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Jeb Bush Publishes Thousands of Citizens' Email Addresses
blottsie writes Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush hasn't even yet formally declared his desire to run for president in 2016, but he's already started what appears to be a major privacy blunder. His new project, the Jeb Emails, a massive, open database of correspondence to and from his jeb@jeb.org email address, publishes the full names, messages, and email addresses of his constituents who emailed him during his eight years in office.
Not a good start.
How exactly the fuck does someone "at this level" make this kind of mistake? This is almost like his brother's $5 million dollar email archival system...
If you're sending an email to the government and expect it not to be subject to foia, maybe you should think again.
This disclosure appears in his signature on most of the messages I looked at...
Please note: Florida has a very broad public records law.
Most written communications to or from state officials
regarding state business are public records available to the
public and media upon request. Your e-mail communications
may therefore be subject to public disclosure.
That would seem to include E-mails sent from private individuals to public officials, in particular E-mails intended to influence policy. Isn't making such E-mails transparent and public one of the main functions of FOIA?
Update in the article:
The Verge has uncovered emails that contain Social Security numbers, home addresses, and other personal information from Floridians.
Why would you assume that writing to a public official in their official capacity would be private?
We were in read-only mode most of the day while some server issues were fixed. Sorry for the downtime!
Since SourceForge went down at the same time, I'm thinking it's due to a wet-ware failure.
The twitter dude was much funnier. But then of course, we all know who the republicans work for. All part of the show
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Under Florida law, e-mail addresses are public records. If you do not want your e-mail address released in response to a public records request, do not send electronic mail to this entity. Instead, contact this office by phone or in writing.
History.—s. 1, ch. 2006-232.
Pretty sure that happened under Jeb's reign.
Makes dealing with government interesting.
You ruined my workday. I had nothing to do but *shudder* work all day.
It's Florida. All metadata is automatically considered public record, and contents are also public record if they bear on a state official's duties. Jeb was a state official (governor), so his e-mails are all automatically public record.
It's not a mistake, and it's not illegal: in Florida, public officials have no privacy on anything that pertains to their job. Every state official's salary, from the janitors' to the governor's, is listed in a giant, public-facing database, searchable by employee name. Colleges have a separate excel sheet, with salaries listed by name. The stuff you think people would want to keep quiet: in Florida, it's public. It's called the Sunshine Law.
Governor's e-mails? Of course that shit's public.
LOL, me too.
What I learned in previous years is that you should have an e-mail address dedicated for political stuff only. This after a state senator's campaign e-mail address was compromised and I received spam from her, I think.
By this I mean use an alias, or disposable one. Like Hotmail aliases.
It was too hard/long to edit and delete everything that needed to be.
now lets see him release audio and video recordings of every meeting and informal chat that lobbyists and corporate representatives have with him, and all correspondence to and from them too.
the way this country, or our laws, work.
Time to hit the books, and stop reading reddit and slashdot as your sole source of "knowledge". It will do you wonders. There was this invention some years ago, called a search engine, and it yields vast amounts of useful, as well as useless, information. The trick is, you actually have to "research" some of the items of interest, instead of being spoonfed propaganda all day by your equally-uneducated peers.
-GenX Survivor
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
The small blessing is that most of the senior citizens in Florida probably have already given this information to scammers in Asia.
My favorites are the ones with this type of warning at the bottom:
This message is intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain confidential, privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please delete all copies of the message and its attachments and notify us immediately.
Guess that didn't work out so well.
Not that those warnings have any teeth to begin with, but this doesn't help.
I didn't expect there would be thousands of Floridians who were smart enough to know how to use email yet interested in contacting Jeb. Are we sure they aren't thousands of throwaway email addresses used by just a few people?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Or was Ethan Czahor too busy redacting his Twitter feed?
I got carpel tunnel syndrome and repetitive motion injury hitting the refresh button so many times.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Perhaps Jeb Bush is trying to show voters that he believes in transparency for government officials. Instead he is showing that he has entirely misunderstood the point.
