We Found The Private Phone Numbers Of Nearly All Fed MPs Even After They Were Apparently Deleted
Text ur MPs, see who's keen.
Yesterday The Sydney Morning Herald broke the news that the Department of Parliamentary Services had accidentally published the private phone numbers of nearly every single federal politician.
Every six months the department uploads the phone bills of politicians and their staff, and usually the phone numbers are deleted. But this time around the numbers weren’t removed, they were just posted in white text. The problem with that is that as soon as you highlighted the numbers, they were readable.
The Herald even made this nifty gif explaining how it worked:
The government quickly blamed a private contractor, TELCO Management, for the screw up and deleted the documents as soon as they were notified.
But nothing on the internet can ever truly be deleted.
After the story broke, Junkee checked to see if the documents had been captured by Google and stored in their cache. The search engine trawls the web, taking snapshots of websites and storing them on its own servers.
Sure enough, the documents were readily available. All you had to do was prefix the URL of the phone bills with “cache:” and a Google snapshot of the files, complete with phone numbers, would download.
Never heard of this bloke, but apparently he’s a federal MP.
Hell yeah, it’s Bob Hawke.
Using this method Junkee was able to download the phone numbers of nearly every federal politician, as well former Prime Ministers like Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Paul Keating.
The best bit? The numbers weren’t even whited out. They were just there in black and white for everyone to access in an even easier format than the original upload.
The story was covered by most news outlets yesterday. Given how prominent it was, and how easy it is to access a cached version of a website, there’s a strong chance the files were downloaded even after the department pulled them from the site.
Junkee has spoken to a number of individuals who independently accessed the files yesterday using Google’s cache.
But if you were hoping to prank our esteemed representatives, I’ve got some bad news. This morning the documents had been pulled from Google’s servers, presumably after someone from the government got in touch and politely asked for the data to be scrubbed.
but sure, give us all your metadata, nothing could possibly go wrong ?? https://t.co/5s9QNPGJZO
— Scott Ludlam (@SenatorLudlam) March 20, 2017
All up the story is pretty embarrassing for the government, considering how intent they are on accessing our personal data while promising it will be safe. If they can’t even keep their own personal information private, what chance do us normal people have?