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Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error
mpicpp writes in with this story about a mistake that saw personal details of world leaders accidentally disclosed by the Australian immigration department. "With a single key stroke, the personal information of President Obama and 30 other world leaders was mistakenly released by an official with Australia's immigration office. Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, were inadvertently emailed to one of the organizers of January's Asian Cup football tournament, according to The Guardian. The U.K. newspaper obtained the information as a result of an Australia Freedom of Information request. Aside from President Obama, leaders whose data were released include Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The sender forgot to check the auto-fill function in the email 'To' field in Microsoft Outlook before hitting send, the BBC reports."
Yes, I am called Barack Obama. Can't you see that in these forge... authentic papers? I just travel economy, as that is the most cost-sensitive solution!
Amusing as this is, most of it (perhaps not passport numbers -- but how hard can it be to get a new passport as a head of state) is already public information.
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
"Outlook not so good."
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When their privacy is violated, it makes headlines.
When they violate ours, it's business as usual.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It was mostly only metadata.
This is the equivalent to the periodic scenario where HR accidentally emails the spreadsheet with everyone's salary numbers to the Everyone list.
And yes, back in the days I was an email administrator, I had to try and do damage control on someone who had actually done that. Twice. Others probably have similar stories.
Actually, it's gotten better now, ironically, now that all that stuff is stored in some cloud app. Now the people just have accounts that they can run their own reports from. Of course, in smaller, or less tech savvy businesses, people are probably still passing those sorts of spreadsheets via email even today.
personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit [...] British Prime Minister David Cameron
A minor consitutional note, but David Cameron isn't a head of state. Queen Elizabeth is, but she doesn't have a passport, as they're issued in her name, and in any case she can just flash a tenner at passport control as ID, or just say "I'm the bloody queen, mate" and be done with it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's interesting for a couple of reasons. Given that the sender intended to send the details somewhere, I'd be really interested to know who the intended recipient was and for what reason.
Even more interesting, I never quite realised that heads of state would have (or then use), a passport. Surely no one actually checks it? I mean, I was once stuck in an immigration queue at JFK behind Paddy Ashdown, just after he stopped being something like the NATO-imposed governor of Bosnia and was an ordinary human again. He was relaxed, but his diminutive aide was not happy that Lord Ashdown had to wait. Fascinating people watching. But a proper bona-fide head of state?
OK, so the summary makes it sound like the Guardian got a copy of the personal information via a FOI request, which would make no sense. "Welp, we sent it in an email. Guess we have to release it now if anyone asks." In fact what happened is they learned about the breach through a FOI request, though I'm not sure how they knew to make the request.
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The only thing more annoying than a computer is a computer that tries to be helpful.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well than, let's see your birth certificate!
Which one of Barrack Obama's - if that is his real name - birthdates and social security numbers were released? He is known to have stated several different at various times.
The message included the 31 world leaders' dates of birth but not personal addresses and other contact details.
Good.... who knows what could have happened if people knew where these world leaders lived.
No matter how much training, security measures, or mail filtering......
You can't fix stupid.
I'm having difficulty imagining how this happened. The forgot to "check" autofill, or did the article goof and mean "uncheck" autofill? And what would autofill do anywa? I use Outlook but I have no autofill that I see. Will it fill in a random list of addresses if you forget to put anything in the "To:" field?
All autocompletes I have ever seen are completely awful and generally worse than nothing at all. Putting words together is, like, the one thing we humans are good at? So I am at a loss as to why we seem so addicted to this ridiculous kind of software.
Really? I use it all the time -- works really well on Google Mail, I start typing "Joh" and a popup window gives me a list of users that begin with "Joh" so I can choose whether I wanted to send the email to John or Johanna. Works decently well on my phone too - I use the "swipe" style typing on my phone and the autocomplete usually figures out the word I meant to type, even when I don't quite swipe over all of the letters I intended to type.
Forget the auto-complete nonsense. The question that should be being asked is why an un-encrypted email containing " Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia" would be being sent to ANYONE. I can't even send an unencrypted email at work containing MY OWN social security number.
