{"id":535,"date":"2018-01-25T15:22:38","date_gmt":"2018-01-25T20:22:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=535"},"modified":"2018-03-08T15:27:15","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T20:27:15","slug":"kris-kobachs-office-put-thousands-of-state-employees-partial-social-security-numbers-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=535","title":{"rendered":"Kris Kobach\u2019s Office Put Thousands of State Employees\u2019 Partial Social Security Numbers Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a bad look for the man who wants data on every voter in the country.<\/h3>\n

PEMA LEVY<\/a><\/span>JAN. 25, 2018<\/span><\/p>\n

The office of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, which\u00a0controls sensitive information on millions of American voters through the Interstate Crosscheck Program, posted online the partial Social Security numbers of thousands of state employees and politicians\u2014including Kobach\u2019s own. It\u2019s the latest\u00a0in a series of security breaches involving\u00a0Kobach, a candidate for governor this year who ran President Donald Trump\u2019s election integrity commission\u00a0until it\u00a0folded<\/a>\u00a0earlier this month.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many Kansas state employees and candidates for office must fill out a public disclosure form to document\u00a0financial or business interests that could pose a conflict of interest. The form includes an optional field asking\u00a0<\/strong>for the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, known as an SSN4, to help the state can differentiate between state employees with similar names. Kobach\u2019s office posted more than 100,000 of these forms on its website,\u00a0Gizmodo\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Dell Cameron\u00a0discovered<\/a>.\u00a0The combination of name and SSN4 can be cross-referenced against previously hacked databases, such as the massive\u00a0Yahoo breach<\/a>\u00a0in 2013, allowing hackers to identify, locate, hack, steal the identities of, and, in some extreme cases, blackmail those exposed.<\/p>\n

Kobach\u00a0is the nation\u2019s most vocal proponent of restrictive voting laws, and together with his allies on the election commission, he sought to generate evidence of voter fraud in order to promote these laws.\u00a0He led an attempt by the commission\u00a0to collect personal data on every voter in America\u00a0but was partly or fully rebuffed by nearly every state government.\u00a0He has faced mounting questions in recent weeks over security breaches and privacy concerns with Crosscheck, a system that compares voter registration data from more than 30 states and flags matches that suggest a person is registered in more than one state. Studies have shown that Crosscheck produces false positives at the alarming rate of\u00a099 percent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Not only is Crosscheck\u2019s data unreliable; it\u2019s also not secure. As\u00a0Mother Jones\u00a0<\/em>reported<\/a>this fall, Crosscheck has been uploading data files over unsecured systems and emailing login credentials back and forth. This means that Crosscheck\u2014along with the data on millions of voters it contains\u2014is vulnerable to hacking. As Shawn Davis, director of digital forensics at Edelson PC, a Chicago-based law firm specializing in technology issues, explained to\u00a0Mother Jones<\/em>:<\/p>\n

If a hacker sent a \u201cphishing email\u201d to Kansas pretending to be from another state that\u2019s part of Crosscheck, Davis says, he or she could potentially get access to the voter files of every state participating in Crosscheck. That information could be stolen, released, or even modified, Davis says. \u201cIt\u2019s not very secure at all,\u201d he says of Crosscheck.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This and\u00a0other revelations<\/a>, including the leak of SSN4 information in Florida, pushed Kobach\u2019s office to improve security this year. Researchers\u00a0still believe<\/a>\u00a0that Crosscheck data is significantly exposed to hacking. If states can\u2019t trust Kobach with their data, some could withdraw from the program.<\/p>\n

Following an inquiry from\u00a0Gizmodo<\/em>, Kobach\u2019s office took the information down from its website, but it admitted no wrongdoing, noting that Kansas law requires making the forms publicly available. But Kobach\u2019s office clearly dealt carelessly with the information, even if it didn\u2019t break any laws. As\u00a0Gizmodo\u00a0<\/em>discovered, the website purportedly required a password to access the records, but anyone with the URL could circumvent\u00a0the login process. Moreover, Kobach\u2019s office\u00a0could have realized that it was problematic to ask for\u00a0SSN4s on publicly available forms and pushed to revise the form.<\/p>\n

PEMA LEVY<\/a><\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n

Pema Levy is a reporter at\u00a0Mother Jones<\/em>. Reach her at plevy\u00a0[at] motherjones [dot] com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a bad look for the man who wants data on every voter in the country. PEMA LEVYJAN. 25, 2018 The office of Kansas…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":536,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national-news","category-state-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.gopplaybook.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/2018-03-08_15-24-14.jpg?fit=657%2C416&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8VBh7-8D","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":532,"url":"https:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=532","url_meta":{"origin":535,"position":0},"title":"Kris Kobach says he can\u2019t comply with Kris Kobach\u2019s voter data request","author":"Donnie","date":"June 30, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By\u00a0Christopher Ingraham\u00a0June 30, 2017\u00a0Email the author Donald Trump greeted\u00a0 Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach at Trump's golf club in Bedminster Township, N.J., in November. 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