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The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

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Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#101

Post by legitster »

rootsudo wrote: post #92
legitster wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but if you demand a warrant to confirm you don't have uranium, you can't be surprised if they are going to treat you as hostile.

How is that hostile? To be aware of your rights and state they can’t do an illegal search? Demanding a warrant to be searched is not hostile it’s the equivalent of saying no thank you. Hostile is when they have a warrant and you still refuse.

You cannot get a warrant without probably cause that a crime has been committed. So asking for a warrant to search your computer is literally asking to be charged with a crime.

IANAL, but demanding a prosecutor and judge be involved when dealing with an IT department is really dumb. If you can just agree with their legal team (and your lawyer) on the stipulations of the search and confirmation, you can't be charged with further crimes if they find anything ("fruit of the poison tree"). But insisting on getting hit with a warrant means anything they find can be used against you.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#102

Post by michaelmrose »

shadowgovt wrote: post #41
techsupporter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that government records should be open and are good for transparency. The problem comes when people don't realize that something they're doing would put all of the personal information they've submitted into the public record, or when it's required to do this to access a service. In Washington, and Seattle specifically, doing something as simple as reserving a park space or signing up for a constituent newsle…

The counterpoint is that as a citizen, I should be able to find out who keeps renting out the park and ruining the grass because ultimately, we the people hold the government accountable. In the early years of the rollout of federal income tax, the government lacked an IRS to enforce the code. They addressed the issue by making income tax filings public knowledge, so that if individuals saw that, for instance, their…

We have learned to our chagrin that such data is functionally useless to joe average voter because he is far far too ill informed and ill positioned to use it.

For instance it's incredibly easy to detect double voting if you have to check in at the polling location and send your ballot in in a signed envelope how on earth would it be possible to miss such?

What can happen and does happen to thousands of folks in an election with over a 100M voters is folks plan to be out of town and come back.

Lets be mean. When you thought of this sort of circumstance is an imaginary problem that would have thousands of false positives and zero true positives.

You ably demonstrate why its useless to crowd source election integrity because the crowd doesn't know anything. If you need further evidence look at all the other imaginary election fraud from causes as simple as not understanding things like

- people cast legit votes then die weeks or months later

- people move in area and forget to update their voter registration

- people have the same first and last name as the recently dead/moved/imprisoned/otherwise ineligible

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

thsksbd wrote: post #85
legitster wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A warrant is only required for a police search. You can agree to have anyone search your property as a resolution to any legal agreement if you want to.

A warrant is required for all government search, and I can just as easily waive my right for a warrant w/ the police. In fact, a workers for the municipality is the very last government level Id want snooping in my house. Next thing I know Im getting fined for having the wrong colored bathroom tiles.

> A warrant is required for all government search,

False. (As, also, is the upthread claim that "A warrant is only required for a police search")

Reasonableness is required for all government search, warrants are usually (but not categorically, there are all kinds of established exceptions to the warrant requirement) required for reasonableness.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#104

Post by brightsize »

andersrs wrote: post #59

Companies and governments will always undermine privacy either by incompetence or because it's good for business. In every case the only party that benefits from more privacy is really the end user. So what can we as users do about this? Is there an email service that can generate unique alias addresses? just.for.bloated.govt.dept.123@xyz.com would really help but I'm guessing the big companies like Google and Micros…

Spamgourmet (https://www.spamgourmet.com, https://github.com/spamgourmet/spamgourmet), free, has always worked well for me though these days I tend to just use the disposable addresses built in to Fastmail. Addy.io, (https://addy.io/), free/paid, is a newer offering with some nifty features like automatic PGP encryption.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#105

Post by refulgentis »

chankstein38 wrote: post #39
refulgentis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the author, and idk if the snide extra bit about informing them about their failings from 5 years ago makes any sense. This was posted today.

Bro the date right under the title on the article says "March 27, 2019"

Correct

I'm not sure an appeal to not comment because it's irrelevant because it happened 5 years ago makes sense

This is a site that provides a place to discuss news.

It was posted here today.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#106

Post by NegativeK »

legitster wrote: post #78
kelnos wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a "rookie mistake"; that's gross negligence. Whenever I write some sort of script to produce some sort of data file, I always look to ensure that the data file ends up looking like what I expect. This isn't even to ensure my data file doesn't include something private, just to ensure that it actually includes what I intended it to, and I didn't do something dumb like put the data in the same field twice, o…

We are not talking about one of the geniuses here at HN. The guy answering FOIA requests for the city is the IT equivalent of the counter person at a McDonalds. I don't think it's fair to flame them for being an idiot when it's clearly a process issue.