These information are mostly available in the public domain already. So what's the big deal about the leak?
What about their luggage combination?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Yes, I have to concur. I was complete baffled, trying to imagine what kind of person would be tech savvy and not appreciate the value of autocomlete in life. Then I noticed pattern. Since I prefer not to respond to an AC unless they are saying something truly unique or it is blatantly clear that they are legitimately trying to add to the conversion, I kept reading and waiting to find a good one to which I might respond. Someone logged in or writing something that remotely approaches a rational thought. Perhaps it is coincidence, but I gave up trying to find a dissenter that wasn't an AC, or was an AC that seemed sincere.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I think in this case the "check" refers to looking at what has been auto-filled in the field...
That information is useless: you are not going to impersonate Obama because you have his passport number.
By the way I am surprised diplomatic missions have to show a passport.
I'm pretty sure that post was written by a markov chain generator using a combination of fox news and slashdot as it's data set
I encountered a bug once in Outlook where I did fill in the name, autocompleted it correctly but still Outlook sent it to the wrong person behind my back.
Luckily the person receiving the mail wasn't a security breach.
So I don't trust Outlook much since then.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Autofill errors have happened on Voting machines too. it filled in the ballot with the last guys ballot.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Really? Here's how it works for me: type "J" - long pause while system pulls up every name that starts with J. This is a lot so it takes a while. Whew, OK! Ready for the next letter. "O" and another long pause while the list is refined and the javascript finishes running. By this time I could have just typed "Johnathan" and been done with it. Or the system could have waited until I typed 3 or 4 letters before auto complete starts getting in the way but NOOO THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS.
Sounds like you need a faster computer or faster internet connection -- even when use my phone to connect to the internet, the autocomplete popup comes up faster than I can type, but even if I type faster than the autocomplete popup, I don't see how it would get in the way, if I don't want to use autocomplete, I don't have to use one of their suggestions.
No, he needs software where the autocomplete lookup is asynchronous and keyboard input has interrupt priority. But not all software is built sanely....
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
So the data leaked, is that secret or just personal?
that's all nice and good when the email address you want to send is actually the one it chooses for the name.
what's more annoying though is doing a search on google and then google deciding that "NOPE, you want to search this other word that is slightly similar!".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So the story goes they accidentally sent the email to the asian cup organisers when the autofill picked the wrong entry.
So they would have type 'a' 's' 'i' and then autofilled?
Sounds like they were sending the email to ASI...O
And yet despite recommending not to tell the leader about the breach, somehow a second leak occured when the leak was leaked to a newspaper.
Autofill is not evil. What is evil is that it changes the order. What is even worse is that you can not turn that off. When you do not mail somebody a lot, that person is number two in line after somebody who you mail a lot.
Then there is a project and the number two becomes number one and the number one becomes number two.
Out of habit you select the second one, because that is where it always was. I bet that is what happend here. I know it happend a lot to me where three adresses change all the time in the order they are shown.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It works shite on Outlook, because the order keeps changing depending on how often you use an address.
So what has happend here is that some email adress that was always the second in line has been moved to the first and the first in line has moved to the second. THis due to the fact that suddenly he needs to mail to that one department a lot.
They are always number two, so he type 'd' for 'department' and selects the second one that pops up. Now this has changed, so the second you see with 'd' is not department' but 'dave' and 'department\ is the first one.
It becomes even more confusing as it looks at both the first and the last name when you type 'd'.
So yeah, this one is awefull.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Luckily the guy didn't email those world-leaders with all the recipients in the to: field, they would 'reply all' for the next 20 years and nothing would get done.
What I want to know is do Angela Merkel's documents show that her real father was Adolf Hitler?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Isn't everyone missing the real issue here? It's not that someone mis-addressed an email. It's not that Outlook helped them mess up. It's not that it was leaders' information.
It's the fact that they were sending this kind of information about anyone in clear text, on an email, at all, to anyone.