21 ms·
As a lawyer, i've read this entire filing and it seems like nonsense at a glance. Krebs mentions the person was arrested. Ubiquiti claims first that he doesn't
by DannyBee 5y ago
As a lawyer, i've read this entire filing and it seems like nonsense at a glance.
Krebs mentions the person was arrested. Ubiquiti claims first that he doesn't point out the person he sourced it from what arrested, and that he tries to mislead people by not saying repeatedly that the person is basically felon, and that being arrested makes him an invalid source of evidence, etc. They also claim he describes him as a current employee.
This is all nonsense AFAICT
1. Krebs mentions the person was arrested.
2. Krebs says "In March, a ubiqitui employee said X". That was accurate at the time (AFAIK, and ubiquiti cites no real evidence I see that Krebs should have known it was not true).
3. Krebs carefully points out the arrested person claims x and y (which is accurate).
4. The filing says Sharp made false claims, and spends a paragraph explaining them.
5. The filing says Krebs made them too, but ironically, for all of its bluster, doesn't cite where and when (that I can see), and which exact claims, they are claiming Krebs said that were false.
6. The filing cites no evidence that Krebs knew or should have known, in March, that the claims were false. They get into some weird arguments about their 10-q filing but it's hard to understand the point they are trying to make. It apperas they are trying to claim that krebs should have known they notified the public but i think that's kind of a silly argument - krebs is clearly talking about their users, and most users do not read 10-q's. Saying you notified the public because you put it in a 10-q is like saying you notified the public because you put it in a classified ad section. It's dumb wordplay.
7. The December blog post they say he "doubled down on" seems again, carefully written to say what Sharp claims, not what Krebs claims.
I could go on.
The whole thing is, IMHO, not written very well. It's very emotionally written for a pleading, and you will be hard pressed to find a judge who will get themselves worked up over that kind of writing. Instead they mostly roll their eyes and wish that someone gave them a clear and convincing pleading instead.
Put another way - if there is a case here, it isn't visible on this pleading. This feels like "throw a bunch of emotional stuff at a wall and hope it sticks", where you really want "here is an open and shut case of why this person defamed us"
- daniel-cussen 5y agoHe can countersue.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nojito 5y agoThe argument is that there isn't two people, there is just one who was arrested. Kreb's original source for the march article was the fake whistleblower extorting ubiquiti. He had just gotten raided by the FBI. Which is why the tweets are being mentioned.
- DannyBee 5y agoKrebs doesn't claim there were two people anywhere? Ubiquiti hangs this entire argument about this on using slightly different wording to refer to a person in two places in an article. But if you read the article, he reports the facts in a literal linear timeline fashion, attempting to use what appear to be time-correct monikers. IE He literally says (see the screenshot) In January x happened in March, a ubiquiti employee said something in November, a former developer for ubiquiti was arrested and charged. He never says the march and november people are different. He is reporting exactly what happened. They claim he knows they are the same person, and should refer to them as such but they literally don't even provide any evidence of this either (ie that it was Krebs source). It wouldn't help them (because what krebs says does not seem wrong or untrue), but they don't prove it either. IE even if krebs knew they are the same person, the above appears to be a totally accurate rendering of the story. Krebs is only required to be accurate. Did a Ubiquiti employee say X in march (or did Krebs have good reason to believe a ubiquiti employee said X in march)? Did a former ubiquiti developer get arrested in late november? Yes? (AFAIK, yes) Okay, case over. The fact that they don't like his reporting doesn't make it untrue, and if they want to show it's untrue, as I said, this filing does a bad job of it.
- mannykannot 5y agoI have not looked into this in any detail, but is it possible that Ubiquiti is fishing for the name of a second source?
- dsr_ 5y agoIf they really wanted that, they would craft a less emotionally loaded complaint and try for discovery ASAP. I think.
- ilamont 5y agoIf you were Krebs, would you defend, countersue, or seek “settlement” or some combination?
- adanto6840 5y agoIANAL and I haven't read the filing. I'd assume, based on what I've read thus far (and the fact that it's a pretty standard initial response), that he'll file a motion to dismiss and go from there. It seems plausible that he could have a decent chance of having such a motion granted -- the bar is generally "in the light most favorable to the plaintiff [Ubiquiti]". Based solely on the commentary I've read, it sounds like the complaint could be deficient.
- staticautomatic 5y agoYou’d first move to dismiss for failure to state a claim, and perhaps counter-sue under anti-SLAPP.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mst 5y agoThey (presumably intentionally) filed the claim in a state without an anti-SLAPP law, sadly. Edit: Or at least, so Greg says, and I've found him a reliable source for such things: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1509184336188350465?s=20 https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1509184336188350465...
- DannyBee 5y agoNone of the above. My answer is much more mundane. Krebs almost certainly has professional liability insurance (if not, that would be pretty dumb at his scale) I would call up my insurance company, tell them i've been sued, send them the documents, and then go back to my day. I would then proceed to follow their instructions, and not care too much about it, unless i was asked to do things that i wasn't willing to do
- belter 5y agoNot a fan of Krebs but also not a critic. Litigation is expensive, and the purpose is to scare or bankrupt him, validity is irrelevant. Will never use any product of this company.
- DannyBee 5y agoThey had good products for a long time, but it's gone very downhill in the past few years (lots of internet stories about why this is happening). I've had enough bad experiences that i recently moved my routing/IDS to a dedicated box and am slowly moving away from their switches. No reasonable replacements i've found for their APs yet though (Meraki is too expensive).
