Data Of Almost 200M Americans Collected By GOP Leaked, No Protection Whatsoever

When collecting data from citizens for use in things like winning elections, it makes sense to afford hoard with heavyweight protection. Not only did the GOP fail to do this, which led to the leak of data of 198 million Americans, the information was not even guarded by a password. What’s more, the details regarding each voter were also very specific.

The leak occurred when the marketing company that the GOP used to for managing the data just left it out in the open for anyone to find, Gizmodo reports. It was stored in an Amazon server but could have been accessed by the public if they had come across it.

The kinds of information in the data are nothing to sneeze at either. Containing details of about 61 percent of the American population, the data included home addresses, birthdates, even voting patterns and attitudes or political affiliation.

As to where these mountains of data even came from, they were mined from several sources and platforms, including Reddit and super PACs. Apparently, ownership of the data belonged to Deep Root Analytics, a conservative firm that collects information on voters in order to target them for political ad campaigns.

At roughly 25TB in size, the amount of data that anyone could have had access to could fill about 500 Blu-ray discs, Forbes reports. In the wrong hands, the data could have been used to cause devastating effects. If it had fallen into the hands of terrorists, for example, it would have been easy to select targets for any kind of malicious act.

The GOP did contract from several other sources to gain their data, which means that the information that was left hanging is not even the entirety of what the Republican Party has on Americans. A lot of information was also contributed by known donors to Conservatives, including the Koch brothers.