Headlines are saying GOP Data Firm ‘Accidentally Leaks’ Personal Details Of American Voters. In reality, it may not have been accidental and the firm left the data on a cloud server with no password. That isn’t a leak. It’s an inexcusable breach of security and sounds suspicious. Especially considering 200 MILLION voters is almost all Americans who voted last November and in light of the fact that the House and Senate want to interview Pascale, Trump’s Digital Director. After all, if all that voter data was just sitting there on the cloud with no password, no one is to blame for Russia using it, right? Come on. ON THE CLOUD? NO PASSWORD? Doesn’t pass the smell test. And 200 million American voters means it’s more than just Republican voters. It’s Democratic too.
House Intel Committee wants to talk to Trump's Digital Director
Parscale is on the list of Trump associates that the committee wants to testify about any connections between the Republican nominee’s campaign and Russian operatives. CNN reported in May that the campaign’s data analytics operation—widely credited with securing Trump’s surprise victory—was being scrutinized by federal investigators. Agents want to know whether Russian intelligence operatives relied on Trump campaign staffers or their data to assist with Russia’s targeted use of social media bots and “fake news” sites to sway American voters, as CNN previously reported.
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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. The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.
Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday.
UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery
discovered Deep Root’s dataonline last week. More than a terabyte was stored on the cloud server without the protection of a password and could be accessed by anyone who found the URL. Many of the files did not originate at Deep Root, but are instead the aggregate of outside data firms and Republican super PACs, shedding light onto the increasingly advanced data ecosystem that helped propel President Donald Trump’s slim margins in key swing states.
Although files possessed by Deep Root would be typical in any campaign, Republican or Democratic, experts say its exposure in a single open database raises significant privacy concerns. “This is valuable for people who have nefarious purposes,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said of the data.
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gizmodo.com/...