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Info on 1.8M Chicago Voters Was Publicly Accessible, But Now Removed From Cloud Service (chicagotribune.com)
A file containing the names, addresses, dates of birth and other information about Chicago's 1.8 million registered voters was published online and publicly accessible for an unknown period of time, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners said this week. From a report: The acknowledgment came days after a data security researcher alerted officials to the existence of the unsecured files. The researcher found the files while conducting a search of items uploaded to Amazon Web Services, a cloud system that allows users to rent storage space and share files with certain people or the general public. The files had been uploaded by Election Systems & Software, a contractor that helps maintain Chicago's electronic poll books. Election Systems said in a statement that the files "did not include any ballot information or vote totals and were not in any way connected to Chicago's voting or tabulation systems." The company said it had "promptly secured" the files on Saturday evening and had launched "a full investigation, with the assistance of a third-party firm, to perform thorough forensic analyses of the AWS server." State and local officials were notified of the existence of the files Saturday by cybersecurity expert Chris Vickery, who works at the Mountain View, Calif. firm UpGuard.
People love to bash on Chicago as allegedly being overrun with illegitimate voting. Now there is some data they can parse through to try to see if they can support it. How many people on this list are dead? What precincts can you put them in?
There is pretty good data on how Chicago voted in the 2016 presidential election, and we see only 1.02M votes cast (out of the 1.8M voters on the rolls). Go ahead and get more granular though, can you find precincts with more votes cast than expected?
The people who claim to be so highly knowledgeable on fraudulent voting - if they are as intelligent as they claim - should be able to resolve this pretty quickly. Go ahead, show us how bad it is there.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
>> Saturday
Nice job on the prompt reporting, Slashdot.
How many in that database were dead voters?
It's real hard to argue against a voter registry, it's hard to enforce that no one is voting multiple times without it. What of the other government databases? Can't they also be leaked and/or abused? Should we be using Social Security numbers everywhere?
A couple examples. Licenses to drive, do we really need those? Maybe a license for minors that lack the legal authority for things like signing an insurance contract, would be difficult to sue in court if caught violating the law or doing damage, etc. The license for a minor is much about an adult, presumably the parent, agreeing that they take responsibility for the behavior of the minor as it is about making sure the minor has a minimum understanding of how to drive. An adult though is always legally responsible, licensed or not. Every day is a driving exam by police officers looking for bad drivers.
We don't need gun licenses either, and for much the same reason as driving licenses. If you own and carry a gun then you are assumed responsible for anything that happens if it is discharged, licensed or not. These have been abused by law enforcement and by the public. Get rid of them.
Some licenses we probably need though are things like hunting and fishing, building repair and construction, or anything where there is a need to manage quantity. Can't have too many hunters hunting at once, that's bad for managing the wildlife. Can't have a building without knowing who owns it, that's a matter of managing taxes, census, and so forth.
We don't need marriage licenses. Marry who you want to marry. Have kids with whomever you choose. Might need record of who is responsible for the actions of a minor, like the driving license example, but that's what birth certificates are for. In cases of adoption, guardianship, whatever, there's existing means to record that.
In cases like this I believe we should think more about whether we need these records in the first place, rather than how to keep them secure. Voter registration is perhaps not the greatest example, again we do need to assure one person gets only one vote. Perhaps we can not record so much on the voter registration, like Social Security numbers, or party affiliation. A political party is at it's core just a club membership. There's no reason a person can only be a member of one club or the other. Why can't I join both clubs?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
As a Chicagoan I'm not bothered as I assume there's a large chance that the data is basically garbage because 77% of those voters are dead already.
How meny dead people are on that list?
It is interesting to see people shocked by this. The sunshine laws in Florida are so strong that all of this is openly sold. Check out this site that puts it all online by zip - http://flvoters.com/by_zip.htm...
Whenever I see "analysis" like this, I always question the matching criteria. Quite often it is naive and not validated.
If you use first name, last name and birth date you can produce THOUSANDS of _false_ matches. Throw in the address, maybe a few hundred. But then if the address is not correct on either side, you miss the match.
A good brief: http://www.brennancenter.org/a...