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Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#72
post #54

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) .. vowed his administration would seek to prosecute and investigate .. anyone who aided the publication in its "attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet." Embarrassing governments is the natural outcome of the press doing it's job. This is what the extra constitutional protections are for.

Exactly. Thank you nosy media. This anti-press stuff started with Trump. Terrifying how authoritarian the right has become. Reporters, please continue “embarrassing” all states. The sane leaders and citizens will be thanking you.

Anti-press goes back decades, centuries even.

Calling it a left/right issue just diverts from the real problem of government overreach and negative reaction to the exposure of malfeasance.

If you seriously think anti-press is a Trump phenomenon, I encourage you to look into the creation and use of the Alien and Sedition acts.

Or maybe how Lincoln treated press that was not acting as a propaganda arm of the Federal government.

If you want a more contemporary example, take a look at Obamas use of wiretapping against journalists and other attacks on press freedom.

When you treat this as a thing that only happens because of one "side", nothing is done to address the root cause.

Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#73

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) said fixing the flaw could cost the state $50 million Talk about waste of resources.

It's a disgrace the agency who produced this website is not liable for this substandard quality.

How crazy is it that code like this is deployed to production and then the customer has to pay 50 million to get it up to standards? The senator should be ashamed they are being scammed like this.

Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#74
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Thank you nosy media. This anti-press stuff started with Trump. Terrifying how authoritarian the right has become. Reporters, please continue “embarrassing” all states. The sane leaders and citizens will be thanking you.

> This anti-press stuff started with Trump. * gestures vaguely in the direction of Richard Nixon, waits for historians to chime in with earlier examples.

I'll leave this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...

Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#75

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) said fixing the flaw could cost the state $50 million Talk about waste of resources.

I would absolutely love to know who provided that estimate and how they arrived at that number. I understand that issues are often far more complex than they appear but this just seems ridiculous.

Turns out a bunch of other systems rely on this bug to fetch information, and no-one's entirely sure where they are, who's responsible for them, or what they do. Also the page is auto-generated though some arcane CMS such that it's really hard to figure out how to get the data off that page while keeping it other places where it needs to be, without restructuring the whole thing. Also deployment is manual and you'll need to go back and forth with some unrelated department for months to make it happen. Also there's no testing environment, no information about how to get it running—let alone any useful scripts or config/deployment management—is in the repo or otherwise available at all, and there are no tests. And it's all written in an unholy combination of ASP.NET and Java server pages. And the "database" is a standards-nonconforming CSV.

(pure speculation)

Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a student at DeVry University (a national for-profit college with 40 campuses) your SSN was your student ID. This wasn’t corrected until 2002 or 2003. :(

Your SSN was your driver's license number in 29 states until 2004, when Bush outlawed the practice. Many, many institutions in the USA are built on it being a high-trust society. Now that it's falling into a low-trust state, we can expect those institutions to fail, and perhaps the state to as well.

> Many, many institutions in the USA are built on it being a high-trust society. Now that it's falling into a low-trust state, we can expect those institutions to fail, and perhaps the state to as well.

Not enough people understand this, but I'm encouraged whenever I hear from those who do.

Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#77
post #54

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) .. vowed his administration would seek to prosecute and investigate .. anyone who aided the publication in its "attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet." Embarrassing governments is the natural outcome of the press doing it's job. This is what the extra constitutional protections are for.

Exactly. Thank you nosy media. This anti-press stuff started with Trump. Terrifying how authoritarian the right has become. Reporters, please continue “embarrassing” all states. The sane leaders and citizens will be thanking you.

The Julian Assange fiasco predates Trump's rise to power, and was (at least in my opinion) a very clear anti-press action on the part of the US.

Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#78
> “hacker took the records of at least three educators, decoded the HTML source code, and viewed the social security number of those specific educators.”

There's so much wrong here - am I to understand that if the state sends you SSNs in plaintext and you read them, _you're_ at fault?

Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#79
post #6

Apparently, the SSNs were all embedded directly in the HTML file. Like … what?

When I was a student at DeVry University (a national for-profit college with 40 campuses) your SSN was your student ID. This wasn’t corrected until 2002 or 2003. :(

Irving Campus ? I was there for those years.

Re: Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting

#80
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Thank you nosy media. This anti-press stuff started with Trump. Terrifying how authoritarian the right has become. Reporters, please continue “embarrassing” all states. The sane leaders and citizens will be thanking you.

> This anti-press stuff started with Trump. * gestures vaguely in the direction of Richard Nixon, waits for historians to chime in with earlier examples.

Trump literally called the press the enemy of the people.

Traditionally, that's the sort of rhetoric a leader uses when they're about to send out the hit squads.

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