this. I think they need to hire a sys admin that knows how to configure their email servers.

That should have read "The district court ruled this way as well." Not referring to the CoA ruling.