Deceased GOP Strategist's Daughter Makes Files Public | Hacker News Reader

Deceased GOP Strategist's Daughter Makes Files Public

npr.org

153 pointseverybodyknows79 comments

Open articleView on HN

More context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hofeller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Commerce_v._New_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_North_Carolin...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-delays-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-to-review-motive-of-trump...

The files:

https://www.thehofellerfiles.com/

Some possible similarities to the situation with the late Bill Broeksmit of Deutsche Bank and his son Val: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/business/val-broeksmit-de... .

That is a very strange article.

No denying that.

David Enrich, the writer, Burned him purposely. He reappropriated all Val Broeksmit's work and research - including his deceased fathers documents - and passed them off as his own.

Enrich included all Broeksmits work into his book. The New York Times strangely enough supported these behaviors. They've been promoting his book's release.

Broeksmit and Enrich have been battling it out on twitter. Its an epic fight.

Wow. Thanks.

I guess that Enrich isn't expecting any other potential sources to trust him.

And if the New York Times has supported Enrich's behavior, it damages their journalistic integrity.

I found some good advice on one of the slides:

Make sure your computer is in a PRIVATE location.

Don’t walk away from it and leave your work exposed. Password protect your monitor screen – with a short cycle.

Save and log off if you’re going to be away for long.

From "What I've Learned the Hard Way" https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NI53QSEta45KNKdkdoGn-wvpyt...

How about 'don't spend your life subverting democracy so your family members can expose you after you die'?

Seriously. They don't learn why not doing it is the right thing to do, they just learn how to hide it better.

This needs a torrent. Badly.

That's the ingenious thing about torrents. Literally anyone can make one.

Anyone.

From /r/datahoarder: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3D8FF2A3B20CEF8C3EA966F0657F1E4235141090

Seeding that. Crazy ratios.

There are many tools easing the process: ctorrent, buildtorrent and others allow torrent creation in a single command line, and qBbittorrent contains a gui panel for creating them as well.

That's true. Though there's a killer first step. First you have to get the data.

"These are matters that concern the people and their franchise and their access to resources. This is, therefore, the property of the people".

Is this true?

Literally? No, it's her storage device and her data on it. This is a figurative argument about why she wants to release it.

How do you know it's her property? I guess it was her father's property and now is in her possession. Does this automatically become her property? The device and the data?

I guess we have a generation facing this new problem. I have only seem discussion about how services like Facebook should handle the data of deceased people. I didn't realize your kids (and spouse?) can just take your device and release it. This future seems scary to me.

While I certainly don't think all things in the digital space map perfectly to things in the analog space, there's literally centuries of precedence for descendants of someone who's deceased to make decisions about publicly releasing their journals, correspondence, unfinished manuscripts, and so on. Most of Emily Dickinson's poems were published after her death by her sister; author John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer-prize winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces was discovered and submitted for publication by his mother after he committed suicide; Franz Kafka's The Trial was only published because Kafka's executor defied his dying wish to burn his unpublished works.

tl;dr: I don't think the ethical questions here are affected by whether the deceased's writing takes the form of ink on paper or bits on digital storage.

It is true there are relevant precedents. I guess the difference is that in this digital age the scope of data is far greater than data on the paper. I don't know whether this truly matters.

But some of this data may be subject to other ownership rights, nondisclosure agreements, etc.

True. And that's probably why she put it online.

Before it was too late.

Well, they can unless it's securely encrypted.

Raw possession does not always equal the legal right to dispose of something. To an extent this could be treated as a very limited scope data breach depending upon who your attorney is in the matter. Litigation outcomes should be interesting since the firm the strategist worked for is suing to regain legal custody of the materials.

Well, given the torrent, there's a decent chance that it's too late.

> How do you know it's her property?

She was estranged from her father. After his death, her mother encouraged her to take the hard drives and USBs. Assuming that his wife was the legal owner after his death and it was in fact gifted her then it sounds legit.

This seems only change the subject of question from children to spouse. Does this change the nature of the question? I mean do your spouse automatically own your data when you die?

After death property is passed to the spouse, then kids, then closest surviving relatives, then the state unless instructions are provided otherwise in a will.

I assume data is property.

In this case the mother already had joint possession (through marriage) of her and her husband's property. While we refer to it as "his USBs" because he probably bought them and used them exclusively, when you're married they are legally owned jointly by you and your spouse.

One exception would be if he did the work on behalf of a company and the company paid for the USBs. Then the company could probably sue to have their property returned. Or if he had a contract saying that he had to delete the data after the contract ended, that could probably be enforced as well.

Absent a will saying otherwise all of your property is inherited by your next of kin upon your death. Your next of kin is your spouse if you have one. Your property includes your hard drives. Once someone is the owner of property they are usually free to do whatever they want with it, including giving it away.

I wonder if her mother knew that there was interesting stuff on those devices. Or if she just didn't have any use for them.

