Jess Swanson reports:
About 4,000 confidential records — the purported home addresses of police officers, lawyers, and judges — have been published on the website PBSOTalk.com, and the former owner of the website is blaming it on Russian computer hackers.
Mark Dougan is a former Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office deputy. After leaving the force in 2008, he made it his mission to expose corruption within the department. He created PBSOTalk.com and encouraged visitors to air complaints. On the website, Dougan published documents such as the probable-cause affidavit in a lieutenant’s pain-pill addiction case, purchase orders showing that the Sheriff’s Office spent more than $60,000 on barbecue grills, and a copy of an internal-affairs complaint filed against Bradshaw.
He says the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office has been retaliating against him and others who criticize the department. Now a technology consultant who regularly travels to Russia, Dougan says he made friends with hackers there and sold his website to them. He says that they are responsible for the hack — which exposes home addresses of people such as Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, federal judges and even FBI agents.
Read more on the New Times. There appear to be 3,583 14,305 records in the data dump.
CORRECTION: The number of records in the total dump was corrected post-publication.
This is what started the entire episode of retaliation – the cops acting like complete criminals and no one doing anything about it.
http://www.gossipextra.com/2015/08/24/pbso-ric-bradshaw-secret-audio-tapes-pattern-of-harassment-computer-hacking-investigations-into-pbso-critics-5033/
Aren’t addresses fairly common to get anyway… simply by doing a public records search (assuming they own their own home)?
Some states permit exemptions from public records.
It would actually be easier to get their addresses from voter registration lists.