Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dsfyu404ed

Why is a political organization retaining any info that isn't the minimum to do their job?

It's not like both sides haven't been trying to get their enemies membership lists for the past 100+yr.

View on HN

Regarding logs:

"...the site's administrators didn't keep this data for DisruptJ20.org, but DreamHost did...

DreamHost keeps server logs in order to manage the sites of its 400,000-plus customers and identify issues like Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

"We only retain those logs for a very brief time," Dunst wrote. "The DOJ served us with a preservation notice immediately after the inauguration, which is why we still have access to that data in this case."

Why would a political organization feel the need to protect their information from the DOJ?

This isn't a matter of "sides", it is a matter of extreme overreach by the executive branch.

It's not overreach if the political organization is behaving like a criminal organization. Much of the rioting and property damage at the inauguration was clearly planned, so the DOJ is just doing its job here.

An across-the-aisle analog would be a Democrat President demanding detailed visitation logs to Breitbart in response to the Charlottesville riots. You can prosecute violent crime without lazily trampling over the First and Fourth Amendments.

Except that there's no indication Breitbart had any involvement in Charlottesville (and anyway the rioting was mostly Antifa). Here we have tweets from people plugging their organizations and promising disorder.

While individuals may have used the platform to plan illegal acts that does not mean everyone on the platform should have their information revealed. This type of dragnet investigation is illegal for a reason. The DOJs job is to collect evidence on criminals without trampling on the bill of rights. Asking for this information is lazy at best and malicious at worst.

Party registration is a matter of public record in almost every state in the US. Though that is admittedly different than a smaller group of people who participated in a particular riot.

Oh you mean like this?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/19...

And people still say they are worried about voting from an app with cryptography.

The media hoopla around that story was largely Fake News. Everything in that database was taken from public records. The only value of the database is the painstaking work of making all of those public record requests to the thousands of jurisdictions in the United States, and then merging and cleaning up the data. But several organizations have done it at this point and all a leak would do is potentially cause those organizations to lose money or competitive advantage against organizations without that data.

The question is WHY are those public records taken and stored in the first place??

Reply on news.ycombinator.com