-By Warner Todd Huston
The Journal News is in the center of controversy again. In December the Westchester, New York area paper politicized the names and addresses of thousands of New York’s legal gun owners then threatened to publish even more in the near future. But now a hacker group has hacked into the newspaper’s database and is disseminating the names, addresses, and passwords of thousands of the Journal News’ own customers.
After the local New York paper published the names and addresses of gun owners in Rockland County in an online interactive map, bloggers responded by posting the names and addresses of the employees of the Journal News.
The paper then hypocritically hired armed guards to patrol its offices over what it claimed were “threatening” emails it had received.
The Journal News also announced late in December that it would continue politicizing the names and addresses of New York gun owners and began the process of obtaining the names and addresses of gun owners in nearby Putnam County. But county officials there have balked, refusing to give the paper the requested information.
“There is the rule of law, and there is right and wrong and the Journal News is clearly wrong,” Putnam County Clerk Dennis Sant said in a statement. “I could not live with myself if one Putnam pistol permit holder was put in harm’s way, for the sole purpose of selling newspapers.”
In the latest in this saga of invasion of privacy tit for tat, a group of hackers have announced that they’ve broken into the Journal News’ subscriber database. The group is sending the database of customers’ names, addresses, and passwords to anyone that requests it.
Some of this database appears to be on the file sharing site called Pastebin and as William Jacobson notes, many are Tweeting about the release of information.
I will not post the names, addresses and passwords of the customers of the Journal News as that information is not public record. Of course a little Internet sleuthing will turn the info up regardless.
Still, one might feel that the Journal News is reaping the whirlwind that it started by publishing the gun-owners’ private information in the first place.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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