LexisNexis spokesperson Paul Eckloff disputes that the freeze is an excessive measure. The company deemed this step necessary to honor requests submitted by Atlas users not to disclose their data. “This company couldn’t be more dedicated to supporting law enforcement,” he said. “We would support common sense protections.” But he described Daniel’s law as too punitive.
For Adkisson, the the people punished were the cops, judges, and other officials he 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 along the border with New 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 trying to get the police to behave badly, and Justyna asking him to leave a government office has become 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 the White Pages. Scott said Facebook would not remove comments linking to contact information. Neither does the police department, citing First Amendment concerns. Tensions were boiling.
In August 2023, Scott received text messages demanding $3,000 or “your family will be responsible for paying me with their blood.” The texts included his sister’s name and address. An hour later, the same number sent a video of two masked individuals armed with guns inside an unknown location. Atlas wasn’t yet operational, so Scott, determined to delete all of his family’s online contact data, sat on his lagoon-side deck every night for weeks, crushing Michelob Ultras to stay calm for that he was going through the withdrawal forms. He made so many requests to the White Pages for his family that it stopped him from doing more.
The Facebook comments linked to the Maloneys’ address were only posted 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 censorship complaints.
As Adkisson sought to sue noncompliant data websites, he had no difficulty listing the Maloneys as plaintiffs. And because Daniel’s Law now made it possible, thanks to lobbying by Atlas and the police union, to collect guaranteed penalties on data websites, Adkisson had been able to secure five law firms, including the national law firms of prominent Boies Schiller Flexner and Morgan & Morgan, and some of the lawyers who personally knew Daniel from “Daniel’s Law”.
