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Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

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Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#151

Post by rwc »

ericcumbee wrote: post #100
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the supposedly "startlingly accurate" preference and views modeling that is linked to all personal details and publically accessible. While someone could always deny it being correct it again raises questions about responsibility in data collection. > RNC_RegID, State, 2012ObamaVoter_DRA_12_16, 2012RomneyVoter_DRA_12_16, 2016ClintonVoter_DRA_12_16, 2016TrumpVoter_DRA_12_16, AmericaFirstForeignPolicy_agree_DRA_12…

I can not vouch for the accuracy of those. but as a power user of GOPDataCenter (The portal they provide to campaigns and GOP County chairs) the Modeled Ethnicity is pretty terrible.

Can confirm.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#154

Post by falcolas »

cookiecaper wrote: post #127
falcolas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, while I understand that this is nothing illegal, I think it's terribly wrong. We just handed everyone, including the 5% of society who tend towards sociopathy, a nicely tagged, collated (and yet probably slightly inaccurate) list of minorities. Hate women? You have a nice list which includes the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all those women. Hate muslims? Boy do I have just the list for you.…

One of the weird effects of the internet is that stuff that used to be considered obvious and self-evident is now treated as very sensitive. For example, no one used to consider their gender or race "private" information; rather, it was nearly impossible to interact with another human without these things being self-evident. Not many years ago, there used to be a book distributed far and wide with the names, address,…

The difference is in the scope. Back when phonebooks were widely used, there was no automated way to correlate those records with other records to create a highly specific list of all Asian women who live in a four block radius of a specific address.

You could walk around and find some of them, but that would take a significant amount of time and effort.

Phones were also not capable of interrupting you while you were out of the home, nor were they capable of receiving short messages on your dime.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#155

Post by InitialLastName »

Frondo wrote: post #141
794CD01 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a slippery slope. Analysis of writing style, patterns of use, etc can deanonymize data to the point where basically everything becomes PII.

Let's slide a little more down that slope, then. Where personal data and privacy is concerned, I'd rather err on the side of caution, than the world we live in now.

Dunno about anybody else, but I'd like to find a convenient canyon.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#156

Post by creepydata »

mrpoptart wrote: post #90
vinhboy wrote: post #69

> It would ultimately take days, from June 12th to June 14th, for Vickery to download 1.1 TB of publicly accessible files Do security firms have special permission to do this? Because as a private citizen, I am pretty sure I would go to jail if I tried this.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure if someone leaves a Top-Secret document on the ground, and you pick it up, you don't go to jail for that. The data is accessible to the public -- this isn't a hack, this is just downloading.

The only people who can go to jail for mishandling classified information are people with security clearances.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#157

Post by falcolas »

nostrademons wrote: post #128
falcolas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, while I understand that this is nothing illegal, I think it's terribly wrong. We just handed everyone, including the 5% of society who tend towards sociopathy, a nicely tagged, collated (and yet probably slightly inaccurate) list of minorities. Hate women? You have a nice list which includes the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all those women. Hate muslims? Boy do I have just the list for you.…

I don't really disagree that this is a shitty data breach, but on the consequences, I'll point out that the 5% of society who tends to sociopathy already have much lower-effort means to target minorities: Hate women? Look for boobs. Hate muslims? Look for brown skin. Hate Republicans? Look for MAGA hats. That these are inaccurate signals is irrelevant: haters gonna hate, and I really don't think they care whether the…

> lower-effort means to target minorities

It doesn't get much lower effort than downloading a list, popping it into Excel, and sorting on a column (I'm willing to bet that some hate groups are already doing this and will release very specific lists to their membership). And with phone numbers and a couple of bucks, you don't even have to leave your house to send them hate messages by the thousands.

Haters gonna hate - far too flippant a phrase to describe those who emotionally and physically assault their targets.

As for the ad models - the RNC release has a very specific DOB, location, gender, and phone number. Some of these the ad network could guess at, but this provides concrete data.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#158

Post by anigbrowl »

ksk wrote: post #134
fnovd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't blame a "careless programmer" when the real problem is organizations simply not committing any resources to security. It's like a hospital only employing 1 nurse and blaming her when patients inevitably die. The organization has a clear responsibility to employee a sufficient number of experts to protect their data. DRA is not unique here but does demonstrate a pattern of companies playing fast and loose wi…

>You can't blame a "careless programmer" when the real problem is organizations simply not committing any resources to security. How have you established that they didn't have a sufficient number of experts? What if they purchased a product or service and it simply didn't work? Its rather harsh to point fingers without having all of the information. >We'll keep seeing things like this until our laws are such that ste…

I'm really impressed at the lengths people will go to defend those whose malfeasance or ineptitude unarguably worsen the lives of up to two hundred million people. You seem like a smart person, please tell me how you think it's OK that these folks' contact details and potentially very detailed psychological and political profile information are now likely available on the dark web?

Given that this data was collected for explicitly political purposes with the specific goal of shaping voting behavior - one of the few things in American life where privacy is considered sacrosanct - surely you don't need me to point out the potential for manipulation, exploitation, and intimidation that become available to bad actors in possession of this data.

Are you familiar with the concept of 'strict liability'? Do you have any policy reason why such a standard shouldn't apply in cases like this?

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#159

Post by anigbrowl »

strictnein wrote: post #56
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #47

As long as the CEO of an company (RNC) that gives data to an outsourcer (Deep Root Analytics) is not going to jail to give data to an unqualified company, nothing will change. If the CEO goes to jail, things will change very rapidly (CEO will manage his CMO much tighter who will first want to see an security audit not older than 6 months). At least CEOs I have reported to as CTO were very sensitive for implemention i…

What law did they break, exactly? These aren't medical or financial records. A careless programmer makes a bad choice and the CEO has to go to jail? Come on.

The point is that we need laws to govern the management of personally sensitive data like this. Privacy laws in the USA are appallingly weak.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#160

Post by sgift »

frisco wrote: post #129
strictnein wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What law did they break, exactly? These aren't medical or financial records. A careless programmer makes a bad choice and the CEO has to go to jail? Come on.

> What law did they break, exactly? That's not how laws work. Laws can be whatever we write them to be. Losing medical and financial records was once not illegal too.

Not retroactively, that would be a disaster.
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