McCain Camp Sells Blackberries for $20, Forgets to Erase Confidential Info
At least they never got their hands on the nuclear codes:
There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.
And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.
When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.
We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for "Citizens for McCain," a group of Democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider's look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.
But most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.
We called some of the numbers.
"Somebody made a mistake," one owner told us. "People's numbers and addresses were supposed to be erased."
"They should have wiped that stuff out," another said. But he added, "Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise."
Hilarious!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/12/mccain-campaign-sells-bla_n_150678.html
If they had advertised this they could have gotten $2,000 a piece. Maybe more. This is hilarious.
December 12, 2008 8:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Should've sold 'em on e-Bay, wink wink.
December 12, 2008 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yup, yup!
December 12, 2008 10:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
And, also!
December 12, 2008 10:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
The new owners still could. (Wink, wink)
December 13, 2008 2:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
It makes one wonder what was on the laptops. Palin's shopping lists?
December 12, 2008 11:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is so little regard for private information anymore nobody really takes it seriously. Privacy is a quaint idea that has been obsolete for longer than people realize.
December 13, 2008 2:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
No I realize it. What I find interesting is how very short a time Privacy as a recognized human need and right has existed. It did not exist at all until probably the late 19th century. There was no concept of privacy before then and there still isn't in some parts of the world.
Guests used to sleep with their hosts; strangers shared beds in Inns; aristocrats consummated their marriages in front of witnesses in some places. Privacy is a modern idea and it sure didn't last long.
December 13, 2008 11:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think it's instructive that we recognize less is better in this case.
December 14, 2008 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I love this story. Sadly, this sort of thing happens far too often. A few years back, Washington Mutual upgraded many of their computers. They sold all the old computers to some computer salvage geek in Seattle for a couple hundred bucks apiece. When he started checking them out, he quickly realized that no one had thought to wipe the drives! He called them up to tell them what he'd discovered, and they said, "We'll need to get those back." So he told them, "Sure. They're my property now, but I'd be happy to sell them to you. How does ten grand apiece sound?"
If you're going to hire a geek, you've gotta make sure the geek knows what they're doing. And you should never let non-geeks mess with geeky gear.
Speaking of geeky gear, I just installed the just-out-of-beta Chrome browser. It's freakin' awesome. I'm on a dial-up right now and it's fast as hell. Highly recommended.
December 13, 2008 2:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
All right, i just installed it, and wow, that's fast. Not liking the standard font, though.
December 13, 2008 4:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Do you usually change the font or use your own stylesheet? I don't, so I can't tell much difference, but I did compare it to IE (which I rarely use) and I noticed that IE has more pleasing font smoothing going on. Chrome is essentially v.1, so improvements should come fairly quickly, I'm guessing. I don't know if you're into the under-the-hood stuff, but they're doing a lot of cool stuff with this browser. For instance, rather than taking a multithreaded approach with tabs, Chrome runs each tab in its own process, so if something hangs or crashes, it only affects that tab/process. You can fire up the Task Manager and kill the process without shutting down the browser. Pretty cool. Also, the way they've set it up, if a pop-up somehow manages to run, it MUST run in its own process as well. There's no way for it to invade the current tab (at least I think that's how it should work). Plus, they're using some kind of a virtual machine to pseudo-compile javascript, so instead of reading it in and interpreting it line-by-line every time, it actually runs more like an application. I haven't played around with it much yet, but it should allow Google Apps and other Ajax-based apps to run really smoothly. I'm liking it so far, although I do miss a few of my Firefox Add-ons.
December 13, 2008 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
PS: Sorry for diverting your thread. I'll quit now. :)
December 13, 2008 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just tried killing one of the processes. The tab immediately goes grey and you get a message that says, "Oh SNAP! Something has gone wrong." Geek humor.
December 13, 2008 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink