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The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

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Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#211

Post by maxxxxx »

danso wrote: post #200
maxxxxx wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the state getting involved in primaries? That should be the parties' business. I think there should be no public record of party affiliation.

Primaries aren't enshrined in the Constitution, but they became state business in the 1970s because there was a desire to let the average voter have more say in the selection process, which had previously been done via party conventions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/1...

I would prefer going back to party conventions instead of the endless campaigning :-)

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#212

Post by maxxxxx »

qznc wrote: post #191
maxxxxx wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even understand why party affiliation is tracked by the state. What's that good for other than entrenching the two party state? Parties should have their own member lists.

My (very uninformed) guess is that this is cultural. When democracy spread, Europe already had a good system of tracking people. The church was keeping records of every family for hundreds of years already. In contrast, the USA is a country of immigrants where new people without a history came in all the time. Tracking who votes where could not rely on an established system.

Voter registration is fine but why track party affiliation?

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#213

Post by tgb »

Pfhreak wrote: post #208
mratzloff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handling these kinds of things anonymously is the only reasonable way to protect yourself.

Is there a service that supports this? Like, get it to a security researcher, wipe it from your drive, and have the security researcher handle returning the data and providing a basic education (or reporting the data loss to the appropriate authorities.)

Just turn it in to the police anonymously, let them look at the drive.

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#214

Post by wongarsu »

djrogers wrote: post #181
maxxxxx wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even understand why party affiliation is tracked by the state. What's that good for other than entrenching the two party state? Parties should have their own member lists.

There are states with ‘closed primaries’, where certain elections are only open to registered party voters - ie a Democrat would not be allowed to vote in the Republican primary and vice-versa. This, and ‘because that’s how we’ve always done it’ are probably the main reasons party affiliation is part of voter registration.

If a party wants to hold a closed primary, can't they do that themselves without help from the government? Why would the government be involved in a party-internal election?

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#215

Post by walshemj »

danso wrote: post #183
walshemj wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say an ex finds the new address of a former partner then goes around and shoots them dead. BTW I am not being hyperbolic here there was a case where this happened when I worked for BT - someone as a favor looked someone's new address up for a friend which resulted in a murder.

The scenario you propose is possible through using Google, and/or many other services that collate public records of people's names and addresses. Try Googling your name and one of your cities of residence some time. > someone as a favor looked someone's new address up for a friend which resulted in a murder. A government employee who looks up someone's address for a friend is not covered by FOI laws. Just as FOI doe…

And if the state govement employee freely just hands massive amounts of personally identifiable information due to a FOI this is some how better.

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#216

Post by brewdad »

jacquesm wrote: post #164
coolboy93290 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar story. I worked at a polling company out of college owned by a Standford professor. My first task: After a poll is finished online, match that with voter records (using emails and addresses). My first question was: "Well, that is a cool idea, but, there is no way the government would release a huge database of every california voter and their party affiliation. Let alone, the users entering in online poll inf…

Standford?

Great name for a scam for-profit, online institution, don't you think?

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#217

Post by astura »

jarfil wrote: post #149
c3534l wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never assumed that an email address I gave the government would be protected. I would also not assume that the contents of any email I sent would be in any way protected either. The government is collectively owned. Your police record, where you live, who you're married to, and whether or not you voted last election are publicly available. I would rather all of that be protected in some way, but I think it's c…

Maybe you need the GDPR. When governments in the EU started digitizing their data like 20 years ago, it used to be that lots of personal data would end up published on official websites, either in the form of scanned PDFs that Google would gladly OCR and index, or in directly readable formats. Since then, the EU has cracked down on all of that, and you can no longer search for someone's phone number in order to get t…

Except the GP is talking about explicitly public records, not private records that were inadvertently published.

(Ignoring that the GDPR doesn't even apply to governments)

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#218

Post by danso »

walshemj wrote: post #215
danso wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scenario you propose is possible through using Google, and/or many other services that collate public records of people's names and addresses. Try Googling your name and one of your cities of residence some time. > someone as a favor looked someone's new address up for a friend which resulted in a murder. A government employee who looks up someone's address for a friend is not covered by FOI laws. Just as FOI doe…

And if the state govement employee freely just hands massive amounts of personally identifiable information due to a FOI this is some how better.

FOI is a law mandating these public records be provided on request -- with various exemptions and allowances for redacting information that could be reasonably seen as a violation of privacy. It's not about being "somehow better", because legislators have deemed that bureaucrats cannot be trusted to decide whether transparency is a good thing.

Consider the example you brought up -- it is against the law for a state employee to send a friend that kind of information, and I imagine that that law exists because politicians feared that kind of murderer scenario. How exactly does that murderer use a cache of email metadata and redacted messages to go after his victim?

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#219

Post by AzMoo_ »

wongarsu wrote: post #214
djrogers wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are states with ‘closed primaries’, where certain elections are only open to registered party voters - ie a Democrat would not be allowed to vote in the Republican primary and vice-versa. This, and ‘because that’s how we’ve always done it’ are probably the main reasons party affiliation is part of voter registration.

If a party wants to hold a closed primary, can't they do that themselves without help from the government? Why would the government be involved in a party-internal election?

It always interests me how much of the US electoral system is just obviously completely broken from the perspective of outsiders, and it seems strange that people within the US see procedures like this and view them as normal and legitimate.

Re: The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

#220

Post by astura »

walshemj wrote: post #176
jacquesm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which I'm not even sure is the situation here That's the key bit right there. So, if you are not sure - and they are also not sure - then they could ask for a ruling before releasing. Err on the side of caution is good practice when it comes to releasing data. I just looked at the dataset and it is full of information that I would normally consider to be private, which private citizens contact which government offi…

Say an ex finds the new address of a former partner then goes around and shoots them dead. BTW I am not being hyperbolic here there was a case where this happened when I worked for BT - someone as a favor looked someone's new address up for a friend which resulted in a murder.

I mean, real estate records are public information and real estate transactions are even republished in the newspaper on a weekly basis...
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