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The Journal News is reaping the whirlwind that it started by publishing the gun-owners' private information

Gun Owner-Outing Newspaper Has User Database Hacked, Customers Outed



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.

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"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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Warner Todd Huston -- Bio and Archives

Warner Todd Huston’s thoughtful commentary, sometimes irreverent often historically based, is featured on many websites such as Breitbart.com, among many, many others. He has also written for several history magazines, has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows.

He is also the owner and operator of Publius’ Forum.


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