Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error 140
mpicpp writes in with this story about a mistake that saw personal details of world leaders accidentally disclosed by the Australian immigration department. "With a single key stroke, the personal information of President Obama and 30 other world leaders was mistakenly released by an official with Australia's immigration office. Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, were inadvertently emailed to one of the organizers of January's Asian Cup football tournament, according to The Guardian. The U.K. newspaper obtained the information as a result of an Australia Freedom of Information request. Aside from President Obama, leaders whose data were released include Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The sender forgot to check the auto-fill function in the email 'To' field in Microsoft Outlook before hitting send, the BBC reports."
Papers, please (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, yea? (Score:1)
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Well then, let's see your birth certificate!
Grammar alludes you!
In Soviet Russia, grammar nazis you!
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Oh, him. After I donated in 2008 he kept sending me emails. It does occasionally come in handy, like when my wife tells to mow the grass. "Not right now, honey, Barack Obama just sent me an email."
Bah.. who cares.... (Score:2)
What I want to know is do Angela Merkel's documents show that her real father was Adolf Hitler? [helpfreetheearth.com]
Is that you markov bot? (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure that post was written by a markov chain generator using a combination of fox news and slashdot as it's data set
Amusing but not a threat (Score:2)
Amusing as this is, most of it (perhaps not passport numbers -- but how hard can it be to get a new passport as a head of state) is already public information.
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Amusing as this is, most of it (perhaps not passport numbers -- but how hard can it be to get a new passport as a head of state) is already public information.
There is absolutely nothing that could happen to any of these people that would make me feel like something unfair was done to them, or feel bad for them in any way whatsoever. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Sadly though the biggest argument against the concept of karma is a very strong one: in this world, the wicked tend to prosper.
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Sadly though the biggest argument against the concept of karma is a very strong one: in this world, the wicked tend to prosper.
At work I hear a lot about how my bad or trouble-making peers will have to face karma and to sit back and wait for that to happen. My problem with karma or the whole "they will get theirs" is, even if this it's true, it does not undue any damage they have caused me.
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Amusing as this is, most of it (perhaps not passport numbers -- but how hard can it be to get a new passport as a head of state) is already public information.
Not to mention, being important political figures, they have arms guards protecting them at all times. They don't have to fear someone coming for them.
the 8 ball was right! (Score:5, Funny)
"Outlook not so good."
Re:the 8 ball was right! (Score:4, Funny)
See how nice and easy Outlook is to use!
You can disclose all your secrets in less than half the time than with one of the competitor's products.
Insist on Genuine Microsoft.
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I'm reading the description over and over, and I have absolutely no idea how this occurred. So there's an "autofill" check box that wasn't checked. How does this end up disclosing all of this information in the email?
I am forced to use Outlook for work and as a result I use it as minimally as possible. For some reason I still have to spend several seconds searching for the awkwardly placed "Send" button every time I need it. Forgive my lack of experience using an awful email client.
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For sending, Ctrl+Enter is your friend.
I think they mean "check" as in "verify".
I'm guessing the guy typed "Michael", clicked on the name that came up, and hit send. He didn't notice that it autofilled the name "Michael Brown" from the Asian Football Cup organising committe rather than, say, "Michael Smith" the internal employee who was supposed to update the approved official visitor database.
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Funniest thing I've seen today! Thanks for the laugh.
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I have mod points today. I'll throw one on his comment for you.
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Don't bother ducking. It went far over your head.
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"Outlook not so good."
You got the accent right too, since the 8 ball was made in China!
Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
When their privacy is violated, it makes headlines.
When they violate ours, it's business as usual.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if they have done nothing wrong they have nothing to hide. Right?
Isn't that what they tell us?
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Hillary, did you forget to log in?
Re:Funny (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, how dare the evil government have access to my passport number and birthdate.
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Apt, considering this same government is pretty much implementing an NSA style metadata retention scheme as we speek. Apparently we have to trust that they won't mishandle the data and this example clearly shows they can't.
Voting machine (Score:2)
Autofill errors have happened on Voting machines too. it filled in the ballot with the last guys ballot.
Don't worry. (Score:5, Funny)
It was mostly only metadata.
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I'm waiting for Whoosh Guy to deliver the metadata-matters diatribe and close the show.
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Besides, if they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.
So much for privacy.... (Score:3)
This is the equivalent to the periodic scenario where HR accidentally emails the spreadsheet with everyone's salary numbers to the Everyone list.
And yes, back in the days I was an email administrator, I had to try and do damage control on someone who had actually done that. Twice. Others probably have similar stories.
Actually, it's gotten better now, ironically, now that all that stuff is stored in some cloud app. Now the people just have accounts that they can run their own reports from. Of course, in smaller, or less tech savvy businesses, people are probably still passing those sorts of spreadsheets via email even today.
