[kevingadd]

Neither of those actions are 'just speech', quite in fact they are punishable through the existing legal framework and in neither case is the crime specifically the speech. The crime is what you use the speech to do, whether it is oppress someone, punish them, or bring harm to them.

Pasting a link to the stratfor archive - content that was already available in lots of places - does not do measurable harm to anyone. The idiots at Stratfor who stored CC information without proper security, or the people who leaked that information without paying attention, are the ones who did harm. Once that information was out there on the internet, no single link was going to magnify or increase the magnitude of that disclosure.

[comex]

While this is a reasonable opinion, the parent was responding to a claim that "typing out http://some.website should never be a crime. Period." Since the harm supposedly caused by pasting the link is contested, this was presumably meant to mean that the consequences of typing out a link should not be considered, so the parent was reasonable in rebutting it with that example.

[kevingadd]

My PoV is that the link itself IS irrelevant; you can just look at whether it inflicted harm to the owners of those credit cards, and in this case it obviously did not - the information was already available.

[mpyne]

Yeah, that's one of the things that would make pasting a link just fine in my opinion/analysis, is if that data were already publically-known (and not otherwise legally restricted somehow). I'm not diving into 40 pages of indictments to research again, court PDFs are driving me batty, but to the extent that information was already out there somehow I don't see justification for charging Barrett for simply pointing that out.