alt Hacker News> Perhaps if someone is misusing their access to an administrative or law enforcement database to ‘run plates’ and report on who owns the vehicle, this could be unlawful.
But that's not an example of something that would be illegal to say in a chat. It would be an example of something that's illegal to do regardless of the chat.
I don't think the idea is that the speech in the chat is inherently illegal; it's that it could be used as evidence of illegal activity. Using that example - if someone in the chat asks about plate XYZ at 10AM, and if a phone linked to "Bob" posts to the group chat at 10:04 AM that license plate XYZ is used by ICE, and the internal logs show that Bob queried the ICE database about plate XYZ at 10:02 AM, and no one else queried that license plate in the past month, that is pretty good evidence that Bob violated the CFAA.