How stupid can you be? Not as stupid as the McCain staffers selling BlackBerrys without first wiping them of sensitive information, I bet.
From the ever-deeper annals of "High profile people not smart enough to erase their gadgets," comes the story from Fox 5 of Washington, DC that one of their reporters bought a BlackBerry "containing confidential campaign information" from the McCain/Palin campaign. No wonder they lost.
As Fox 5's Tisha Thompson reports,
It started with a snippet we read on page A23 in Thursday's Washington
Post. The McCain-Palin campaign was going to sell its used office
inventory at low prices.
But when we got there, it didn't look
like we were going to get much. It was lunchtime and most of the good
stuff was gone, picked over by early birds looking for deals on file
cabinets, white boards, sofas-- anything headquarters could sell to get
back some of their campaign dough.
But, then something shiny caught their eyes ...
The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only
10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for
sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.
And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.
When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20
Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people
connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails
from early September until a few days after election night.
Apparently the device contained "private cell phone [numbers] for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists." Fox 5 called one of the numbers and got this gem of a comment from the person who answered: ?They should have wiped that stuff out. Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.?
For the sake of national security, thank goodness they lost the election, huh?