September 13th, 2006
In CA, Dem Angelides team leaked Arnold's 'hot' talk to press
Let us consider the government IT implications of one hot story in today’s news - the revelations that Phil Angelides, Democratic candidate for governor, or rather his campaign team grabbed and leaked to the LA Times audio of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger describing a Latina assemblywoman as "hot" and Cubans and blacks as "hot-blooded" people.
When the story broke, the governor’s office claimed their system had been hacked and initiated a CHP investigation.
The LA Times reported yesterday that Angelides’ camp admitted to providing the file to the paper but denied there was any hacking involved.
Angelides campaign manager Cathy Calfo said her camp came by the audiotape easily. She said an Angelides campaign researcher who downloads documents daily from government websites got the material by backtracking from a link sent out Aug. 29 by Schwarzenegger’s press office.
The link connected visitors with a recording of Schwarzenegger discussing Hurricane Katrina and other topics at Cal State Long Beach. By shortening the Web address, the researcher was able to reach a cache of various audio clips, including the one at issue, Calfo said.
That is, the hot files were sitting on a public server without so much as the "don’t-diplay-directory-contents" switch turned on on their webserver. And the question is, who’s running the web servers in Sacramento? And what other basic, basic security procedures are not in place?
