LexisNexis spokesman Paul Eckloff denies the freeze was an overreach. The company considered this step necessary in response to requests from Atlas users not to disclose their data. “This company couldn’t be more committed to supporting law enforcement,” he says. “We would support common sense protections.” However, he described the Law of Daniel as excessively punitive.
To Adkisson those punished were cops, judges and other government workers he met on his jeep tours around Recent Jersey. They included police officers Justyna Maloney, 38, and her husband, Sergeant Scott Maloney, 46, who work in Rahway, a diminutive town along the border with Recent York.
In April 2023, Justyna was filmed by a YouTuber who runs the Long Island Audit channel, which has over 842,000 subscribers. He often films himself and Justyna trying to get the police to behave inappropriately asking him to leave his government office became his latest viral hit. Followers flooded the Rahway Police Department’s Facebook page with approximately 6,500 comments, including death threats, insults and links to the Maloneys’ addresses and phone numbers on SearchPeopleFREE.com and Whitepages. Scott says Facebook would not remove comments that linked to contact information. Neither did the police, citing First Amendment concerns. Tensions boiled over.
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 showing two people wearing ski masks with weapons in an unknown location. The Atlas wasn’t yet up and running, so Scott, determined to remove all of his family’s contact information from the Internet, sat on his deck above the lagoon every night for weeks, crushing Michelob Ultras to keep peaceful while reviewing the deletion forms. He sent so many requests to Whitepages about his family that it prevented him from making any more.
Facebook comments containing links to the Maloneys’ address appeared only 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 police from the censorship complaints.
Since Adkisson wanted to sue websites containing non-compliant data, he had no problem registering the Maloney family as plaintiffs. And because Daniel’s Law now made it possible, thanks to Atlas and police union lobbying, to extract guaranteed fines from data websites, Adkisson was able to secure five law firms, including top national firms Boies Schiller Flexner and Morgan & Morgan, as well as some lawyers , who personally knew Daniel from “Daniel’s Law.”