On Data Breaches & Privacy Harms
My thoughts on that troubling HuffPo piece about Richard Hanania
Yesterday, HuffPost released a damning expose written by Christopher Mathias (@letsgomathias) on the libertarian pundit Richard Hanania1 and his deeply troubling past. I won’t relay the gory details here, but it’s a well-written, well-researched piece and pulls no punches.
Instead, I want to talk about how Mathias managed to uncover Hanania’s past, and specifically a decade-old online persona, where Hanania posted some absolutely abhorrent garbage that is almost certainly going to alienate anyone not already to the right of Tucker Carlson.
Like Diamonds, Data Breaches are Forever
Mathias discovered that Hanania was associated with the ‘Richard Hoste’ persona by matching email addresses, shared passwords, and related IDs that had been exposed in two data breaches — the Disqus 2012 breach, and another unnamed breach. From the article:
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