191M US Voters’ Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Database

Re:191M US Voters’ Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Da... by JadeNB on Monday December 28, 2015 @11:14AM (#10801796)

Your replies in this thread suggest that you take the public nature of voting registration lists to be axiomatic, but it is not; as the article discusses (and as I quoted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10801570 ), there are (more or less strict) laws regarding confidentiality of voter registration lists in some states, some of whose voters are affected by this breach.

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Re:191M US Voters’ Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Da... by eli on Monday December 28, 2015 @11:21AM (#10801839)

Laws in various states restrict how you can use the data, but does any state prevent you from accessing it? It's illegal to misuse the data regardless of how you acquired it, including from this "leak"

I assure you there are already databases of every registered voter in America. You're not allowed to do certain things with some of the data, but its always been available.

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Re:191M US Voters’ Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Da... by JadeNB on Monday December 28, 2015 @11:27AM (#10801867)

> Laws in various states restrict how you can use the data, but does any state prevent you from accessing it?

That's an interesting and subtle point, to which I don't know how to respond fairly. My information on these laws comes solely from the article, which says:

> In California, information on voter registration cards is considered confidential, and subject to many restrictions to access and use ….

"[S]ubject to many restrictions" links to https://www.lavote.net/Documents/purchase-order-for-voter-el.... I suppose that you could argue that these restrictions do not prevent you (assuming you are a US person) from accessing the data, but I think that the data are far from being public, which is what I understood you to be saying.

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