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a company I was at more than 10 yrs ago ran MS email. some of us ran unix email (I think I was into qmail at the time) and the sysadmin was a friend, so I was left alone and had my linux box do my desktop work. was not forced to use windows. back then, it was atypical, but we used a form of bsd in our products and so the unix guys were not a small minority. still, I was one of the few who used only unix email, for corp stuff.
one day I get an email from some marketing guy, then a few minutes another emai
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Even when running on Exchange I've never seen recall actually work. I've gotten "Would like to recall" messages by the dozens. It never actually deleted the email.
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just too funny. the MS guys really do think the whole world is MS.
Well ... let's put it in perspective.
It is funny, and I've had it happen in the past too - I think because of some misconfiguration, not from not using Outlook or Windows. But the idea is that the whole place uses a unified system, which does allow for nifty corporate functions like recalling emails. The issue you saw was that you were allowed to have a rogue setup.
On the other other hand, it is of course very hard to lock down what is by nature supposed to be extremely interoperable ...
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Why the heck can't Outlook by default display a warning about such with wording similar to: "You are about to send a message to 100 or more people. Please confirm....".
I've had some embarrassing moments myself from such mistakes.
And a similar default warning for large messages or attachments.
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I used to have this happen to me a lot at my last company where there was another person with a similar name, except my name came before his alphabetically so the autocomplete would helpfully fill in my name for people when they started typing his, and they would
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It does now. I will get a warning about the list having x amount of users on it and do I want to send it to that many people. Not sure what the minimum number is.
When I was an email administrator, we didn't have Outlook, we were using plain old POP mail with Eudora as our mail client (for the non UNIX machines). I went in as root on the mail server, made everyone's inbox a folder in pine, and proceeded to go through everyone's inbox and delete it. I doubt very much that I was able to get everyone. Afte
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This is the equivalent to the periodic scenario where HR accidentally emails the spreadsheet with everyone's salary numbers to the Everyone list.
And yes, back in the days I was an email administrator, I had to try and do damage control on someone who had actually done that. Twice.
Yep - happened at my job as well. Someone in HR attached a wrong spreadsheet to an email about the company picnic. The spreadsheet had our salary, address, dob, and social security number.
Heads of state, and David Cameron (Score:5, Interesting)
personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit [...] British Prime Minister David Cameron
A minor consitutional note, but David Cameron isn't a head of state. Queen Elizabeth is, but she doesn't have a passport, as they're issued in her name, and in any case she can just flash a tenner at passport control as ID, or just say "I'm the bloody queen, mate" and be done with it.
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The idea of state-sanctioned royalty in 2015 is quite disturbing.
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Why? Most of the civilised world has state-sanctioned royalty. Are you conflating ceremonial royalty with some form of government?
Passport numbers (Score:4, Funny)
Even more interesting, I never quite realised that heads of state would have (or then use), a passport. Surely no one actually checks it? I mean, I was once stuck in an immigration queue at JFK behind Paddy Ashdown [wikipedia.org], just after he stopped being something like the NATO-imposed governor of Bosnia and was an ordinary human again. He was relaxed, but his diminutive aide was not happy that Lord Ashdown had to wait. Fascinating people watching. But a proper bona-fide head of state?
Re: Passport numbers (Score:2, Interesting)
Heads of state probably go through the border security process used primarily by airplane/airport staff.
I went through it once at Tokyo Narita airport (long story), there was no queue, my passport was scanned and fingerprint taken in about 5 seconds (despite nobody there speaking english and no written english instructions).
Re:Passport numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
They surely never have to bother with this on their own. It's handled all by their underlings, of course. I suppose one way to explain it would be that it might cause some minor political embarrassment if it were revealed the head of state / elected leader didn't have a passport, and therefore, technically speaking, was actually breaking the law when traveling abroad. They don't really *need* it, of course, but bureaucracies, if nothing else, tend to mind their p's and q's. The sender undoubtedly intended to send that information to another civil servant for properly processing it in some mundane fashion, as they tend to do. I'm betting 1000 to 1 that it was for no interesting or glamorous reason other than fulfilling a bureaucratic rule or an information filing law.
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British heads of state (currently Queen Elizabeth II) don't have passports. A British passport is a document in which the Queen requests that foreign counties allow the holder to pass. The Queen can ask in person and so has no need for a passpor
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Oddly enough, I specifically typed "head of state / elected leader" because it was pointed out earlier that David Cameron is not the British head of state. I had intended that slash to mean OR, not AND. Anyhow, it seems to be the case that royal heads of state don't seem to use one as a rule. I suppose it would be considered undignified to show a little book with a picture that essentially says "Hi! I'm the King of Saudi Arabia". Similar to British passports, Saudi passports are (according to Wikipedia
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Isn't an email still, as always, essentially a post-card? How many servers were in the chain between sender and recipient?
