McCain campaign sells Blackberries, forgets to erase data

[General Zod]

Whoops.

ARLINGTON, Va. - Private information at bargain prices. It was a high-tech flub at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Arlington when Fox 5’s Investigative Reporter Tisha Thompson bought a Blackberry device containing confidential campaign information.

It started with a snippet we read on page A23 in Thursday’s Washington Post. The McCain-Palin campaign was going to sell its used office inventory at low prices.

But when we got there, it didn’t look like we were going to get much. It was lunchtime and most of the good stuff was gone, picked over by early birds looking for deals on file cabinets, white boards, sofas-- anything headquarters could sell to get back some of their campaign dough.

We saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.” We couldn’t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.

The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. 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.”

We called the McCain-Palin campaign, who says, “it was an unfortunate staff error and procedures are being put in place to ensure all information is secure.”

But we wonder-- Did we get the only Blackberry with personal campaign information in it? Or did you get one too?

Let us know by dropping an email to fox5tips@wttg.com or calling our Fox 5 News Desk at (202) 895-3280.

Several weeks after the campaign and they're still fucking up. I'd be curious as to the content of the emails myself, but sadly they didn't reprint them that I could see.

[Edi]

Couldn't log in to the laptops without a password? Who cares? Slave the drive to another PC, lift things out and copy email profiles to another machine, then peruse to your heart's content. It wouldn't surprise me if there was stuff on those too.

[Uraniun235]

If the laptops had been administered competently, wouldn't the hard drive be encrypted?


Of course, everything points to that McCain campaign as having been anything but competent.

[Edi]

If the laptops had been administered competently, wouldn't the hard drive be encrypted?


Of course, everything points to that McCain campaign as having been anything but competent.

As you said, a competent operation would have the lot of it encrypted but there's little competence to be seen from where I stand...

[Bounty]

Couldn't log in to the laptops without a password? Who cares? Slave the drive to another PC, lift things out and copy email profiles to another machine, then peruse to your heart's content. It wouldn't surprise me if there was stuff on those too.

We saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.” We couldn’t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.

The laptops were put on display before they were formatted, probably to show people they worked properly. Unless the staffers also forgot to format those drives, no-one would be taking home a drive with data on it; and I doubt anyone fancied slaving the laptops' drives at the McCain Yard Sale event itself.

[Patrick Degan]

Sometimes, the comedy just writes itself.

[The Kernel]

The funny thing is that Blackberry Enterprise Server is extremely competent at managing these sorts of user transitions. Blackberries can be wiped remotely in the case of theft, locked down and even have the data migrated seamlessly.

It's not the technology that's at fault here, it's a substandard administrator.

[Zixinus]

My reaction: So, what did they find? Anything juicky?

My reaction after reading the whole news post: So they brought blackberries on the cheap. Wow. How fucking interesting. What's on TV?

I don't watch TV and I would have to be very, very, very, very bored to do so.

[Bilbo]

If the laptops had been administered competently, wouldn't the hard drive be encrypted?


Of course, everything points to that McCain campaign as having been anything but competent.

Which is too damn funny that as bad as the McCain campaign was, and how much of a money advantage Obama had he still did not win the election by that much.

[Terralthra]

My reaction: So, what did they find? Anything juicky?

My reaction after reading the whole news post: So they brought blackberries on the cheap. Wow. How fucking interesting. What's on TV?

I don't watch TV and I would have to be very, very, very, very bored to do so.

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.

[Zixinus]

So they found... what? That the people who owned the things actually used them? That they had the phone number of various political supporters? Colour me surprised!

Here I was hoping for a sex scandal or something.

[Terralthra]

So they found... what? That the people who owned the things actually used them? That they had the phone number of various political supporters? Colour me surprised!

Here I was hoping for a sex scandal or something.

They found that a campaign whose calling card was incompetence during the election season continued that trend afterward. That should be more important than who someone was sleeping with, not less.

[Phantasee]

So they found... what? That the people who owned the things actually used them? That they had the phone number of various political supporters? Colour me surprised!

Here I was hoping for a sex scandal or something.

They found that a campaign whose calling card was incompetence during the election season continued that trend afterward. That should be more important than who someone was sleeping with, not less.

Well, considering the nature of the information, you might still be able to learn that, if you were so interested.