Her mother inherited the property (hard drives) from her father when he died as his next of kin. Stephanie got back in contact with her mother and her mother gave her the hard drives after she found them in the house and asked if she could have them.

Later on the drives were subpoenaed as part of a lawsuit and she made a copy of the contents and handed them over.

This is detailed in the New Yorker article linked in TFA.

It's not "scary," it's how property law has always worked.

If you don't want the contents of your hard drive released by your next of kin then encrypt it.

If the data is not encrypted then all my data can be automatically taken by my spouse and kids, used in any way they want? How is it not scary?

I don't see how this is easily comparable to my monetary properties.

Your property includes your personal papers, letters, notes, manuscripts, diary, dirty underwear, pornographic magazines, any printed copies of your tax returns, doodles on a notebook, the contents of your wallet, etc, not just "monetary properties" (whatever that means).

Once someone is the owner of property they are usually free to do whatever they want with it, including giving it away.

This is how property law has worked for literally centuries.

I don't think I'll be caring much about what my spouse is doing with the contents of my hard drive if I'm dead.

I don’t mean to be glib here but if you are dead do you really care? If you can’t trust your spouse and kids after death then maybe you need to reconsider your relationship choices?

> If the data is not encrypted then all my data can be automatically taken by my spouse and kids, used in any way they want? How is it not scary?

It's not "his" data any more, by definition. He's dead. Your capacity to control things in the world, in any way, stops once you are dead. That's what "dead" means!

There are ways to create contracts with the living that will bind them to your (heh) will even after your death. They tend to be pretty complicated, unsurprisingly. But by default someone gets your stuff when you die, and they aren't you and don't necessarily have your opinions.

If you don't like this, well, I guess plan on immortality?

What is so scary? The humiliation you’d feel while in heaven? How irresponsible or bad your kids or loved ones are going to be?

There's lots of stuff there that she ought to have redacted. Totally personal stuff. Some about herself and her family. And it wouldn't have taken that long, even manually. It's just a bunch of backups and USB sticks.

she's actually done that deliberately.

She made a statement about why she left her personal stuff in there. Brave woman. Good on her.

Life-hacking democracy:

Hofeller had manually entered "%18_ap_blk" into nearly every draft of his mapping software when he mapped North Carolina's districts; "%18_ap_blk" is a formula that shows the number of African American citizens of voting age in each district

He made a custom software program already in the 1970s to disenfranchise blacks.

(From Wikipedia.)

One wonders what the monetary value of that disenfranchisement has been over the years. Will we ever broach that issue?

Is this what is called reparations?

Usually that is referring to reparations for slavery. (But it could include gerrymandering too IMHO. It's something perpetrated by the state against an ethnic group.)

There's something odd about that URL.

It takes me to

https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org...

Edit: And there's nothing at https://choice.npr.org/ itself.

This is from a German IP address.

GDPR compliance. If you used US you wouldn't get that interstitial.

I get that. But there's no page there.

> Unable to connect

> Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at choice.npr.org.

This can't be good, there's a scan of a persons passport in there, pictures of abuse and so on..

It's sad that stories like these end up getting flagged while other political stories more favorable to the right end up doing fine. It's clear a lot of people didn't even read the article and likely just flagged it because it contains 'GOP' in the title.

The "bombshells" according to the article are that her father planned gerrymandering for the North Carolina state legislature... like every single political party in power everywhere where gerrymandering is legal.

The actual bombshell? That "gerrymandering" is pronounced with a hard "g".

edit: I'm seeing from some of the comments that there are worse things in the actual files. more: Hofeller's actions were gerrymandering based on race, which is illegal and wrong.

Uh... drawing a political district on the basis of race is quite expressly illegal in the United States. What is newsworthy here is that it's a pretty clear smoking gun that that is exactly what was happening.

That I missed. I should have read more carefully. Thank you for the correction.

I agree that that is disgusting.

So, now the question becomes why, unprompted, you launched into such a vehement defense of the nature of his work, without understanding the nature of it.

Because he thought he understood it fully, but, turns out, he didn’t. Which is exactly why he asked the question and then apologized when he got corrected.

Isn’t a brief glance at the shape of some congressional districts a smoking gun that it happens all the damn time?

Yes, but if this were a Democrat strategist NPR certainly wouldn’t have covered it.

NPR covered Democratic gerrymandering in Maryland many times, e.g.:

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/14/577969855/gerrymandering-in-m...

Lol the angle in that story is that Democrats should "give up" gerrymandering to convince Republicans to do so. I don't think this counts as "pro-Republican" (or "anti-Democrat") bias.

The point is that it draws attention to Maryland, which is gerrymandered by the Dems - contrary to your claims that they'd ignore that. Why is it supposed to be "pro-Republican"?

(Nor is it the only story NPR has on gerrymandering in Maryland, by the way - merely the most recent one.)

