Yes, there are reasons that studies sometimes lie to their participants. These lies are something that has to be justified to an IRB and the study has to be des

Yes, there are reasons that studies sometimes lie to their participants. These lies are something that has to be justified to an IRB and the study has to be designed to carefully minimize harm. Lieing to unwilling particiants only raises that bar. In this case, the bare minimum ethical way to conduct this study would have been a careful manual review of every unwilling participant that was going to be recieving deceptive communication to ensure they actually fell under the laws in question. The compound of deception, legal intimidation, and scatter shot automated selection of unwilling participants is a particularly egregious ethical failure.