Open Government - you got it!
Jeb Bush - not as good as Anthem at disclosing PII!
He could man up and offer 10 year or lifetime quarterly credit reports and monitoring. that might save some trouble for some folks.
Update 2:15pm ET, Feb. 10: It gets worse. The Verge has uncovered emails that contain Social Security numbers, home addresses, and other personal information from Floridians.
Releasing PII data is a Federal crime, and there should be criminal charges filed in addition to civil charges by anyone with PII data exposed by this. I'm not saying there will be any charges or case filed, but that there should be (In other words, I know how the good'ole boy network is).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
First he hires a communications director with a history of sending out ugly tweets (that are, apparently, being deleted in an attempt to keep Bush's potential campaign from imploding before it even begins). Then he publishes constituents' email addresses. Doesn't seem all that smart to me.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
During his reelection campaign, his opponent hammered at the pending 2 billion dollar budget hole, to which he replied, "I fixed the state's finances. What budget hole?"
What does appeal does this college dropout hold to any geek around here, Republican or Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian?
So I e-mail the guv of Florida. Why am I disclosing my SSN in that e-mail? Is this required? Is Jeb Bush matching people e-mailing him against a database and revealing SSN's that way?
Privacy for the little people is a non-issue at best. Half the time you can shout down anyone who complains with variations on 'national security!'
Politics is easy: with marketing, you have to pander to the consumers all the time, with politics, it's 6 months or so. Everything else you do is just news clips. And what kind of candidate is going to get points against you yapping on about some email addresses?
Online Investing, Here are the top investing tools you need to be successful as an online investor. Find accurate, up-to-date investment news and tools to help, and it got me thinking about how most people seem to think owning a house is a great “investment at home”. Now, I have an obvious issue with this.
I am a democrat and I guess I "should" declare JB to be an asshat for his mortal sin and enjoy the show. I cannot imagine voting for him. But, he's probably not his campaign's IT guy. Jeb probably had nothing to do with this idiotic error. I could be wrong there but, I'm not ready to hold him accountable for this error - unless he fails to apologize. It is his campaign and he should apologize and make sure it never happens again.
Don't step on the baby.
we are not taking gov info - this is citizen private info - colleges publishing personal details of students along with correspondence with their teachers would be more similar
Some emails, which contain private data about person X, were sent by someone other than X.
A Verge article has two examples: an email about someone with employment troubles because of previous convictions, and an email about someone's major health problems. The name and SSN of the employee, and of the patient's mother, were in the emails. The emails were sent by someone other than the employee and the patient's mother.
So the problem is more complicated than "This is what happens if you put your own personal info into an email."
Slahdotted, were you?
Note: while trying to connect to www.slashdot.org over https, the SSL certificate were invalid. It was issued for "*.cloudflare.com" (or something like that) rather then for "*.slashdot.org".
I guess this pretty much sums up how he feels about privacy protection.
Except it is a .org account, not a .gov
Interestingly enough, I went out to the state's website and logged into the public mailbox that displays all email that are sent to the Governor. I saw phone numbers and everything else in there.
Nothing wrong with posting the e-mails (lobbying should be transparent!), but home and e-mail addresses could have conceivably been redacted and probably should have been. Furthermore, some of those e-mails may contain sensitive information (i.e., someone complaining about the treatment their child has received in a school for children with special needs), and in such cases the identities of the persons involved should also be concealed. But in general this is a good start.
Um, I do believe that it was Iraq that was claiming they had WMD, and had been witnessed gassing the Kurds. Heck, Saddam was preventing the UN inspectors access to known chemical weapon plants, while threatening to attack other people (as a smoke screen to prevent Iran from invading, but it was a credible threat). The chemical weapons were even found and disposed of, but it of course makes a good sound bite to claim they never existed.
This was hardly the wrong country, you just conveniently forget what was happening at the time. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, it was a declared war, and was about Saddam threatening other countries and not allowing inspections.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
I assume this is the 12 year old war you meant, if you mean Afghanistan, than it is just as off base.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
In fact, many people consider Florida to be *ahead* in government transparency issues.
