Commentary

George Hulme
 

Fallout From 'Joe The Plumber' Snooping Heats Up

This presidential election involved more hacking and digital snooping than any other election I can recall.

This presidential election involved more hacking and digital snooping than any other election I can recall.First, there's the alleged hacking of vice-president hopeful Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account. Then there was the hacking of both candidate's Web sites. Perhaps the worst case of digital debauchery is what happened to Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka "Joe the Plumber," after he simply asked then-candidate Barack Obama a question about small business tax policy.

According to a story that recently ran in the Akron Beacon Journal, the Ohio Inspector General is investigating a half-dozen agencies that accessed state records on Joe the Plumber:


More Security Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

The Beacon Journal has learned that, in addition to the Department of Job and Family Services, two other state offices -- the Ohio Department of Taxation and Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers -- conducted database searches of Joe the Plumber.

The story goes on:

The next day, the taxation department conducted two separate searches of a database of liens for unpaid taxes that were certified to the Ohio Attorney General's Office for collection.

The moral of the Wurzelbacher story? Make sure your parking tickets, taxes, child support payments, and any other business with the state is cleared up before having the audacity to ask any politician a tough (which it really wasn't in this case) question.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links