No, the shape of the district is circumstantial evidence. The people who draw those lines swear up and down (and often under oath, as these things are routinely contested in court) that they would never do this. And because the distinction is intent and not the result, it basically amounts to an unprovable thought crime.

But what we have here is a guy with a bunch of analysis based directly on racial data, and a bunch of emails detailing specific plans and concerns about racial demographics. In this one case we know the relevant boundaries constitute a civil rights crime.

> like every single political party in power everywhere where gerrymandering is legal

Leaving aside the rather important specifics here, this isn't even true in general. Taking US, while there are examples of gerrymandering from both parties, one of them does it a lot more than the other.

Now, it could be cynically said that the difference is because one party has a much more substantial advantage to derive from it, because it is on the losing end of popular support due to demographic changes and urbanization, and it has to resort to it to maintain control of many state legislatures. Nevertheless, as things stand, it is a de facto partisan issue.

Mixed feelings. On the one hand, we all know that most if not all politicians are corrupt, so the greater transparency that modern technology offers us to expose this truly does help to make the world a better place. On the other hand, the constant obsessive search by one of the parties to discover “bombshells” from the other while turning a blind eye to the corruption of their own party is upsetting. I cannot help but feel that this blind obsession to winning the zero sum game at any cost leads you to become the very thing that you are fighting against.

This goes well beyond corruption, it is clear disenfranchisement based on race.

When black Americans vote for Democrats at rates above 90% how could you draw districts without racial implications?

That's an excellent question, which makes me wonder the Republican Party was not satisfied disenfranchising Democrats and catching Blacks as collateral dammage, but insisted on disenfranchising Blacks specifically.

By explicitly not selecting for voting behavior for any party during the drawing of the districts, but basing the borders of the districts purely on a geographic or statistical property such as area and/or population. As soon as you start taking voting behavior into account you will be favoring either one or the other party.

For starters, the GOP could instead try and figure out why black Americans vote overwhelmingly in favor of Democrat and update their policy stances to reflect that. Instead, they're deciding to draw districts to lump them together so they can disenfranchise them and make their vote worth less.

So you're right there are racial implications, and it's certainly on the side of the GOP.

I think about this alot. Modern elections have turned into political investigations where the goal is to get more dirt on the opponent than they can get on you. But in some ways this causes a self policing effect and hopefully stops rampant corruption at the highest levels of government.

> hopefully stops rampant corruption at the highest levels of government

I think we have a strong proof that that isn't the case.

If the most recent election cycles are any indication, rampant corruption is something many politicians are proud of

I used to figure I might run for public office some day; no longer. I haven't done anything that would merit a scandal or be counted as "dirt", but that doesn't change it. I don't want a bunch of busybodies poking into ever detail of my life, and more importantly, don't want that to happen to my family.

If modern politics is any guide, the takeaway is that you are able to run for office no matter what happened in your personal life. Your family, I can understand not putting them through that, but there's no reason why you should be ashamed of anything you've done.

Unfortunately the definition of "dirt" has drifted slowly to any moral lapse, which almost every person has at one time committed (at least, among my group of close friends who share that kind of thing, maybe things are more moral somewhere else). It's sort of a slippery slope though - unearthing information of Epstein/Moore type activities is more legitimately in the public interest than Trudeau blackface lapses (arguably). I think the millennial generation will be more forgiving of dumb things done in youth, simply because their dumb things are more thoroughly documented than the boomers/gen-x'ers.

This is the country whose government held that sex with a subordinate is a worse offense than starting a war for personal profit.

> we all know that most if not all politicians are corrupt,

We do? Seems unnecessarily cynical. If that were true than by corollary most if not all people are corrupt, and that does not match my experience by far.

That statement is predicated on the mis-guided assumption that politicians are a statistically-representative sample of Americans.

No one thinks their own frieds are corrupt. That's part of the corruption. The quiet benefeciaries "just following orders" and "useful idiots" of corruption aren't seen as corrupt.

Invalid logic. It is not necessary for most if not all people to be corrupt for the same to be true of politicians. Many people are gullible. Many people are easily manipulated. This is especially true of those who are young, and prone to adopt the ideology of the group. But yes, I do believe that a significant portion of the population possess the brain anomaly that manifests as narcissism and these people are more successful than others at climbing political hierarchies because they are unrestrained by conscience.

If you are curious about this phenomenon, you might want to research "the flying monkeys of the narcissist"

This seems both overly-cynical and a case of whataboutism - "most if not all politicians are corrupt" [citation needed]. There's also a difference between "bombshells" which usually relate to moral lapses and regrettable life choices, and actual corruption which is a crime typically investigated by the FBI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scan... is an illuminating read. Some of the older entries seem quite quaint now the bar is a lot lower:

"John C. Doerfer (R), the appointed Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission by President Eisenhower, spent a week-long Florida vacation in 1960 on the yacht owned by his friend George B. Storer, president of Storer Broadcasting; as a result, he was accused of conflict of interest and forced to resign."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com