LexisNexis spokesperson Paul Eckloff disputes that the freeze was an overreach. The company deemed this step necessary to accommodate Atlas users' requests not to have their data made public. “This company could not be more committed to supporting law enforcement,” he said. “We would support the protection of common sense.” But he described the law of Daniel as overly punitive.
To Adkisson, the people punished were the police, judges, and other government employees he met during 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 City.
In April 2023, Justyna was filmed by a YouTuber who runs the channel Long Island Audit, which has more than 842,000 subscribers. He often films himself trying to incite police misconduct, and Justyna asking him to leave a government office became his latest viral hit. Followers flooded the Rahway Police Department's 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 the comments linking to the contact information. Police wouldn't do that either, citing First Amendment concerns. Tensions boiled.
In August 2023, Scott received text messages demanding $3,000 or “your family will be responsible for paying in blood.” The text messages contained his sister's name and address. An hour later, the same number sent a video of two people wearing ski masks and carrying weapons in an unknown location. Atlas was not yet operational, so Scott, determined to delete all of his family's contact information online, sat on his lagoon patio every evening for weeks and crushed Michelob Ultras to stay calm as he navigated the deletion forms. He submitted so many requests to Whitepages for his family that he couldn't submit any more.
The Facebook comments linking to the Maloneys' address only emerged 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.
While Adkisson wanted to sue non-compliant data websites, he had no qualms about signing on the Maloneys as plaintiffs. And because Daniel's Law now made it possible, thanks to the lobbying work of Atlas and the police union, to collect guaranteed fines from data websites, Adkisson had been able to secure five law firms, including leading national firms Boies Schiller Flexner and Morgan & Morgan, and several lawyers who personally knew the Daniel of “Daniel's Law”.