TFA states that, "The Immigration Department described the incident as an "isolated example of human error and said the risk of the breach to be 'very low'," and "the immigration officer recommended that the world leaders not be made aware of the breach"
Sounds like someone might need an attitude adjustment.
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.
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I'm having difficulty imagining how this happened. The forgot to "check" autofill, or did the article goof and mean "uncheck" autofill? And what would autofill do anywa? I use Outlook but I have no autofill that I see. Will it fill in a random list of addresses if you forget to put anything in the "To:" field?
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I think in this case the "check" refers to looking at what has been auto-filled in the field...
PHRASING! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Alas, (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing more annoying than a computer is a computer that tries to be helpful.
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The only thing more awesome than a computer is a computer that tries to be helpful.
Which one of his birthdates (Score:1, Interesting)
Which one of Barrack Obama's - if that is his real name - birthdates and social security numbers were released? He is known to have stated several different at various times.
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Oh ya, because we know he was born on Mars and he's been denying it all his life. Denial is the best evidence of a lie. The whole Kenya thing is just a smokescreen to entrap the ignorant who don't know the Mars story.
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address (Score:1)
The message included the 31 world leaders' dates of birth but not personal addresses and other contact details.
Good.... who knows what could have happened if people knew where these world leaders lived.
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Imagine what we can do now when we know how old they fake they are in their passports.
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And yet despite recommending not to tell the leader about the breach, somehow a second leak occured when the leak was leaked to a newspaper.
Always the same (Score:2)
No matter how much training, security measures, or mail filtering......
You can't fix stupid.
Re:Autocomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
All autocompletes I have ever seen are completely awful and generally worse than nothing at all. Putting words together is, like, the one thing we humans are good at? So I am at a loss as to why we seem so addicted to this ridiculous kind of software.
Really? I use it all the time -- works really well on Google Mail, I start typing "Joh" and a popup window gives me a list of users that begin with "Joh" so I can choose whether I wanted to send the email to John or Johanna. Works decently well on my phone too - I use the "swipe" style typing on my phone and the autocomplete usually figures out the word I meant to type, even when I don't quite swipe over all of the letters I intended to type.
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that's all nice and good when the email address you want to send is actually the one it chooses for the name.
what's more annoying though is doing a search on google and then google deciding that "NOPE, you want to search this other word that is slightly similar!".
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Really? Here's how it works for me: type "J" - long pause while system pulls up every name that starts with J. This is a lot so it takes a while. Whew, OK! Ready for the next letter. "O" and another long pause while the list is refined and the javascript finishes running. By this time I could have just typed "Johnathan" and been done with it. Or the system could have waited until I typed 3 or 4 letters before auto complete starts getting in the way but NOOO THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS.
Sounds like you need a faster computer or faster internet connection -- even when use my phone to connect to the internet, the autocomplete popup comes up faster than I can type, but even if I type faster than the autocomplete popup, I don't see how it would get in the way, if I don't want to use autocomplete, I don't have to use one of their suggestions.
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No, he needs software where the autocomplete lookup is asynchronous and keyboard input has interrupt priority. But not all software is built sanely....
Unencrypted Email (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget the auto-complete nonsense. The question that should be being asked is why an un-encrypted email containing " Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia" would be being sent to ANYONE. I can't even send an unencrypted email at work containing MY OWN social security number.
Re:Unencrypted Email (Score:5, Insightful)
Because only criminals use encryption, you know. :-D
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Available in public domain already (Score:2)
These information are mostly available in the public domain already. So what's the big deal about the leak?
Oh, yeah? (Score:2)
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I hear Obama usually goes for a hardshell trolley-style suitcase for his casual stuff, plus a garment bag for the formal gear and a small carry-on.
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Useless (Score:2)
That information is useless: you are not going to impersonate Obama because you have his passport number.
By the way I am surprised diplomatic missions have to show a passport.
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This store reminds me of an Outlook bug. (Score:2)
I encountered a bug once in Outlook where I did fill in the name, autocompleted it correctly but still Outlook sent it to the wrong person behind my back.
Luckily the person receiving the mail wasn't a security breach.
So I don't trust Outlook much since then.
secret or personal? (Score:2)
So the data leaked, is that secret or just personal?
ASIANCUP...ASIO? (Score:1)
So the story goes they accidentally sent the email to the asian cup organisers when the autofill picked the wrong entry.
So they would have type 'a' 's' 'i' and then autofilled?
Sounds like they were sending the email to ASI...O
Could have been worse. (Score:4, Funny)
Luckily the guy didn't email those world-leaders with all the recipients in the to: field, they would 'reply all' for the next 20 years and nothing would get done.
Missing the point (Score:2)
Isn't everyone missing the real issue here? It's not that someone mis-addressed an email. It's not that Outlook helped them mess up. It's not that it was leaders' information.
It's the fact that they were sending this kind of information about anyone in clear text, on an email, at all, to anyone.
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