That's not how access to email content should work at any organization, and I can personally tell you that responsible government organizations don't give it to entry level employees.

Discovery and FOIA-equivalent requests that I've seen at the SLTT level were handled with the care that is expected for potentially sensitive communications. I'm sure smaller orgs can't do it as well, but Seattle is probably going to have some money for this stuff.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#107

Post by ToucanLoucan »

legitster wrote: post #101
rootsudo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that hostile? To be aware of your rights and state they can’t do an illegal search? Demanding a warrant to be searched is not hostile it’s the equivalent of saying no thank you. Hostile is when they have a warrant and you still refuse.

You cannot get a warrant without probably cause that a crime has been committed. So asking for a warrant to search your computer is literally asking to be charged with a crime. IANAL, but demanding a prosecutor and judge be involved when dealing with an IT department is really dumb. If you can just agree with their legal team (and your lawyer) on the stipulations of the search and confirmation, you can't be charged w…

> You cannot get a warrant without probably cause that a crime has been committed. So asking for a warrant to search your computer is literally asking to be charged with a crime.

That is just completely 100% wrong. Warrants are not (or at least, shouldn't be, your mileage may vary based on your local authorities) issued like candy. Prosecutors and judges issue warrants when there is probable cause to search in the event of a crime being committed by you, or simply being committed within an area to which you have access that the public does not. That does not mean you are being charged with a crime. I would agree that more often than not, if you are having warrants issued for searches of your home or business, a criminal prosecution for you is probably not an unreasonable thing to be concerned about, but these are not the same thing. One absolutely happens without the other all the time.

> If you can just agree with their legal team on the stipulations of the search and confirmation, you can't be charged with further crimes if they find anything

This is the same fallacious thinking as "If I've committed no crime I have nothing to fear from being searched," and that's not the point: the point is it is your right to privacy that they are demanding they now have the right to encroach upon to ensure the secure and to-their-satisfaction destruction of data they erroneously sent you which cannot be performed without some element of highly invasive search, and also cannot be requested without the implication that they don't trust you to have deleted it.

This institution regardless of your individual opinions on it does not have your interest at heart: their negligence has placed the two of you as legal entities on opposing sides of a legal affair that can incredibly easily escalate to a conflict. Your lawyer is your FIRST call in this situation, and after that, you shut the fuck up and let your lawyer do their job.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#108

Post by legitster »

chaps wrote: post #100
legitster wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They thanked me for bringing the situation to their attention and all that, but the mood of the call was as if both parties had a knife behind their back. Somewhere towards the end of the call, I asked them if it was okay to keep the emails. Why not at least ask, right? >...This isn't something I'm even remotely cool with, so we ended the call a couple minutes later, and agreed to have our lawyers speak going forwa…

This was definitely not my first rodeo and I like to think I've done a good job in acting in good faith in future similar instances [1] for example. Every time I've reported something, the other side acts differently every single time. Sometimes they're friendly, sometimes they put out obvious traps ("prove it that you found HIPAA sensitive info"), and sometimes they're just thankful it didn't go worse. You gotta rea…

I get it. But as someone who has worked a lot of helpdesk and customer service roles in my life, all I can do is whinge. These departments clearly do not have the processes or experience to respond correctly, so the brunt of the pain is going to fall on inexperienced and overworked public servants whose whole job is to be harassed by citizens. So please be nice!

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#109

Post by eli »

legitster wrote: post #101
rootsudo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that hostile? To be aware of your rights and state they can’t do an illegal search? Demanding a warrant to be searched is not hostile it’s the equivalent of saying no thank you. Hostile is when they have a warrant and you still refuse.

You cannot get a warrant without probably cause that a crime has been committed. So asking for a warrant to search your computer is literally asking to be charged with a crime. IANAL, but demanding a prosecutor and judge be involved when dealing with an IT department is really dumb. If you can just agree with their legal team (and your lawyer) on the stipulations of the search and confirmation, you can't be charged w…

This is terrible advice based on a real misunderstanding of the law.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#110

Post by _boffin_ »

Oh... this reminds me of where the Assessor of my county threatening to call the cops and inform them of me wanting public data; attempting to charge me thousands of dollars more for records that should only cost the amount it takes to duplicate the records; and more...

oh the fun it is to deal with public agencies.

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