I didn't expect there would be thousands of Floridians who were smart enough to know how to use email yet interested in contacting Jeb. Are we sure they aren't thousands of throwaway email addresses used by just a few people?
well sure i'm responsible for like 170 of the addresses but i didn't write ALL of them.
Just another second banana
We know Saddam had had chemical weapons, because we kept the receipts. We had no good information that he still had them, because he didn't (except for a few left over from earlier times). He was not blocking UN inspection of known chemical weapon plants, because at that time he had none, at least none that were operating. He was keeping UN inspectors out of places that, it turned out, were not involved in producing chemical or nuclear weapons, and bragging to his neighbors. He was trying to keep the capability to produce WMD, but I can't take a nuclear weapons production facility seriously when essential parts are buried in the rose gardens of the scientists.
In fact, Colin Powell was unconvinced that he had chemical or nuclear weapons when he gave his famous UN speech, but didn't have time to verify its claims for himself. See his book "It Worked For Me". Ideally, get it on CD, because that way you can hear his tone of voice when he reads the appropriate section.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Was Carter president 12 years ago when we started a war against a wrong country? :P
You seem to have a bad case of "but Bush!". Butt bush is very unappealing - you might try shaving that area, or perhaps laser hair removal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sorry to post a second time, but you have completely missed my point probably because I did not explain it.
I'm referring to the situation where the Greek economy was in trouble a few years ago and some "conservatives" (compared with the previous bunch anyway) who were "fiscally conservative" came in and their attempted cure was far worse than the disease.
Such penny wise and pound foolish authoritarian idiots are a problem and we can be thankful that US conservatives have only paid lip service to austerity instead of practising it.
Nonsense. The cure would have been painful, but had it been done in earnest it would have produced results.
It was, at best, half assed. Now they've announced their intention to print euros until the presses are taken away from them.
Playing chicken with the continents currency. These are the sociopaths you support.
At this point, it's all about planning the Greek exit from the Euro.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I assume you're talking about a time after Greece went top the Euro.
Greece was spending vastly more than it was making, It's debt-to-GDP ratio was one of the highest in the world. If your living at double your income off credit cards, of course it's going to suck when you stop doing that! But that's not mean fiscal conservatives hurting you, that's your unsustainable lifestyle running out.
Again, austerity isn't something designed to give you a better life! No one imagines that. If that's the position you're attacking, you have no opposition.
Austerity is what you must do to service your debts. When you're past the point where you can play games moving your debt from one credit card to another, and you finally run out of lenders, well, now you're in a bad way. Not only do you have to live on what you earn, you have to life on what you earn less the massive amount you're paying in interest.
None of that is the fault of fiscal conservatives either. All the "austerity" is is the outright lie that you can live beyond your means, a lie told to buy votes, finally being revealed as what it is. Greece was never going to make it work: long term, you can only consume as much as you produce.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You, sir, owe me a good swallow of 15 year single malt.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
People in that generation just don't understand technology dangers. They just don't grasp the whole an email is a master key thing. They don't understand why the NSA reading emails is like having a cop read your post office mail, why your online life is your life. How it is so easy to go from email + name to having someones SSN and then address then credit in their name.
Except anything relating to his governorship falls under the law, regardless if the communication went to his private, corporate, or government address. You can't just sidestep public records laws by "privatizing" your communications. Any communication with a government official as that government official is public record.
Why? Florida has only one Governor, not one for each party. After the election, people who didn't support whoever made it still have needs and opinions on policy.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Look internationally instead of waving flags - please attempt to at least read and comprehend my posts instead of a knee jerk "How can you be so out of touch" without considering anything other than the last five minutes.
Please read my post to see where in the timeline I am describing - "attempted cure was far worse than the disease" is an enormous clue which I possibly should put in red with a BLINK tag so you do not miss it again. Please read that line. Then look up "austerity" in a dictionary if you really did read but fail to comprehend instead of merely skimming and cheerleading which is what I suspect. Getting it yet?
