2016-01-07 – Voter data breaches

Your voter information is sometimes stolen by burglars. Sometimes it gets hacked, sometimes leaked. Occasionally employees take it home. Sometimes it gets lost, and sometimes it gets found by someone else. For these reasons, we should be judicious about what information we require for a voter registration, how voter lists can be used, and how they are protected.

Nowadays that old, traditional, “democracy app” called voting may tell you it needs access to your name, address, photo, Social Security number and even, if you vote in some countries, to your fingerprints.¹ Whether you should have to give up that much personal information in order to exercise a human right should at least be discussed, if not litigated.²

Certain basic voter list information must be accessible to the public so any citizen can check to see that election results are true. We need to be able to verify who was eligible to vote, who did vote, and make sure there are not more votes than voters. Elections cannot be accountable to the public without this election arithmetic.³

But making voter lists accessible does not require collection of your Social Security number, and it certainly doesn’t mean voter lists need to sit on the Internet, nor does it mean anyone should have the right to commercially exploit your information, or resell it.

Voter lists now live on networked computers; they are bought and sold (without you knowing who bought your data), they include unnecessary but sensitive information, they end up on private companies’ computers. They are massaged, merged with other information, such as what you bought at the store, and yes, your location on a map and who your friends are. When the juiced up version is sold, you certainly aren’t consulted about it.⁴

BURGLARIES

Far more voter information can be stolen by hacking than by throwing a brick through a window. Examples of hacking voter data follow, but if you doubt that anyone would hack election-related data, just take a look at the burglaries:

In a presidential election year, a Democratic Party headquarters got burglarized. No, not Watergate (which involved burglars breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters with a money trail leading to the Republican National Committee and a coverup at the White House.) No, not that one. This one happened in 2012 in swing state Pennsylvania. The Democratic Party headquarters in Harrisburg was burglarized in July, but police didn’t reveal it until September. Whoever did it took two laptops and a camcorder — and, of course, all the data contained on those devices.⁵

A few months earlier, presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign had two iPads, two laptops, two handheld radios and a briefcase stolen out of its rented SUV.⁶

Theft of devices holding political data — and in this day and age that almost always includes voter information in some form — happens at all levels.

At the local level, the mayoral campaign office of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer was broken into in June 2012. They stole two laptops containing “sensitive campaign and donor information.”⁷

At the state level, the campaign office of South Carolina state senate candidate Deedee Vaughters was burglarized in July 2012. Just about everything of value was ignored but they stole the campaign’s laptop computer.⁸

Just after midnight in June, 2014 someone carefully removed the video surveillance camera for a cluster of offices housing Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin’s campaign office, along with other politically related offices including former Senate president pro tem Glenn Coffee, who was representing several state officials on various legal matters. The burglar forced open a door, drew the blinds, and spent over six hours going from office to office, entering computers and rifling through paperwork. The burglar stole a laptop from Gov. Fallin’s campaign office, and left telltale signs on computers in Coffee’s office.⁹

In Canada in 2012, the personal information for 553,000 eligible voters in the province of New Brunswick fell into illicit hands; two Elections New Brunswick computers were stolen, one of which contained voters with their drivers’ license numbers.¹⁰

In Uruguay, it started with cutting barbed wire protecting the campaign office of the main opposition candidate in a presidential election. They took the closed circuit cameras, managed to erase the entire security system, and stole everything containing digital data: computers, hard discs, DVDs, and, of course, all the information on those devices.¹¹

In Great Britain, in 2012, an intruder — presumably with a pass to get into that area of the building, and knowledgeable about who had which unmarked office — forced a door at Labour leader Ed Miliband’s suite of offices. Once inside, they “messed about” with a computer. Was it an MP (Member of Parliament)? Well, with 25 laptops and 40 other thefts which included iPads and mobile phones, one official said that “honesty is a problem that stretches beyond MPs and their expenses.”¹²

After examining Freedom of Information documents, ViaSat reported that 15 percent of all data breaches in the UK were found to be attributable to local government; after accidental leakage, the most common cause for compromised data was theft and loss. Nearly 163,000 data-containing items were stolen in the UK over just a 12-month period, and 17 percent of all thefts were found to involve data storage devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones, and desktop computers).¹³

HACKING

Smashing a door is so noisy. Why not grab a thousand times more information while sipping a cappuccino at your desk? Or just hire a hacker. For small jobs, such as cracking into someone’s e-mail or guessing their password, it may cost less than $200 with an online payment, though for big jobs you might need to make a personal visit to a conduit in China with a bag full of cash.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, hacker communities sometimes solicit online, and will “penetrate a passworded system in 48 hours or less for as little as $150.” One method, reports the Journal, is to spoof the e-mail of someone you know. You will likely open that message, which then installs malware which hands over your passwords.¹⁴

