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Australia Government Privacy

Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error 140

Posted by samzenpus from the sounds-like-a-case-of-the-mondays dept.
mpicpp writes in with this story about a mistake that saw personal details of world leaders accidentally disclosed by the Australian immigration department. "With a single key stroke, the personal information of President Obama and 30 other world leaders was mistakenly released by an official with Australia's immigration office. Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, were inadvertently emailed to one of the organizers of January's Asian Cup football tournament, according to The Guardian. The U.K. newspaper obtained the information as a result of an Australia Freedom of Information request. Aside from President Obama, leaders whose data were released include Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The sender forgot to check the auto-fill function in the email 'To' field in Microsoft Outlook before hitting send, the BBC reports."
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Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error More

Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error

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  • Papers, please (Score:4, Funny)

    by sanf780 ( 4055211 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:15PM (#49374947)
    Yes, I am called Barack Obama. Can't you see that in these forge... authentic papers? I just travel economy, as that is the most cost-sensitive solution!

    • Oh, yea? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well than, let's see your birth certificate!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Oh, him. After I donated in 2008 he kept sending me emails. It does occasionally come in handy, like when my wife tells to mow the grass. "Not right now, honey, Barack Obama just sent me an email."

    • What I want to know is do Angela Merkel's documents show that her real father was Adolf Hitler? [helpfreetheearth.com]

  • Amusing as this is, most of it (perhaps not passport numbers -- but how hard can it be to get a new passport as a head of state) is already public information.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Amusing as this is, most of it (perhaps not passport numbers -- but how hard can it be to get a new passport as a head of state) is already public information.

      There is absolutely nothing that could happen to any of these people that would make me feel like something unfair was done to them, or feel bad for them in any way whatsoever. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

      Sadly though the biggest argument against the concept of karma is a very strong one: in this world, the wicked tend to prosper.

      • Sadly though the biggest argument against the concept of karma is a very strong one: in this world, the wicked tend to prosper.

        At work I hear a lot about how my bad or trouble-making peers will have to face karma and to sit back and wait for that to happen. My problem with karma or the whole "they will get theirs" is, even if this it's true, it does not undue any damage they have caused me.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      Amusing as this is, most of it (perhaps not passport numbers -- but how hard can it be to get a new passport as a head of state) is already public information.

      Not to mention, being important political figures, they have arms guards protecting them at all times. They don't have to fear someone coming for them.

  • the 8 ball was right! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:19PM (#49374985)

    "Outlook not so good."

    • Re:the 8 ball was right! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:38PM (#49375109)

      See how nice and easy Outlook is to use!

      You can disclose all your secrets in less than half the time than with one of the competitor's products.

      Insist on Genuine Microsoft.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pspahn ( 1175617 )

        I'm reading the description over and over, and I have absolutely no idea how this occurred. So there's an "autofill" check box that wasn't checked. How does this end up disclosing all of this information in the email?

        I am forced to use Outlook for work and as a result I use it as minimally as possible. For some reason I still have to spend several seconds searching for the awkwardly placed "Send" button every time I need it. Forgive my lack of experience using an awful email client.

        • For sending, Ctrl+Enter is your friend.

          I think they mean "check" as in "verify".

          I'm guessing the guy typed "Michael", clicked on the name that came up, and hit send. He didn't notice that it autofilled the name "Michael Brown" from the Asian Football Cup organising committe rather than, say, "Michael Smith" the internal employee who was supposed to update the approved official visitor database.

          • CTRL+ENTER is terrible. I disabled it after e-mails were sent prematurely a few times after my finger lingered slightly too long on the CTRL key after pasting something, whilst I hit ENTER too quickly for the next paragraph. ALT+S is safer.
      • There are add-ins for Outlook available that can solve the auto-complete issue. Just google for "Outlook popup external recipients" or something...
    • And here I am without any mod points!

      Funniest thing I've seen today! Thanks for the laugh.
    • even more annoying is Outlook's spam blocking has been delibertly disabled; you can't just "block domain" any more from the individual emails. M$ claims this is to stop "accidental" right clicking on an email, scrolling down to "Junk Options", then also accidentally clicking "Block Sender's Domain". I accidentally do multi-step actions all the time, blindly clicking all over my PC! Thanks Microsoft! I'll put $ that someone paid some $$$ to have that removed.

    • "Outlook not so good."

      You got the accent right too, since the 8 ball was made in China!

  • Funny (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:20PM (#49374989)

    When their privacy is violated, it makes headlines.

    When they violate ours, it's business as usual.

  • Don't worry. (Score:5, Funny)

    by ElectraFlarefire ( 698915 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:20PM (#49374995) Journal

    It was mostly only metadata.

    • That was the funniest damn comment I have read on /. in I don't know how long.

      I'm waiting for Whoosh Guy to deliver the metadata-matters diatribe and close the show.

