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The gang that couldn’t shoot straight

By: Josh Painter (Diary)  |  December 12th, 2008 at 07:22 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

No, I’m not talking about the bunch of Corruptocrats in Chicago (this time, at least), but the bunch of mostly Republicans who mismanaged the McCain campain.

According to reports here and here from Fox5 in Washington, DC, the station purchased two Blackberry units from the McCain campaign. The organization had announced in an e-mail to staffers that it was selling off computers, office equipment and other items as it winds down operations.

Some of the items wound up in the hands of reporters. One journo at the Fox affiliate acquired a Blackberry and was suprised to discover that it was still loaded with what was supposed to be confidential campaign information such as private cell phone numbers, e-mails and the like. So a second Blackberry was purchased, and the news staff found it to contain more than 260 contacts full of personal emails, phone numbers and addresses for McCain supporters.

One of the contacts the reporters called said:

“They should have wiped that stuff out. Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.

Anyone who observed how the McCain campaign mismanged their vice presidential candidate will certainly not be shocked by its sloppiness with matters of data security . One can only imagine what was on the hard drives of the computers Team McCain sold. These people, some of them at least, are to political campaigns what Barney Fife was to law enforcement.

- JP

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COMMENTS

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  • http://conservative-and-proud.blogspot.com/ eschristian

    Would that not be the most stupid thing ever? If it is there I hope they are busted.

  • E Pluribus Unum

    For those who are skeptics (and curse you for being so) , here is the winning argument:

    If we had to have a lack-luster, unenergized campaign marked by incompetence, bad counsel, and disorganization, then at LEAST we should have had one led by a guy whose principles we believed in.

    Bam!

    • http://jeffemanuel.net Jeff Emanuel
      • E Pluribus Unum

        that it would not have been 87-13. It would have been AT WORST 55-45, and crap-piles better coattails.

  • GB221

    I guess this is temporary but there seems to be a problem with the organization of the Sarah Palin material; at least from clicking the Hot Topics: Sarah.

  • http://hillbillypolitics.com Steph C

    if the people running his campaign weren’t a bunch of closet Obama supporters.

    EPU, I agree, although Fred really did start too late in the campaign to run the kind of campaign he wanted to run.

  • Kowalski

    With all of the millions of dollars people donated to the McCain campaign, one would think that they could have hired someone to be responsible for electronic security on the devices their campaign staffers used.

    But when you lose, it’s a big downer and all you want to do is cut and run, not manage the winding down properly.

    Come to think of it…

    Governments around the country regularly auction off their old equipment on places like Govdeals.com, and I’d be surprised if all of the hard drives on those machines are wiped before the equipment is sold. Government agencies regularly dispose of huge quantites of old computers and my guess is they don’t do any better job at prepping them for sale than the McCain campaign did.

    • Kowalski

      Back in the “heavy iron” mainframe era, my father disposed of several gigabytes of IBM fixed-disk cartridges that had been used by a large bank. Several gigabytes of data is nothing now, but it was a room full of disk drives then.

      Because of the technology, even when those spindles were erased it was still possible to read the previous contents if you had sensitive equipment, so the way he disposed of them was the old-fashioned way: before sending the pile of scrap to the recycler, you took the cover off the drive and whacked the platters with a ball-peen hammer a few dozen times.

      The very least the McCain people could have done was erase the data on the machines they sold.