GOP Data Firm Accidentally Leaks Personal Details of Nearly 2. Million American Voters. Political data gathered on more than 1. US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server. The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 6. US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot- button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity.
The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co- founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove. Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday. Up. Guard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered Deep Root’s data online last week. More than a terabyte was stored on the cloud server without the protection of a password and could be accessed by anyone who found the URL. Many of the files did not originate at Deep Root, but are instead the aggregate of outside data firms and Republican super PACs, shedding light onto the increasingly advanced data ecosystem that helped propel President Donald Trump’s slim margins in key swing states.
Although files possessed by Deep Root would be typical in any campaign, Republican or Democratic, experts say its exposure in a single open database raises significant privacy concerns. Data Trust received over $6.
RNC during the 2. Open. Secrets. org, and its president, Johnny De. Stefano, now serves as Trump’s director of presidential personnel. The Koch brothers’ political group Americans for Prosperity, which had a data- swapping agreement with Data Trust during the 2.
Target. Point, whose co- founder previously served as director of Mitt Romney’s strategy team. Each file offers rich details about political ads—estimated cost, audience demographics, reach, and more—by and about figures and groups spanning the political spectrum. There are files on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as files on every 2. Republicans included. What’s more, the Kantar files each contain video links to related political ads stored on Kantar’s servers. Spreadsheets acquired from Target. Point, which partnered with Deep Root and GOP Data Trust during the 2.
Target. Point’s data seeks to resolve questions about where individual voters stand on dozens of political issues. For example: Is the voter eco- friendly? Do they favor lowering taxes? Do they believe the Democrats should stand up to Trump? Do they agree with Trump’s “America First” economic stance?
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Pharmaceutical companies do great damage: Agree or Disagree? The details of voters’ likely preferences for issues like stem cell research and gun control were likely drawn from a variety of sources according to a Democratic strategist who spoke with Gizmodo.“Data like that would be a combination of polling data, real world data from door- knocking and phone- calling and other canvassing activities, coupled with modeling using the data we already have to extrapolate what the voters we don’t know about would think,” the strategist said. Deep Root has retained Stroz Friedberg, a cybersecurity and digital forensics firm, to investigate. He used the same process last month to detect sensitive files tied to a US Defense Department project and exposed by an employee of a top defense contractor. This is not the first leak of voter files uncovered by Vickery, who told Gizmodo that he was alarmed over how the data was apparently being used—some states, for instance, prohibit the commercial use of voter records.
Moreover, it was not immediately clear to whom the data belonged. In an email to Gizmodo, Deep Root said that its voter models are used to enhance the understanding of TV viewership for political ad buyers.
Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday.
Deep Root also works primarily with GOP customers (although similar vendors, such as Nation. Builder, service the Democrats as well). Deep Root is one of three data firms hired by the Republican National Committee in the run- up to the 2. Founded by Lundry, a data scientist on the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney campaigns, the firm was one of three analytics teams that worked on the Trump campaign following the party’s national convention in the summer of 2. Lundry’s work brought him into Trump’s campaign war room, according to a post- election Ad. Age article that charted the GOP’s 2. Deep Root was hand- picked by the RNC’s then- chief of staff, Katie Walsh, in September of last year and joined two other data shops—Target.
Point Consulting and Causeway Solutions—in the effort to win Trump the presidency. Walsh, who now works for the nonprofit America First Policies after a brief stint in the White House, oversaw Trump’s data operation in partnership with Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director. Attempts to reach Walsh for comment were also unsuccessful.) Walsh and Parscale focused their efforts on three categories of voters, Ad. Age reports: voters who might be predisposed to support Trump, Republican voters who were uncertain about Trump, and voters that were leaning toward Hillary Clinton but could be persuaded by Trump’s message of changing up government- as- usual. To appeal to the three crucial categories, it appears that Trump’s team relied on voter data provided by Data Trust. Complete voter rolls for 2.
Florida and Ohio, apparently compiled by Data Trust are contained in the dataset exposed by Deep Root. Data Trust acquires voter rolls from state officials and then standardizes the voter data to create a clean, manageable record of all registered US voters, a source familiar with the firm’s operations told Gizmodo.
Voter data itself is public record and therefore not particularly sensitive, the source added, but the tools Data Trust uses to standardize that data are considered proprietary. Remove Adobe Bridge From Context Menu Kodi on this page. That data is then provided to political clients, including analytics firms like Deep Root. While Data Trust requires its clients to protect the data, it has to take clients at their word that industry- standard encryption and security protocols are in place. Target. Point and Causeway, the two firms employed by the RNC in addition to Deep Root, apparently layered their own analytics atop the information provided by Data Trust. Target. Point conducted thousands of surveys per week in 2.
Ad. Age, gauging voter sentiment on a variety of topics. While Causeway helped manage the data, Deep Root used it to perfect its TV advertising targets—producing voter turnout estimates by county and using that intelligence to target its ad buys. A source with years of experience working on political campaign data operations told Gizmodo that the data exposed by Deep Root appeared to be customized for the RNC and had apparently been used to create models for turnout and voter preferences. Metadata in the files suggested that the database wasn’t Deep Root’s working copy, but rather a post- election version of its data, the source said, adding that it was somewhat surprising the files hadn’t been discarded.