    • Besides, if they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.

  • So much for privacy.... (Score:3)

    by tnk1 ( 899206 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:22PM (#49375005)

    This is the equivalent to the periodic scenario where HR accidentally emails the spreadsheet with everyone's salary numbers to the Everyone list.

    And yes, back in the days I was an email administrator, I had to try and do damage control on someone who had actually done that. Twice. Others probably have similar stories.

    Actually, it's gotten better now, ironically, now that all that stuff is stored in some cloud app. Now the people just have accounts that they can run their own reports from. Of course, in smaller, or less tech savvy businesses, people are probably still passing those sorts of spreadsheets via email even today.

    • a company I was at more than 10 yrs ago ran MS email. some of us ran unix email (I think I was into qmail at the time) and the sysadmin was a friend, so I was left alone and had my linux box do my desktop work. was not forced to use windows. back then, it was atypical, but we used a form of bsd in our products and so the unix guys were not a small minority. still, I was one of the few who used only unix email, for corp stuff.

      one day I get an email from some marketing guy, then a few minutes another emai

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 )

        Even when running on Exchange I've never seen recall actually work. I've gotten "Would like to recall" messages by the dozens. It never actually deleted the email.

      • just too funny. the MS guys really do think the whole world is MS.

        Well ... let's put it in perspective.

        It is funny, and I've had it happen in the past too - I think because of some misconfiguration, not from not using Outlook or Windows. But the idea is that the whole place uses a unified system, which does allow for nifty corporate functions like recalling emails. The issue you saw was that you were allowed to have a rogue setup.

        On the other other hand, it is of course very hard to lock down what is by nature supposed to be extremely interoperable ...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Why the heck can't Outlook by default display a warning about such with wording similar to: "You are about to send a message to 100 or more people. Please confirm....".

      I've had some embarrassing moments myself from such mistakes.

      And a similar default warning for large messages or attachments.

      • Except in this case the email was sent to just one person, though the wrong one. The issue is that the sender started to type a name or email address, and Outlook helpfully autocompleted the address (with the wrong one) which the sender then used.

        I used to have this happen to me a lot at my last company where there was another person with a similar name, except my name came before his alphabetically so the autocomplete would helpfully fill in my name for people when they started typing his, and they would
        • It is worse for me and some other poor bastard who is over in the UK at the same company. We have the same first and last name, but he appears in our company's address book (~500,000 people) just before me. I have had some managers send "me" an e-mail asking for a status that I never get and then after several days and many progressively more angry e-mails stop by and demand why I am ignoring them. The first time the manager didn't believe me that I had never received any e-mails from them until I send them

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tnk1 ( 899206 )

        It does now. I will get a warning about the list having x amount of users on it and do I want to send it to that many people. Not sure what the minimum number is.

        When I was an email administrator, we didn't have Outlook, we were using plain old POP mail with Eudora as our mail client (for the non UNIX machines). I went in as root on the mail server, made everyone's inbox a folder in pine, and proceeded to go through everyone's inbox and delete it. I doubt very much that I was able to get everyone. Afte

    • This is the equivalent to the periodic scenario where HR accidentally emails the spreadsheet with everyone's salary numbers to the Everyone list.

      And yes, back in the days I was an email administrator, I had to try and do damage control on someone who had actually done that. Twice.

      Yep - happened at my job as well. Someone in HR attached a wrong spreadsheet to an email about the company picnic. The spreadsheet had our salary, address, dob, and social security number.

  • Heads of state, and David Cameron (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:24PM (#49375021) Homepage

    personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit [...] British Prime Minister David Cameron

    A minor consitutional note, but David Cameron isn't a head of state. Queen Elizabeth is, but she doesn't have a passport, as they're issued in her name, and in any case she can just flash a tenner at passport control as ID, or just say "I'm the bloody queen, mate" and be done with it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The idea of state-sanctioned royalty in 2015 is quite disturbing.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Why? Most of the civilised world has state-sanctioned royalty. Are you conflating ceremonial royalty with some form of government?

  • Passport numbers (Score:4, Funny)

    by tomalpha ( 746163 ) * on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:24PM (#49375029)
    It's interesting for a couple of reasons. Given that the sender intended to send the details somewhere, I'd be really interested to know who the intended recipient was and for what reason.

    Even more interesting, I never quite realised that heads of state would have (or then use), a passport. Surely no one actually checks it? I mean, I was once stuck in an immigration queue at JFK behind Paddy Ashdown [wikipedia.org], just after he stopped being something like the NATO-imposed governor of Bosnia and was an ordinary human again. He was relaxed, but his diminutive aide was not happy that Lord Ashdown had to wait. Fascinating people watching. But a proper bona-fide head of state?

    • Re: Passport numbers (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Heads of state probably go through the border security process used primarily by airplane/airport staff.

