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PostPosted: Wed Jun 21, 2017 9:33 am 
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http://gizmodo.com/gop-data-firm-accidentally-leaks-personal-details-of-ne-1796211612

Way too long to repost here ... a few fun excerpts though:

Political data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server.

The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity. ...


... Complete voter rolls for 2008 and 2012, as well as partial 2016 voter rolls for Florida and Ohio, apparently compiled by Data Trust are contained in the dataset exposed by Deep Root.

Data Trust acquires voter rolls from state officials and then standardizes the voter data to create a clean, manageable record of all registered US voters, a source familiar with the firm’s operations told Gizmodo. Voter data itself is public record and therefore not particularly sensitive, the source added, but the tools Data Trust uses to standardize that data are considered proprietary. That data is then provided to political clients, including analytics firms like Deep Root. While Data Trust requires its clients to protect the data, it has to take clients at their word that industry-standard encryption and security protocols are in place.

TargetPoint and Causeway, the two firms employed by the RNC in addition to Deep Root, apparently layered their own analytics atop the information provided by Data Trust. TargetPoint conducted thousands of surveys per week in 22 states, according to AdAge, gauging voter sentiment on a variety of topics. While Causeway helped manage the data, Deep Root used it to perfect its TV advertising targets—producing voter turnout estimates by county and using that intelligence to target its ad buys.

A source with years of experience working on political campaign data operations told Gizmodo that the data exposed by Deep Root appeared to be customized for the RNC and had apparently been used to create models for turnout and voter preferences. Metadata in the files suggested that the database wasn’t Deep Root’s working copy, but rather a post-election version of its data, the source said, adding that it was somewhat surprising the files hadn’t been discarded. ...


... One exposed folder is labeled “Exxon-Mobile” [sic] and contains spreadsheets apparently used to predict which voters support the oil and gas industry. Divided by state, the files include the voters’ names and addresses, along with a unique RNC identification number assigned to every US citizen registered to vote. Each row indicates where voters likely fall on issues of interest to ExxonMobil, the country’s biggest natural gas producer.

The data evaluates, for example, whether or not a specific voter believes drilling for fossil fuels is vital to US security. It also predicts if the voter thinks the US should be moving away from fossil-fuel use. The ExxonMobil “national score” document alone contains data on 182,746,897 Americans spread across 19 fields. ...

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... Some of the data included in Deep Root’s dataset veers into downright bizarre territory. A folder titled simply ‘reddit’ houses 170 GBs of data apparently scraped from several subreddits, including the controversial r/fatpeoplehate that was home to a community of people who posted pictures of people and mocked them for their weight before it was banned from Reddit’s platform in 2015. Other subreddits that appear to have been scraped by Deep Root or a partner organization focused on more benign topics, like mountain biking and the Spanish language.

The Reddit data could’ve been used as training data for an artificial intelligence algorithm focused on natural language processing, or it might have been harvested as part of an effort to match up Reddit users with their voter registration records. During the 2012 election cycle, Barack Obama’s campaign data team relied on information gleaned from Facebook profiles and matched profiles to voter records. ...

... “My guess is that they were scraping Reddit posts to match to the voter file as another input for individual modeling,” a source familiar with campaign data operations told Gizmodo. “Given the number of random forums, my guess is they started with a list of accounts to scrape from, rather than scraping from all forums then trying to match from there (in which case you’d start with the political ones).”

Matching voter records with Reddit usernames would be complicated and any large-scale effort would likely result in many inaccuracies, the source said. However, campaigns have attempted to match voter files with social media profiles in the past. Such an effort by Deep Root wouldn’t be entirely surprising, and would likely yield rich data on the small portion of users it was able to match with their voter profiles, the source explained. ...


... The Deep Root incident represents the largest known leak of Americans’ voter records, outstripping past exposures by several million records. Five voter-file leaks over the past 18 months exposed between 350,000 and 191 million files, some of which paired voter data—name, race, gender, birthdate, address, phone number, party affiliation, etc.—with email accounts, social media profiles, and records of gun ownership.

Campaigns and the data analysis firms they employ are a particularly weak point for data exposure, security experts say. Corporations that don’t properly secure customer data can face significant financial repercussions—just ask Target or Yahoo. But because campaigns are short-term operations, there’s not much incentive for them to take data security seriously, and valuable data is often left out to rust after an election.

“Campaigns are very narrowly focused. They are shoestring operations, even presidential campaigns. So they don’t think of this as an asset they need to protect,” the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Hall told Gizmodo.

Even though voter rolls are public record and are easy to access—Ohio, for instance, makes its voter rolls available to download online—their exposure can still be harmful.

Voter registration records include ZIP codes, birthdates, and other personal information that have been crucial in research efforts to re-identify anonymous medical data. Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government and technology at Harvard University, famously used voter data to re-identify Massachusetts Governor William Weld from information in anonymous hospital discharge records.

Because of the personal information they contain, voter registration databases can also be useful in identity theft schemes.

Even though exposure of Deep Root’s data has the potential to harm voters, it’s exactly the kind of data that campaigns lust after and will spend millions of dollars to obtain. Campaigns are motivated to accumulate as much deeply personal information about voters as possible, so they can spend their ad dollars in the right swing districts where they’re likely to sway the greatest number of voters. But voter data rapidly goes stale and campaigns close up shop quickly, so data is seen as disposable and often isn’t well-protected.

“I can think of no avenues for punishing political data breaches or otherwise properly aligning the incentives. I worry that if there’s no way to punish campaigns for leaking this stuff, it’s going to continue to happen until something bad happens,” Hall said. The data left behind by campaigns can pose a lingering security issue, he added. “None of these motherfuckers were ever Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, they don’t pack out what they pack in.”

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 21, 2017 9:36 am 
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