Yes, this blogger probably went a bit over the line.

But on the other hand, TMM did everything possible to squash this story, and it's well known that they squelched OC3 networks early on when they first noticed the problem, and did the same to many other program owners who independently discovered the problem over the ensuing YEAR that the security breach was known to them, but they failed to notify anyone.

And, even worse than that, some programs, after the breach was made public, sent out incredibly evasive statements to their affiliates, dodging whether or not their program had actually suffered a breach, and instead offering weak self-serving notices that they'd "done all updates recommended by TMM", when what affiliates really needed to know at that point was whether that program (and therefore, potentially, the affiliate's information) had been compromised.

Free speech isn't free. It has a high cost, and one of those costs is allowing people to say things that they believe to be true without fear of punishment. I suspect that blogger believed everything that she wrote about the situation, and if that's the case, then her statements very clearly do not rise to the standard required for a libel or defamation case, which requires the accuser to prove both that the libeling/defaming party *knows* that what they are saying is false, and that the libeling/defaming party intended, with malice, to harm the aggrieved party.

It may not be the answer you want to hear, but it's the way our laws work. If a company undertakes a libel or defamation action without proof of both of those things, then they're essentially trying to strip away that person's right to free speech, and I'm sure that TMM knows that by threatening people with legal action, a lot of people won't want to spend the money money to defend a frivilous defamation action (which can easily cost $50-100,000) and will simply shut up. And that is not OK. (It's also why there's legislation preventing such things in California.)

Yes, I can agree that nobody likes hearing bad things said about them. But I don't know of any other company in this industry where, over and over, you keep hearing stories of people being threatened into silence, and that is not a good thing.