Info on 1.8M Chicago Voters Was Publicly Accessible, But Now Removed From Cloud Service (chicagotribune.com) 27
A file containing the names, addresses, dates of birth and other information about Chicago's 1.8 million registered voters was published online and publicly accessible for an unknown period of time, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners said this week. From a report: The acknowledgment came days after a data security researcher alerted officials to the existence of the unsecured files. The researcher found the files while conducting a search of items uploaded to Amazon Web Services, a cloud system that allows users to rent storage space and share files with certain people or the general public. The files had been uploaded by Election Systems & Software, a contractor that helps maintain Chicago's electronic poll books. Election Systems said in a statement that the files "did not include any ballot information or vote totals and were not in any way connected to Chicago's voting or tabulation systems." The company said it had "promptly secured" the files on Saturday evening and had launched "a full investigation, with the assistance of a third-party firm, to perform thorough forensic analyses of the AWS server." State and local officials were notified of the existence of the files Saturday by cybersecurity expert Chris Vickery, who works at the Mountain View, Calif. firm UpGuard.
Can you mine this data ? (Score:2)
There is pretty good data on how Chicago voted in the 2016 presidential election [chicagomag.com], and we see only 1.02M votes cast (out of the 1.8M voters on the rolls). Go ahead and get more granular though, can you find precincts with more votes cast than expected?
The peo
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What part of TFS makes you think this data has been made publicly available?
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I'd have to go with the first 8 words of the title
Info on 1.8M Chicago Voters Was Publicly Accessible | But Now Removed From Cloud Service
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As they say in Chicago; vote early, vote often ;).
Yea, I was wondering this too. It is said Chicago achieved greater than 100% turnout for the Kennedy election ;).
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Go ahead, show us how bad it is there.
Seriously? I did a Google search on "Chicago dead voters" and this was the first hit:
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/20... [cbslocal.com]
In all, the analysis showed 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade.
That's just the ones they found so far.
I went to check more recent news on voter ID laws and perhaps you've been busy like I have the last couple days and were unaware that Trump and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have been going back and forth the last few days over voter fraud problems in Chicago. I didn't know this until today but it's apparently been on the news a bit for a week now.
Peopl
Holy last week Batman! (Score:2)
Nice job on the prompt reporting, Slashdot.
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TFA was published today. Just because a security violation is reported to the violator at a particular date doesn't mean the news of such event went public on the same day.
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Get better articles then. The was posted at least 24 hours ago. Here's an LA times story from yesterday afternoon:
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-chicago-voter-data-20170817-story.html
http://gizmodo.com/us-voting-machine-supplier-leaks-1-8-million-chicago-vo-1797947510
dead voters (Score:1)
An example to stop with so many gov't databases (Score:2)
It's real hard to argue against a voter registry, it's hard to enforce that no one is voting multiple times without it. What of the other government databases? Can't they also be leaked and/or abused? Should we be using Social Security numbers everywhere?
A couple examples. Licenses to drive, do we really need those? Maybe a license for minors that lack the legal authority for things like signing an insurance contract, would be difficult to sue in court if caught violating the law or doing damage, etc.
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You could just issue a certain number of bullets.
How do you get hunters to practice their marksmanship? They need "bullets" (I'm pretty sure you mean "cartridge" or "shell" but whatever) to practice. Do you want wildlife control or not? You do know that over population of deer create road hazards, can spread diseases (even among the deer, it's for their good too), and other problems. With "bullet control" you'll have a lot of hunters missing their mark and creating a lot of wounded animals. Why do you hate wildlife?
Also, how does bullet control work
Most are probably dead. (Score:1)
As a Chicagoan I'm not bothered as I assume there's a large chance that the data is basically garbage because 77% of those voters are dead already.
How meny dead people are on that list? (Score:2)
How meny dead people are on that list?
Public info in Florida (Score:2)
Questionable Matching Criteria (Score:1)
Whenever I see "analysis" like this, I always question the matching criteria. Quite often it is naive and not validated.
If you use first name, last name and birth date you can produce THOUSANDS of _false_ matches. Throw in the address, maybe a few hundred. But then if the address is not correct on either side, you miss the match.
A good brief: http://www.brennancenter.org/a... [brennancenter.org]