The Lower Hudson Journal News, a Gannett newspaper, caused controversy when it published a map of names and addresses of gun permit holders, and announced that it planned to do so again. The plan for further publication may be in doubt as a neighboring county just announced it was denying the Journal News access to its gun permit database.
In protest, bloggers posted the home addresses and telephone numbers of Journal News editors and staff. Also cirulating was the personal and family contact information for the Chairwoman of Gannett.
The Journal News has hired armed guards for its offices, according to Politico, because of threats.
This privacy war has just escalated dramatically, as a group of self-described “2nd Amendment supporters” claims it has downloaded and posted on the web what it describes as the “user” database of the Journal News.
Twitter users claim the list is being widely circulated. Although the links are easily available, I’m not including links to any of the websites containing the alleged database for the same reason I did not provide the personal information sent to me about Gannett’s Chairwoman.
At least two tweets (only one of which is imaged here) disclosing this development were copied to the Journal News account, @lohud:
One of the tweets (not imaged here) provided a link to a page with this message:
lohud.com was hacked by 2nd amendment supporters in response to the posting of sensitive gun owner information. This database contains user email, name, username, password, name, phone number and address of ~10,000 lohud.com usersFeel free to make maps of Lohud users with this data
A simple Google search also turned up a document dump at Pastebin:
Twice today I reached out to the Publisher and Editor of the Journal News, asking whether they were aware of this, whether they verified the information, what they were doing about it, and what their position was. This obviously is important because the users and subscribers of the Journal News website may not be aware that their personal information has been compromised.
Despite being told by a person in the newsroom that the Editor was checking her emails, I have heard nothing from the Journal News.
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