Because the data from the 2. Even the 2. 01. 6 data is quickly becoming stale. Many of filenames indicate they potentially contain market research on Democratic candidates and the independent expenditure committees that support them. Divided by state, the files include the voters’ names and addresses, along with a unique RNC identification number assigned to every US citizen registered to vote.
Each row indicates where voters likely fall on issues of interest to Exxon. Mobil, the country’s biggest natural gas producer. The data evaluates, for example, whether or not a specific voter believes drilling for fossil fuels is vital to US security. It also predicts if the voter thinks the US should be moving away from fossil- fuel use. The Exxon. Mobil “national score” document alone contains data on 1. Americans spread across 1. Reddit analysis. Some of the data included in Deep Root’s dataset veers into downright bizarre territory.
A folder titled simply . Other subreddits that appear to have been scraped by Deep Root or a partner organization focused on more benign topics, like mountain biking and the Spanish language. The Reddit data could’ve been used as training data for an artificial intelligence algorithm focused on natural language processing, or it might have been harvested as part of an effort to match up Reddit users with their voter registration records. During the 2. 01. Barack Obama’s campaign data team relied on information gleaned from Facebook profiles and matched profiles to voter records.
During the 2. 01. Reddit played host to a legion of Trump supporters who gathered in subreddits like r/The. Trump himself participated in an “Ask Me Anything” session on r/The. Five. Thirty. Eight found that, when Redditors weren’t commenting in political subreddits, they most often frequented r/fatpeoplehate. It’s possible that Deep Root intended to use data from r/fatpeoplehate to build a more comprehensive profile of Trump voters. However, campaigns have attempted to match voter files with social media profiles in the past.
Such an effort by Deep Root wouldn’t be entirely surprising, and would likely yield rich data on the small portion of users it was able to match with their voter profiles, the source explained. Data exposes sensitive voter info. The Deep Root incident represents the largest known leak of Americans’ voter records, outstripping past exposures by several million records. Five voter- file leaks over the past 1.
The Microsoft Font That Has Scandalized Pakistan's First Family. Back in April, the family of Pakistan’s scandal- plagued prime minister landed in the crosshairs of an investigation relating to the leaked Panama Papers. This week, the team handling the investigation concluded that documents signed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s family were fraudulent due to the fact that they were purportedly from 2. Microsoft’s Calibri font, which wasn’t publicly released until 2.
At a recent Hall of Fame news conference, a woman claiming to be Ex- Cowboys receiver Bob. Three of Sharif’s children, including his heir- apparent Maryam Sharif, were included in the data dump. The documents showed that the children had offshore companies and assets that were not reported on the family’s financial disclosures. For two months, a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) investigated the Sharif’s finances. Because of that tiny font choice, they concluded that some documents were falsified in an effort to hide income.
Uncertainty remains, however, about whether the person who prepared the documents really could have had a copy of Calibri in 2. We know that the typeface was officially released to the public and became the default font for Microsoft Power. Point, Excel, Outlook, and Word. Pad in 2. 00. 7. But there’s some confusion about how available it was before that. A Microsoft representative told Gizmodo that the company’s internal system showed the font was available in a pre- release form going all the way back to 2.
We’ll update this post if and when we hear back. That information aligns with font consultant Thomas Phinney’s comments on the matter. Phinney claims that Calibri was first available “outside Microsoft in a Windows beta release on 9 August 2. When Phinney noticed that people were using his post about the font’s history as a source for the story involving the Sharif family, however, he added some clarification.
According to Microsoft’s website, version 1. Calibri was copyrighted in 2. Speaking to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, a representative of Lucas de Groot, the Dutch designer behind the font, expressed similar skepticism: Lucas started designing Calibri in 2. Microsoft not before March 2. Early Windows betas are intended for programmers and technology freaks to see what works and what doesn’t.. As the file size of such operating systems is huge, it would have been a serious effort to get. De Groot himself later followed up with the site, pointedly asking, “Why would anyone use a completely unknown font for an official document in 2.
All of this confusion has spilled over onto Calibri’s Wikipedia page (which had to shut down edits), but, ultimately, the dates may not matter. The investigative team claims to have found “numerous” anomalies in the Sharif family’s records. And, let’s be honest, what else are Panamanian shell companies used for?
Whatever evidence the JIT ultimately brings against Sharif’s family, the font has been the juiciest detail, becoming a rallying cry of social media users using the hashtag #Fontgate. Before you start thinking Pakistani politics are so much different than our own, consider the fact that Sharif is in trouble because of his dumb kids and that those calling for his ouster are using a silly hashtag. Consider the fact that when the papers first leaked, Sharif called them fake news drummed up by people “targeting me and my family for their political aims.” Consider the fact that opposition leader Imran Khan said that this investigation shows Sharif has “lost all moral authority” and he should resign. Consider the fact that Sharif’s fellow leaders in government held a meeting and later “expressed complete confidence in the leadership of the prime minister.” Yeah.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s markets are reeling with uncertainty and its supreme court will have to decide whether a trial is warranted.