(Jake Turcotte)
Buy a BlackBerry and get John McCain’s number at no extra cost!
By Jimmy Orr | 12.14.08
Forget camping out at Best Buy on Black Friday. The place to go was John McCain’s headquarters on Thursday where you could buy laptops, filing cabinets, office furniture, and even BlackBerries at prices that makes Woot look like Tiffany’s.
Plus, act today, and get John McCain’s personal phone number.
Want some public relations advice on how to deal with the media? Buy a BlackBerry and get email addresses to the Palin communications team!
Have a problem with your pipes and are uncertain about Israel? Shop today and get Joe the Plumber’s personal contact information!
All kidding aside
The problem is — this isn’t a joke.
The McCain campaign, as campaigns do, had to get rid of all their excess inventory. So, they held a firesale. And two FOX-5 reporters from Washington, DC decided to drop by.
Contact info
They lamented that “most of the good stuff was gone.” Little did they know, however, that in a world where connections are everything — they got the Holy Grail. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other personal contact information to some pretty powerful people.
Tisha Thompson and Rick Yarborough write:
The hottest item? BlackBerry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.
And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.
When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 BlackBerry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.
Dial now
One of the phones had 260 personal contacts on it including email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses to all sorts of McCain supporters.
So what’d they do? They started calling people. People like former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, who didn’t seem thrilled with the situation.
“It makes me quite uncomfortable,” he told the reporters, “It’s a matter of principle. I gave that information to McCain headquarters, and to have it sold is bothersome.”
Mark it up!
It sounded like Gilmore also had a problem with the price of the BlackBerries. If they’re going to sell the information, they should at least make some more money he reasoned.
“You don’t know who got this information,” he says. “There’s possible harassment. And there’s an enormous amount of campaign intelligence that shouldn’t be sold for such a low-value.”
Oops
The McCain staff admitted they made a mistake with the BlackBerries (which is odd because as you’ll recall they were the ones who claimed that the Arizona Senator invented the PDA).
“It was an unfortunate staff error, and procedures are being put in place to ensure all information is secure,” said the McCain team in a statement.
Isn’t it over yet?
That didn’t stop one individual who was called by the FOX reporters to take a swipe at the McCain campaign.
“They should have wiped that stuff out,” the unidentified supporter said. “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”
<< McCain won’t endorse Palin for 2012 | MainComments
2. David | 12.14.08
“It was an unfortunate staff error, and procedures are being put in place to ensure all information is secure,” said the McCain team in a statement.
And just how are you going to do that after the fact?
3. Tim | 12.14.08
Well if they were using the Blackberry Enterprise Server they could initiate a remote wipe of all of the devices…anyone want to place bets on the chances that they were using a real corporate IT infrastructure for the campaign? Hahahahahahaha…
4. Jill Again | 12.14.08
This should not come as a surprise to anyone who followed the campaign. It’s entirely consistent with things like not vetting the vp candidate, not getting facts straight, and generally assuming they could make up facts on the fly and expect no one to check. We may be quite fortunate this crew did not win the election. Those who do not understand technology stand to be exploited by it. When it comes to the national defense, that could be catastrophic.
6. max m | 12.14.08
mccain invented the pda? He cant even operate one ! You need a younger candidate to say that !!
anyway, he did not even know how to reset the blackberries to clear all data and reset to factory settings… What a shame !!!
//
7. anon | 12.14.08
Why do you think McCain personally had anything to do with the data security? He paid people to do it. Also, “You need a younger candidate to say that !!”? What? How would a younger person be capable of inventing something that has been around as long as the Blackberry? And why would the inventor be running for office?
8. Sri | 12.14.08
Everybody knows, or should know, that the PDA category was invented by Apple with the first Newton. It was not successful in that era because it was too far ahead of its time and the technology to make it fast enough did not exist. Apple recently made up for early errors with the new iPhone and iPod Touch.
12. Laurel Federbush | 12.14.08
I’ll bet that none of the e-mails will tie McCain to the Blagojevich scandal.
13. philip andrew | 12.14.08
They are so stupid, you can’t wipe that stuff anyway, even if you delete the files - the data is still there. You have to destroy the things to make sure the data’s gone, see the NSA and FDI data security measures for old hard disks and computers. Hit it with a brick, make sure its destroyed.
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Jimmy Orr has worked in politics for the majority of his professional career working for two U.S. Senators, two Governors and one President. Most recently, Orr served as White House Spokesman and Internet Director for President George W. Bush and Special Advisor to Governor Schwarzenegger for Internet Communications.
David Cook is Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor and host of the Monitor's newsmaker breakfasts. He was the Monitor's editor from 1994 to 2001. Cook is a graduate of Principia College, served in the U.S. Army, was a Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and is a member of the Gridiron Club, Washington's oldest journalistic organization.
1. David | 12.14.08
This goes hand and hand with the Personal Info Disposal for government jobs.