Coleman breach

Like a plane from Washington, D.C., descending into Minnesota through iffy Midwestern weather, former Sen. Norm Coleman’s financial support from individual donors took a long, bumpy decline. A week-by-week analysis of new Federal Elections Commission reports shows that receipts from individuals reached a high point around the time Coleman’s election-contest trial began Jan. 26, then trended downward through his concession on the last day of June.

Many of Norm Coleman’s online donors were angered last month to learn that the former senator’s campaign Web site had leaked a database with their credit card data. While a U.S. Secret Service investigation is pending, here’s a footnote to the affair: A second leaked database contained dozens of comments from fans of Coleman’s DFL rival, Al Franken.

Federal law leads the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director to believe that neither the IT consultant who found Norm Coleman’s donor database online nor the Web site that leaked it did anything illegal. Fodder for the argument: a similar case in California where authorities decided not to pursue charges when controversial conversations by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s were downloaded by political opponents.

Former Sen. Norm Coleman is no stranger to breaches in data security. He authored a bill in 2007 that would have directed federal agencies to disclose breaches of sensitive personal information in a timely manner.

Wikileaks has again made available sensitive data from Norm Coleman’s senate campaign. this morning, the site made available “[d]etails of the 467 subscribers to Senator Norm Coleman’s SMS ‘Alert’ service” as well as links where the information can be downloaded. Wikileaks.org is hosting the data, but the other 13 mirror sites are located around the [...]

Norm Coleman told donors who are worried about the leak of personal and financial data from his campaign Web site to cancel their credit cards and call him with questions. A Coleman contributor in Atlanta who did just that — shelling out $16 for an expedited replacement card — tells the Minnesota Independent that no one answers the phone at the number Coleman gave.

Norm Coleman’s campaign has said it has “a high degree of confidence” that late January’s exposure of an unprotected donor database didn’t result in the loss of sensitive data. This week’s news that Wikileaks.org had obtained the 4.3 gigabyte database casts doubt on that statement — and so does Bruce Schneier, the locally based and internationally renowned security expert who calls the claim “complete and utter bullshit.”

As recently as last year, Norm Coleman promised campaign donors his Web site would not store their credit card numbers. That was then. The Coleman Web site’s “Privacy Policy” now promises only to encrypt contributors’ data “during the transfer process.” The old policy — or even a sensible system of encrypting data and storing it away [...]

The campaign of former Sen. Norm Coleman has alerted donors that a database containing personal data, including credit card numbers, has been circulating on the Internet.

Minnesota has a number of consumer protection laws that govern the use of personal information, which has raised questions about whether the Coleman campaign has violated state law.

“Chilling,” “frightening,” “scary.” That’s how former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman described an apparent breach of confidential donor data at his campaign Web site. It’s “obviously an attack on this campaign,” he said.