- JaimeThompson 5y agoAruba has some 'instant on' units which might be a decent replacement but I don't have nearly enough experience with them to say for sure. https://www.arubainstanton.com/products/access-points/ https://www.arubainstanton.com/products/access-points/
- thegreenandgrey 5y agoMy employer switched from Ubiquiti to Aruba. Much, much better. Far easier to manage. The Ubiquiti APs had very little range and below-threshold subscriber loads would cause them to become unstable and require a reboot. No good when 500 employees and guests are attempting to get work done. We issue primarily laptops with only certain people getting docks for Ethernet. Quite a few people have purchased the Anker USB-C dongle docks from Amazon and use their IP phone's secondary Ethernet port for a connection if they want a solid Ethernet connection. At home I'm happy with Google WiFi mesh all around my house.
- MobileVet 5y agoThanks for the tip on Aruba. Right now my all Ubiquiti home network is awesome because I have a docker controller image. As spoon as something goes out though, I am done with these clowns. Wasn’t sure where to look next… note taken on Aruba
- szundi 5y agoMaybe it is just to make the defendants uneasy for some time with a lawsuit hanging over their heads
- otterley 5y agoI'm also a lawyer. The things that caught my attention were the embarrassing misspelling of the word "damning" as "damming," and the fact that this was drafted and filed by a specialty boutique law firm (Clare Locke LLP) - I'd have expected a company with Ubiquiti's resources to bring out the big guns with a white-shoe Washington-area firm. Makes me wonder if the company is on the skids.
- at-fates-hands 5y agoI guess they filed in VA because they have no anti-SLAPP laws there so they didn't necessarily have their pick of firms: Via Twitter, T. Greg Doucette, a criminal defense attorney and former computer scientist, opined that Ubiquiti's lawsuit would be considered an attempt to suppress lawful speech – a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP – in states that have anti-SLAPP laws. "It's a SLAPP: the coverage by Brian Krebs was substantially true and/or First-Amendment-protected opinion, and the lawsuit basically admits it in the text itself," Doucette wrote. "But Ubiquiti intentionally filed in Virginia, because there's no anti-SLAPP statute there." ® https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/30/ubiquiti_brian_krebs/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/30/ubiquiti_brian_krebs/
- otterley 5y agoVA is right next to DC; there is no shortage of white-shoe counsel in the state.
- DannyBee 5y agoTo be fair, Clare Locke specializes in defamation. They are counsel for dominion in the suit against sidney powell. They are counsel for shotspotter against Vice Media. etc They actually appear to have sued a lot of media companies at a glance. But it's hard to tell. I think it would be more accurate to say "if you want to sue someone for defamation, they'll do it as long as it's not a conflict" :) (IE they don't seem to be particularly pro or against anything). It seems like a reasonable firm to hire for defamation if your goal is something like "get people to retract claim/apologize or go at them legally until they do". But to your point, it's definitely not the "bury them/grind them to dust with a million lawyers" they would get at a large law firm.
- aserdf 5y agoquestion - does ubiquiti open themselves up to discovery and a lot of private info becoming public by filing this?
- genmud 5y agoThey very well have opened themselves to discovery, which is why it is very unwise to throw stones in glass houses when it comes to litigation. I have seen this before where a company opens a defamation suit against someone, they then don't get the results they were looking for and end up losing a countersuit or end up settling out of court because of their idiocy. I'm not sure what they are thinking on this, but this is also the company that wired 46 million dollars to fraudsters, so its obvious they haven't made wise decisions in the past.
- rdiddly 5y agoNot a lawyer, but I read like one, and I agree this is one of the most butthurt and factless filings I've ever seen. How can they SLAPP? How can they SLAPP?
- supramouse 5y agodid you read the muckraking tweets ?
- DannyBee 5y agoYes. Here's the thing: It doesn't matter. Let me back up a bit. To start with, corporate defamation is ... complicated to begin with. There is no liability for defaming a large class of people. If i say "all people wearing blue are pedophiles", i can't be sued by anyone wearing blue because i defamed them :). This is because defamation is, at the core, about injury to reputation of individual people. It's really hard to meaningfully injure the reputation of individual people with general statements (it's not impossible mind you, but for the average joe it's pretty hard). So first you have to be able to identify what is defamed, exactly. Second, corporations have no reputations in any easily definable personal sense (and remember, defamation is about injury to reputation). Why do I go into all of this? Because it's at the core of what standard you would have to meet to be liable for defaming a corporation. Generally three ways to prove defamation of a overall: Prove the person knew that the statement was false and defamatory, or Prove the person acted with reckless disregard of the truth or falsity of the statement in making the statement, or Prove the person acted negligently in failing to ascertain whether the statement was true or false before making it. The first almost never happens. The second almost never happens. The third is what gets most people. The third is also, it turns out, not available if the defamation was of a public figures. In fact, for public figures, you have to prove one of the first two by clear and convincing evidence (which is higher than the usual burden of proof in a civil case, which is preponderance of the evidence). So if ubiquiti, the corporate plaintiff, is held to be a public figure (or some other variant, like a limit purpose public figure, etc), as long as krebs was only negligent (an idiot) rather than malicious (deliberately ignoring the truth of falsity), it still wouldn't be defamation. Ubiquiti is almost certain to be held to be some sort of public figure - they even sort of out themselves on this by pointing out they file 10-q's with the SEC and expect all their interactions to be with the public.
- goodluckchuck 5y agoHas Krebs said his source was arrested? According to my reading Krebs only said that “a” former Ubiquiti was arrested, with no indication that it’s rhe same person.
- ashtonkem 5y agoTime for congress to make some anti-SLAPP laws; it seems to me as a non lawyer that this is a SLAPP that they forum shopped for. Especially since they dont seem to have pleaded anything that would surmount the “actual malice” requirement for defamation required here.