[tptacek]

You don't know that's what happened, even the researcher didn't say that. You're extrapolating.

A much more reasonable and likely explanation of the same set of things we've been told:

Alex Stamos called Synack and said that the AWS credentials, which, by the researchers own admission, he'd chosen to retain long after the vulnerability he reported was fixed, had to be deleted, and that if they weren't and the researcher continued to use them, the situation would be out of Stamos' hands and into Facebook legal's, at which point he couldn't keep him from being prosecuted.

In that interpretation, Alex isn't threatening the researcher; he's (very reasonably) saying "you cannot use these credentials you've taken from the server, and if you keep doing that, I can't take responsibility for how Facebook will handle this, so you should stop right away before you harm yourself."

[querulous]

it's utterly trivial to revoke and reissue aws access keys. trying to paint this as a necessary security measure is incredibly dishonest. the only plausible reasons to loop in his employer and mention legal remedies are intimidation and incompetence and as you've assured us incompetence is off the table...

[CRConrad]

blazespin > > But threatening to call the cops was really bad.

tptacek > You don't know that's what happened, even the researcher didn't say that. You're extrapolating.

From Wes' blog (presumably based on his boss' oral description of the call): "Alex then stated that he did not want to have to get Facebook's legal team involved, but that he wasn't sure if this was something he needed to go to law enforcement over."

Your bias is apparently badly incapacitating your reading comprehension, because "stated that [...] he wasn't sure if this was something he needed to go to law enforcement over" is exactly threatening to call the cops. Not even your friend mr Stamos, who has presumably read Wes' blog post, is claiming that he didn't. So whom are you saying is lying; Wes, or his boss?

Oh, and "(very reasonably) saying 'you cannot use these credentials you've taken from the server, and if you keep doing that, I can't take responsibility for how Facebook will handle this, so you should stop right away before you harm yourself.'" really, really, really sounds like Vito The Baseball Bat "very reasonably" saying "You cannot use this testimony you got off Loanshark Louie, and if you keep doing that, I can't take responsibility for how the boys will handle this, so you should stop right away before you harm yourself."

Seeing that as SERIOUSLY (as opposed to sarcastically) "very reasonable"... Well, hello, friendship-bias Bizarro World.