Database of 191 Million US Voters Exposed On Internet (reuters.com) 77
An anonymous reader writes: Researcher Chris Vickery has discovered an incorrectly configured database that exposes the details of 191 million U.S. voters. Reuters reports: "While voter data is typically considered public information, it would be time-consuming and expensive to gather a database of all American voters. A trove of all U.S. voter data could be valuable to criminals looking for lists of large numbers of targets for a variety of fraud schemes. 'The alarming part is that the information is so concentrated,' said Vickery."
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Na, Republicans are the technologically impaired ones. These guys are scummy Dems looking at more ways to weasel and cheat their way through another election most likely.
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Republican, democrats, about all the parties candidates could be included but you are foolish if you actually think it is limited to politicians of any party or all of them.
I see you voted in the last democrat primary, donations to us will help stop those republicans. Or democrats vote on Thursdays and republicans vote on mondays- see ya at the polls. Mr Anonymous Coward of 123 wanderland lane, if you could give me your social security number or a bank card to verify your identity, i can inform you of the
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But instead the farce involves everyone whose registered to vote to have their personal data given away to marketeers who then force-feed them a ba
Re:News Flash! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:News Flash! (Score:5, Funny)
Reuters, Dec 28 - "Investigators were shocked to discover books all over the United States - believed to have been compiled by criminal syndicates - containing tens of millions of American home addresses and phone numbers, as well as those for hundreds of thousands of businesses. These largish books, comprised of both grayish-white pages and yellow pages, surprisingly were found to have been left unattended on urban and suburban streets - likely as part of an as-yet-undetermined criminal network of dead drops."
Fraud schemes? (Score:1)
The entire campaign is a fraud scheme, full of liars and cheats, that's what it takes to win. How will this make it worse?
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In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait until the author discovers phone books!
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
There's a difference. From TFA:
So "spear phising" just got a LOT easier.
Via email: Happy Birthday (name)! Click here to see a personal birthday message from (politician).
Re: In other news... (Score:3)
And why is party affiliation registered? Which sympaties you have is supposed to be a secret in a true democracy.
Even the need to register seems to be questionable from a democratic perspective.
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Because party primaries are run by the state rather than the party.
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I'm just a bill. (Score:1)
Yes, I'm only Bill.
And I'm sitting in a public database thanks to Capitol Hill.
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There's a reason for that. Donations to campaigns need to be attributable in order to avoid abuses. They're still (probably) rife with abuse but the goal is noble. I believe you can donate to a PAC and get away with some level of anonymity.
Panic! (Score:1)
This information has been available for free since before WWII. The rolls of registered voters and their addresses have always been freely available. You didn't even need to fill out a FOIA request. Just pop down to the local county clerk and ask. They'll even print it out for you if you'd prefer that to the raw data. In most places, you can also get party affiliation. It's neatly organized by ward and precinct.
That's part of the problem with representative governments and free societies. If you wan
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Publish it (Score:2)
So, make the next step and publish the data. Make it easy to browse and peruse.
Government already knows it, and it is nominally public — make it actually public.
Ha ha ha ha ha (Score:2)
Ha ha ha ha ha...wait, what the FUCK?
US population is 330M (Score:1)
Might as well just release the other 65M records so we can collect the whole set.
Wrong question ... (Score:2)
... the question is: Who did NOT vote.
This could help answer that.
So, what can we expect? (Score:3)
So what is the problem with making free information more easily available?
Voter fraud done by lone wolves as opposed to by political parties? That sounds like an improvement.
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Someone upgraded from that old version of Excel that only supported 65536 rows.
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how the hell did this many records end up in a SINGLE DATABASE? there's no single voting precinct or state that large...
An enterprising US company went to every state and asked for their voter records. They combined these 51 databases into one convenient product, which they sell to the national parties and major SuperPACs.
If you're outraged by anything, you should be outraged that some ne'er-do-well has released that database for free, completely destroying the commercial value of a hard-working American company.
Sadly, database is no longer accessible.... (Score:2)
If you can't secure it, don't collect it (Score:2)
How often must this be said?
Security is NOT optional and yes, you need to pay for it continually and it doesn't have uniform predictable levels of effort.
A non-news post about nonsense? (Score:1)
So... this information is out there, publicly available, and a site took all this public data and conglomerated it into one easily usable interface?
And the reason this is news is because you wan't to spin it as "privacy issues" instead of the "making public services accessible" that it is?
I see this as streamlining the government assets and making it more publicly available.
A more transparent government as it were.
This isn't a privacy issue.Stop demonizing this messenger service for ad revenue.
If it is a pr