That’s exactly what happened in 2011, potentially exposing information for nearly a million Maine voters.¹⁵ “The apparent breach was the result of malware — or malicious computer software — found on a workstation computer in the town clerk’s office in the northern Penobscot County town of Millinocket,” the state reported. Each town can access the entire state voter database. According to the Bangor Daily News, “[Secretary of State Charlie] Summers said they strongly suspect that some information was accessed. We just don’t know how much or the size of the breach.” A day later, Summers decided that “no personal information was compromised.” Depending on the sophistication of the hack, or the political priorities of those involved (this is politics, after all), you may want to take that statement with a grain of salt.¹⁶

A voter data hacking incident was investigated by the Miami Herald in 2013, resulting in prosecution of an aide to Congressman Joe Garcia. The aide had hacked voter data to counterfeit requests for absentee ballots, at first using an easily traceable Miami IP address, later wising up to conceal his computer’s identity with various foreign IP addresses.¹⁷

Voter data in a college election was hacked in a different way to manipulate an Internet voting election. A candidate named Matthew Weaver positioned himself to watch people as they entered e-mail passwords, then exploited that access to find their voter access codes. He then sat in the school’s computer lab using stolen voter access codes to cast votes for himself.¹⁸

Just how nasty the political hacking game can get is illustrated by a situation in New Zealand, where a blogger bypassed an encrypted password, using a dynamic IP address to obscure his computer to harvest a vast amount of political data. According to Nicky Hager’s book “Dirty Politics,” the blogger “netted membership lists, e-mails, donor names, and credit card numbers, later using them to “abuse and harass Labour.” Thickening dirt into pure muck, another politician named Mark Mitchell and a potential ally of the blogger, reported break-ins at his offices.¹⁹

Infiltration of campaigns: Gaining inside access is one of the most powerful ways to get at political data. Peter Camejo, a Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate in 1976 and Ralph Nader’s running mate in 2004, found out just how real political infiltration is. When I met Nader in late 2004 he told me that Camejo’s earlier campaign had been heavily infiltrated, something Camejo learned after a burglary, Freedom of Information documents, and litigation. Kevin Zeese, one of Nader’s staffers at the time, filled me in on how pervasive the infiltration was: According to FBI court testimony, out of 400 Camejo staffers 66 were agents who had infiltrated the campaign. “It turns out they included some of Camejo’s best and most effective people,” Nader said.²⁰

Campaign infiltration is certainly not limited to FBI agents. In depth reporting by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in their book “All the President’s Men” describes a process called “ratfucking” — strictly political and executed by political operatives, in which they infiltrate a campaign, or dummy up documents, or otherwise disrupt or spy on opponents.²¹

LEAKS

It’s really very difficult to know whether a leak is a hack wearing a cloak of plausible deniability.

In 2006, 780,000 Chicago voters’ information was exposed. In 2012, more than twice as many Chicagoans were put at risk with a data breach of 1.7 million voter records. Also exposed were drivers license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers for 1200 poll workers.²²

In December 2015, data security researcher Chris Vickery discovered the granddaddy of them all, the information on 191 million voters exposed on the Internet for anyone to see. Ahem. That’s about everyone of voting age in the USA.²³

A day later, Vickery found another Internet location with data from 56 million voter records exposed.

Both lists contained data fields using the term “nbec_precinct.”²⁴ NBEC stands for Nation Builder Election Center. Nation Builder is one of the largest organizations helping campaigns use voter lists, but their lists are used by many organizations so any group using Nation Builder could have let those humongous lists go. The odd thing is that the owners could not be determined through the IP addresses where the lists were published.²⁵

The list with 56 million records included 18 million records which had been “enhanced” with information not found on any voter registration list, such as information about the voter’s enthusiasm towards guns and religion. Markers in the enhanced portion of the list led researchers to a company called Digital Smart Technology, Inc.²⁶ Within hours after researchers called Tamas Cser, CEO of Digital Smart Technology, both of the huge voter lists disappeared from public view.²⁷ The LinkedIn profile for Tamas Cser shows this statement: “Over the past 4 years we have helped build some of the largest scale, and most advanced political warehousing, data intelligence and outreach platforms powering organizations like the NRA and FRC.” (Family Research Council).²⁸ So this list was Republicanesque in character, though how it became open to public viewing is a mystery.

