McCain-Palin campaign dumps Blackberries loaded with personal numbers, internal email

By Cory Doctorow at 9:49 am Saturday, Dec 13

The McCain-Palin campaign fire-sale dumped a bunch of orphaned Blackberries, including at least one loaded with confidential personal numbers of important people, and a ton of internal campaign email. These were the people who were planning on running an entire country.

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.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for "Citizens for McCain," a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider's look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.

But most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.

We called some of the numbers.

"Somebody made a mistake," one owner told us. "People's numbers and addresses were supposed to be erased."

"They should have wiped that stuff out," another said. But he added, "Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise."

McCain Campaign Sells Info-Loaded Blackberry to FOX 5 Reporter (via Memex 1.1)