

Also worth noting that this was civil court, not criminal. In criminal court, pleading the fifth simply means you’re refusing to testify against yourself. In criminal cases, you still have the presumption of innocence, so pleading the fifth isn’t an admission of guilt.
But the reason the civil/criminal distinction is notable is because civil court uses the fifth amendment against you. If you plead the fifth in civil court, jurors are instructed to presume that the testimony would be damning. The presumption of innocence doesn’t exist in civil court, so pleading the fifth isn’t going to help your case.
The only reason you would plead the fifth in civil court is to avoid having your civil testimony used against you in criminal court. For instance, if you committed a rape and end up in civil court, pleading the fifth can be a way to avoid being criminally charged with rape. Because if you admit it under oath in civil court, the criminal court can use it against you. But it will almost certainly hurt your civil case, because pleading the fifth to avoid criminal charges will have the civil courts presuming guilt.
Basically, if he plead the fifth 80 times, that was 80 times that the civil courts told jurors “presume his testimony would implicate him in {whatever he is accused of}.”








Literally this. It starts with “everything needs to be on an air gapped LAN so we can control it.” And then suddenly that air gapped LAN isn’t air gapped, because someone got tired of paying the call-out fee every time the on-call person had to drive to the site to push a few buttons on a keyboard. But figuring out a proper VPN (or at least a reverse proxy with access control) was too difficult or expensive, (management thinks the point is to save money on call out fees, not spend money on proper hardware) so they just poked a bunch of port-forwarded holes in the firewall and called it a day.