Two other voter database situations cropped up in 2015, but neither involved public exposure of voter data. Both involved leaks of analyses and strategic profiling of voters, used internally by candidates. The first took place in October, when Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders discovered other campaigns could see political information developed by his campaign. The second took place in December, when Sanders campaign workers could see other campaigns’ work. A few techs for the Sanders campaign couldn’t resist the bait; they peeked, the tech leader was fired, and much political hay was made of the situation by all. The two breaches involved different databases but the DNC (Democratic National Committee) had some connection with both. Individual voter information was not exported back and forth, nor was it publicly released.²⁹ 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reportedly developed his own voter database for New Hampshire, although the Republican National Committee said he could use theirs.³⁰ Sequestering one’s own political data from the party leadership may be a wise move, based on how fluid data can become.

TAKING VOTER DATA HOME

In 2004, a Volusia County, Florida elections employee named Lana Hires set a bag of trash on the curb outside her home. I won’t go into all the reasons why, but we looked in it. Inside was an original copy of a voter registration card, signed by the voter. Followup by Susan Pynchon of Florida Fair Elections Coalition ascertained that he did get registered and was able to vote. Still, one wonders why his signed registration card was left in a trash bag on the street at Lana’s home.

A former Doña Ana County, New Mexico document technician sold voters’ Social Security numbers to a group of criminals. Maria Ceniceros began coming into the office before anyone else so she could visit the New Mexico state voter registration database in private. New Mexico required Social Security numbers for all of its 1.2 million registered voters. The data is maintained by a private company and is stored online through the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office. County employee Ceniceros admitted to authorities that beginning in 2014 she picked through the voter registration database, using her work computer to find names, birth dates and Social Security numbers. She copied this information onto notebook paper, took it home, then sold it to an organized crime group in Mexico.³¹

LOST OR FOUND VOTER DATA

According to figures released by ViaSat UK, 48 percent of all data breaches are caused by disclosure error — that is, e-mailing something to the wrong people, giving inappropriate access, or forgetting to redact private information.³²

Failure to redact: Travis County, Texas County Clerk and elections chief Dana DeBeauvoir pulled some 11 million documents, like title deeds, tax liens, and court documents off the web, turning them over to a private company to redact the private information found on them. Then she put them back up. But according to ComputerWorld, when a retired private investigator named David Bloys checked, he found unredacted Social Security numbers on the front page of the first document he looked at, and some documents even showed private medical information.³³

Improper disposal: In April, 2007, 75,000 Fulton County, Georgia voter registration cards containing name, address and Social Security number were found in an Atlanta trash bin.³⁴

Losing stuff: In 2012, Ontario, Canada elections workers left two USB sticks full of data in a temporary storage facility overnight. Data wasn’t passworded or encrypted, and when workers returned the following day, the memory sticks had disappeared. Elections Ontario warned that four million voters might have had their information compromised.³⁵

SOLUTIONS

“Solutions” may be over-optimistic. Let’s call them mitigations.

1. Don’t require Social Security number for voter registration.

A federal court ruled in 2006 that Georgia cannot require Social Security numbers on voter registration documents because it violates federal law. Section 7(a) of the Privacy Act prohibits any “state or local government agency to deny to any individual any right, benefit, or privilege provided by law because of such individual’s refusal to disclose his Social Security account number.³⁶

2. Prohibit putting voter lists online with unrestricted access. It puts victims of spousal abuse and public safety officials, like policemen and district attorneys, at exceptional risk. Opt-out procedures do exist, if you can show “cause,” if you know about it, if you go through the rigamarole, and if no one makes a mistake in redacting your information. Keep the opt-out, but also, to protect all voters, ban posting of voter databases online.

3. Prohibit commercial use or sale of voter lists. We should not have to submit to commercial exploitation in order to exercise civil rights.

Example – South Dakota law: “In accordance with SDCL 12-4-41, I understand that the voter registration data obtained from the statewide voter registration database may not be used or sold for any commercial purpose and may not be placed for unrestricted access on the internet.”³⁷

4. Remove visible signatures from absentee envelopes. For example, Pitney Bowes has patented a system to obscure envelope signatures. Basically, the signature is under a small privacy flap so it’s not visible to the naked eye but is readable with a special scanner that can see through the flap.³⁸

5. Require secure storage and disposal of data storage devices and documents.

6. And as for connecting voter registration to biometric information, like fingerprints and facial recognition data (used for surveillance) … are you kidding me?

 

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