Month: June 2018

Enlarge (credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

In March 2017, Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, appeared on CNBC and said that carbon dioxide was not known to be a major factor in climate change. “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” Pruitt said, adding, “there’s a tremendous disagreement about the degree of the impact” of “human activity on the climate.”

Based on what?

The next day, a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the EPA, asking for any agency documents that Administrator Pruitt may have relied on to come to his conclusions. Since Pruitt’s words contradicted scientific evidence shared by the EPA before the administrator took office, PEER's request might turn up some recent document that indicated Pruitt had new information.

Instead, the EPA stalled and refused to provide any information to PEER. The employee group then sued the agency.

Enlarge / MyHeritage offers DNA testing and ancestry services. (credit: MyHeritage)

Email addresses and hashed passwords of more than 92 million MyHeritage users were exposed in a cybersecurity breach on October 26, 2017, the popular genealogy company reported Monday, June 4, 2018.

MyHeritage said that it only learned of the breach earlier that day—more than seven months after the fact—when an unidentified “security researcher” sent the company’s chief information security officer a message. The researcher said they had found a file containing users’ data on a private server and passed a copy of the file along.

MyHeritage, which allows users to set up family trees and probe their DNA for clues about their ancestry, promptly reported the breach in a blog post, writing:

Enlarge / Volunteer Janice MacGurn sets up a polling station sign before opening on primary election day June 5, 2018 in San Diego, California. There are several highly competitive races throughout the state including those for governor and U.S. House and Senate seats. (credit: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, polls will be open to voters in eight states, including California, which holds gubernatorial primaries among many other national, state, and local elections.

Under California law (Section 2194 of the Election Code), voter data (name, address, phone, age, party affiliation) is supposed to be "confidential and shall not appear on any computer terminal... or other medium routinely available to the public."

However, there's a big exception to that law: this data can be made available to political campaigns, including companies that provide digital analysis services to campaigns. In other words, candidates and their contractors can get voter data, but there's little definition in the law as to how they are required to be custodians of that data and how that data ought to be secured.