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198 Million Americans Hit By 'Largest Ever' Voter Records Leak (zdnet.com)
Political data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server, reports say. From a ZDNet article: It's believed to be the largest ever known exposure of voter information to date. The various databases containing 198 million records on American voters from all political parties were found stored on an open Amazon S3 storage server owned by a Republican data analytics firm, Deep Root Analytics. UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery, who found the exposed server, verified the data. Through his responsible disclosure, the server was secured late last week, and prior to publication. This leak shines a spotlight on the Republicans' multi-million dollar effort to better target potential voters by utilizing big data. The move largely a response to the successes of the Barack Obama campaign in 2008, thought to have been the first data-driven campaign. Further reading: Republican Data-Mining Firm Exposed Personal Information for Virtually Every American Voter - The Intercept; The RNC Files: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak - Upguard; Data on 198M voters exposed by GOP contractor
Data On 198M Voters Exposed By GOP Contractor - The Hill.
Pay a nominal fee to the right company and you have access to all voter records nationwide.
This is "a matter of public record" in the information age: zero privacy.
From TFA
We accept full responsibility, will continue with our investigation, and based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked," he said.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The Donald confirms they were all fake democrat registrations anyway.
Commonly referred to as the "VAN", State voter participation records, even for party primaries/caucus, are a matter of public record. Who you voted for may be confidential, but that you showed up and voted isn't.
Larger political organizations go the extra mile to annotate these records and aggregate them. They even have door to door pollsters that go around to those who have voted recently and target them with polling questions.
IMHO it is a good thing this is open to the wider public, and not just in the hands of a few with the deep pockets to aggregate it.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
American voters from all political parties
What? Both of them?
(I know there are more political parties in the USA, but Americans themselves do not seem to know it.)
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
http://www.politico.com/story/... is the first I found, and that's 10/2016, at 200 million.
In my case, the spotlight is on managers who say, "put everything on S3".
Well, the democratic effort has been famous and bragged-about for several years, during which time it's never been described as anything but huge. It's like you're complaining about some story talking about the "Multi-Hundred-Billion-Dollar Russian Submarine program, seen as an effort to catch up with American submarines"...for not stressing for the thousandth time that America spends more on military (including submarines) than anybody. That's real famous, too.
(PS: The Russians do not have hundreds of billions to spare for submarines; that part was very fictional.)
After Sony, we quickly heard their security was worthless - every VP who wanted to watch some video somewhere could get another hole punched in the firewall.
Then the Democrats were "hacked" by.... asking for the top guy's password, which was promptly given!
Warning after warning that we aren't taking this seriously. I'd love to make some stupid partisan remark about this ("these are the people who mocked Clinton for a potential data exposure that never happened?!!?") but the fact is that everybody has done incredibly stupid crap like this, are still doing it, and will continue.
Until we get some kind of worse event, I guess. What will it take!?!
So, you're saying it's marketing data. Yawn. There's no "narrative" here. Just looking objectively at what actually leaked and how important it is. This isn't social security numbers or healthcare information. It's information about who you'd likely voted for. And, you know what, children insult and ridicule because they're unable to make substantial arguments without it. Go look in the mirror.
It has https in the url, so of course it is a safe site. Don't you know nothin bout the interwebs?
Please do tell, oh victimized conservative, how calling the Republican effort "multi-million" and not, this time, calling the Democratic equivalent the same label, although it has been done many, many, times before, is somehow harmful to Republicans.
Is someone seriously not going to vote Republican because they heard they spent millions of dollars on a part of their campaign? Is someone seriously going to think the Democrats don't?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The Democrats' effort isn't really relevant to the article because it wasn't their data that was exposed. In an article talking about R. Scalise being shot while practicing for a baseball game, do you expect them to also talk about a time that a Dem was shot in the past? If you want an article that might sound negative about the Dems, wait until something actually happens that involves them.
Which is, frankly, much worse than leaking Social Security numbers or health data. If they had leaked the SSN of everyone in America, it would force some real reform of the credit agencies, preventing them from treating an SSN as proof of identity, but overall, the public wouldn't be harmed. If anything, they would be helped by exposing the notion of "identity theft" as the credit-agency contrivance (fraud) that it is.
And the worst-case scenario for leaking health data is embarrassment if somebody got an STD, but that would quickly become uninteresting to people because it would also quickly demonstrate how many people do. You might occasionally have hiring bias by people who want to avoid their health insurance costs going up, but I would not expect that to be common (because it is quite illegal).
But exposing everyone's likely voting behavior is a grievous violation of personal privacy. Ask a Republican in a majority-Democrat region or a Democrat in a majority-Republican region, and ask them if they think that the people around them would be less likely to hire them if they knew their political affiliation. Ask them if it will affect their ability to socialize. And so on. Thus, voting data can be easily abused to pressure people into conformity.
Worse, that small-scale abuse has the potential to shift the balance of elections, which means that leaking this data potentially has a national impact as well as an individual impact. Based on that, I would argue that party affiliation and likelihood of voting for a given party is quite possibly the most private information that anyone can have about you, and that making that information available publicly is one of the worst breaches of the public's trust that a political organization can commit.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.