It seems short posts don't convey enough and long ones exceed attention span and do not get read, unless there is some game of pretending to be stupid "for rhetorical effect" going on.
What is going on? Why does such a simple opinion of why the USA doesn't breed conservative candidates who are fiscally conservative create so much confusion? Surely it's not all that hard a concept to grasp and discuss without confusing someone enough that they can't separate past and present tenses?
Support? Fuck you and your attacking the messenger bullshit. I give an example on the other side of the fucking world of a massive fuckup on top of another massive fuckup and now I'm supporting it am I?
What inspires such shit? Why the personal attack? I won't ask for an apology because I doubt you are man enough to take responsibility for your own words, just some sort of pathetic bully.
Why? Florida has only one Governor, not one for each party. After the election, people who didn't support whoever made it still have needs and opinions on policy.
True, but the summary stated this was email sent to jeb@jeb.org, which is not the official state of Florida email address for the governor. Hence these were far more likely to be emails from people who supported him than from people who did not.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Fuck you too.
You oppose the Greeks living within their means. Hence you support them continuing to spend other peoples money.
You blame the mess on the people trying to impose reason and give a pass to the print and spend Greek sociopaths.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about. What "attempted cure" did you have in mind? I was guessing "austerity", but I could only guess.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
yup you stupid Americans are gonna elect ................ Jeb!
Who's his running mate? Duke? Campaign manager? Jethro the Double Naught spy?
Can hardly wait for the campaign promises. "A possum in every pot"
What an utter lack of empathy on your part - you cannot relate that something stupid done there could apply to someone doing something stupid in your own backyard, and yet you accuse me of things that I'm warning about. What a loser.
Yes, it's become very clear that my simple example I was sure you'd know something about is not something you've been following enough to get more than random sound bites - yet you've been somewhat vocal about it while mixing up everyone in Europe it appears.
A right of centre "fiscally conservative" bunch took a failing economy (failed with a lot of advice from Goldman Sachs remember - conservative bunch there but not fiscally so) and decided to just cut everything. The country ground to a halt and those businesses that were still standing found they couldn't operate for infrastructure reasons. It was in the fucking news in every form of media. In fairy tale terms you may remember it's "don't kill the golden goose" - well they stopped feeding the goose, ate the goose and their bad economy turned into utter shit.
So in times of plenty you can go on about how it's a pity that a conservative is no miser, but when things get tight a conservative is not going to be able to be a miser without killing off some of the things in society they think is worth conserving - no goose no gold later. Hence a conservative with bailouts instead of letting Ford and GM die. Making sense yet?
I've course you've got to be able to tell the difference between years of "small government" propaganda and no functioning government at all to grasp the concept - use your brain instead of dumbed down PR.
You ruined my workday. I had nothing to do but *shudder* work all day.
So businesses everywhere experienced a huge spike in productivity due to a Slashdot uneffect?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So you don't like that example and think it all happened in a different way to what I do - so vehemently that you went as far as accusing me of "supporting" someone I couldn't even name - then let's try something else.
Let's pick a goose - maybe start with prisons. It's insanely expensive to keep people locked up, even in a prison camp full of tents in Texas. So what happens when a "fiscally conservative" person gets in charge? How does that fit with a conservative approach to law and order when you start to empty the prisons? A bit of a loss of gold eggs when your "fiscal conservative" makes radical changes to keep the prison population low - like Thatcher in year 3 of the first term not just reverting to previous sentencing but making it far more lax.
Getting an idea yet?
Let's pick a different goose, the military. By it's nature a military likes to have the resources to deal with a variety of possibilities. Enter the "fiscal conservative" - a lot of money can be saved by limiting military spending to current operations. Not very compatible with conservative, or any competent government is it?
I challenge you to discuss those points about why there are not a lot of conservative "fiscal conservatives" without some sort of silly personal attack.