Monroe Democrats Are So Concerned About Identity Theft They Sent Out A Press Relese To Let The Bad Guys Know What’s Going On
Monroe County Democrats must think every one’s stupid. They should get out of their offices once in awhile. If they did, they would know the world is made up of more the the Kool-Aid drinkers that sit around their office everyday kvetching about how awful Republicans are.
Trying to score political points by pointing out to the world that they found several hundred documents (out of 15 million pages) with social security numbers on them is a new low. The Democrat and Chronicle actually did a decent job covering this story:
County Democratic Party spokesman Sean Hart said party officials heard about the discovery from a constituent.
Yea, right. The first thing I do when I have a concern about a governmental issue is call Democrat Headquarters.
Sean Hart was so concerned about this breach of security that he:
…orchestrated a news conference outside the clerk’s office for Tom Hasman, the Democratic challenger, who accused his opponent of ignoring “a major security breach” and called on her to take down the Web site until the offending pages could be located and scrubbed.
“This disaster happened because we have a politician, not a professional, in the county clerk’s office,” said Hasman, a computer security consultant.
Asked whether he had notified Dinolfo of the vulnerable Social Security numbers before staging his news conference, Hasman said he had not and that he had only heard about the issue from a campaign worker who had seen the television news broadcast.
“I just found out about this two hours ago,” Hasman said. “I’ve never talked to [Dinolfo] before. I don’t have her contact information.”
Oh, ok, this security professional (Tom Hasbeen) has never heard of a phone book to look up the Clerk’s office phone number. Or, his buddy Sean couldn’t look it up for him.
And what was the reaction to this news by one of the people who had their security violated?
Arnold Petralia, a Greece lawyer whose Social Security number was visible in a court document online, said he would not lose sleep over the matter.
“I suppose they should be redacted and I’m sure if someone raises a fuss there will be something done,” Petralia said. “But I don’t see the point in worrying about it.”
Mr. Petralia should be worried now. Thanks to the Democrats efforts to jump start the campaign of a guy who’s name id is probably in the low single digits (maybe not even a whole number) every bad guy who reads the paper knows how to get his information.
And Bob Freeman, the Freedom of Information expert that usually dumps on every elected official, what did he have to say about all of this?
The state’s leading authority on public records, Robert Freeman, of the state Committee on Open Government, said the county clerk’s office is not obligated to redact Social Security numbers from public documents.
Indeed, unredacted copies of original documents containing Social Security numbers on file at the clerk’s office are available to the public upon request.
Oh, geesh, I guess this whole thing was BS. We at monroerising.com have given Joe The Cat Whisperer Morelle grudging respect for his efforts at turning around the local Democrat Party. But this effort was more reminiscent of something from the Bob Cook/Ted O’Brien Era.