LexisNexis spokesman Paul Eckloff denies that the freeze was an overreach. The company considered this step necessary to comply with requests made by Atlas users not to disclose their data. “This company could not be more dedicated to supporting the authorities,” he says. “We would support common sense protections.” But he described the Law of Daniel as too punitive.
For Adkisson, the Those punished were police officers, judges and other government workers he had met on his jeep excursions 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 with New York City.
In April 2023, Justyna was filmed by a YouTuber who runs the Long Island Audit channel, which has over 842,000 subscribers. He is often filmed trying to incite police to behave badly, and Justyna asking you to leave a government office It became his new viral hit. Followers 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 Whitepages. Scott says Facebook would not remove comments that link to contact information. Nor would the police department, citing First Amendment concerns. Tensions boiled.
In August 2023, Scott received text messages demanding $3,000 or “your family will be responsible for paying me in blood.” The text messages included his sister’s name and address. An hour later, the same number sent a video of two masked individuals carrying firearms in an unknown location. Atlas wasn’t up and running yet, so Scott, determined to delete all of his family’s online contact details, sat on his lagoon-side deck every night for weeks, crushing Michelob Ultras to keep calm as he navigated by the elimination forms. He made so many requests to Whitepages for his family that it prevented him from doing more.
The Facebook comments linking to the Maloneys’ address only appeared after they sued their bosses last November for violating Daniel’s Law. Last January, a state judge ruled that the risk to the couple “far outweighs” the potential harm to the police department from the censorship allegations.
As Adkisson sought to sue non-compliant data websites, he had no problem signing up the Maloneys as plaintiffs. And since Daniel’s Law now made it possible, thanks to lobbying by Atlas and the police union, to collect guaranteed penalties from data websites, Adkisson had been able to secure five law firms, including prominent national firms Boies Schiller Flexner and Morgan & Morgan, and some lawyers who personally knew the Daniel of “Daniel’s Law.”