      I went through it once at Tokyo Narita airport (long story), there was no queue, my passport was scanned and fingerprint taken in about 5 seconds (despite nobody there speaking english and no written english instructions).

    • Re:Passport numbers (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @07:06PM (#49375321)

      They surely never have to bother with this on their own. It's handled all by their underlings, of course. I suppose one way to explain it would be that it might cause some minor political embarrassment if it were revealed the head of state / elected leader didn't have a passport, and therefore, technically speaking, was actually breaking the law when traveling abroad. They don't really *need* it, of course, but bureaucracies, if nothing else, tend to mind their p's and q's. The sender undoubtedly intended to send that information to another civil servant for properly processing it in some mundane fashion, as they tend to do. I'm betting 1000 to 1 that it was for no interesting or glamorous reason other than fulfilling a bureaucratic rule or an information filing law.

      • I suppose one way to explain it would be that it might cause some minor political embarrassment if it were revealed the head of state / elected leader didn't have a passport, and therefore, technically speaking, was actually breaking the law when traveling abroad.

        British heads of state (currently Queen Elizabeth II) don't have passports. A British passport is a document in which the Queen requests that foreign counties allow the holder to pass. The Queen can ask in person and so has no need for a passpor

        • Oddly enough, I specifically typed "head of state / elected leader" because it was pointed out earlier that David Cameron is not the British head of state. I had intended that slash to mean OR, not AND. Anyhow, it seems to be the case that royal heads of state don't seem to use one as a rule. I suppose it would be considered undignified to show a little book with a picture that essentially says "Hi! I'm the King of Saudi Arabia". Similar to British passports, Saudi passports are (according to Wikipedia

          • Not having a diplomatic passport, this is the first I have heard of them but I suppose I have always figured they existed, but having been an official guest of a foreign country to perform work for their government I would guess you are correct. I got to go through the diplomat lines at the airport and passport control which is a welcome change from passport control, and TSA in my home country of the US. I just walked up to passport control, handed them my passport, and it got stamped and was let through. I

    • Isn't an email still, as always, essentially a post-card? How many servers were in the chain between sender and recipient?

      TFA states that, "The Immigration Department described the incident as an "isolated example of human error and said the risk of the breach to be 'very low'," and "the immigration officer recommended that the world leaders not be made aware of the breach"

      Sounds like someone might need an attitude adjustment.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • PHRASING! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Headw1nd ( 829599 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:34PM (#49375089)
    OK, so the summary makes it sound like the Guardian got a copy of the personal information via a FOI request, which would make no sense. "Welp, we sent it in an email. Guess we have to release it now if anyone asks." In fact what happened is they learned about the breach through a FOI request, though I'm not sure how they knew to make the request.
    • probably by illegally hacking some phone's voicemail, someone's email, etc. Wouldn't be the first time Murdock etc did that for a scoop.

  • Alas, (Score:5, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:50PM (#49375201)

    The only thing more annoying than a computer is a computer that tries to be helpful.

    • It looks like you are writing a slashdot post. Would you like help?

      The only thing more awesome than a computer is a computer that tries to be helpful.

  • Which one of his birthdates (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Which one of Barrack Obama's - if that is his real name - birthdates and social security numbers were released? He is known to have stated several different at various times.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 )

      Oh ya, because we know he was born on Mars and he's been denying it all his life. Denial is the best evidence of a lie. The whole Kenya thing is just a smokescreen to entrap the ignorant who don't know the Mars story.

  • address (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The message included the 31 world leaders' dates of birth but not personal addresses and other contact details.
    Good.... who knows what could have happened if people knew where these world leaders lived.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mirar ( 264502 )

      Imagine what we can do now when we know how old they fake they are in their passports.

  • No matter how much training, security measures, or mail filtering......

    You can't fix stupid.

  • Unencrypted Email (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <[slashdot] [at] [keirstead.org]> on Monday March 30, 2015 @07:42PM (#49375633)

    Forget the auto-complete nonsense. The question that should be being asked is why an un-encrypted email containing " Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia" would be being sent to ANYONE. I can't even send an unencrypted email at work containing MY OWN social security number.

  • These information are mostly available in the public domain already. So what's the big deal about the leak?

  • What about their luggage combination?

  • That information is useless: you are not going to impersonate Obama because you have his passport number.

    By the way I am surprised diplomatic missions have to show a passport.

  • I encountered a bug once in Outlook where I did fill in the name, autocompleted it correctly but still Outlook sent it to the wrong person behind my back.

    Luckily the person receiving the mail wasn't a security breach.

    So I don't trust Outlook much since then.

  • So the data leaked, is that secret or just personal?

  • So the story goes they accidentally sent the email to the asian cup organisers when the autofill picked the wrong entry.
    So they would have type 'a' 's' 'i' and then autofilled?

    Sounds like they were sending the email to ASI...O

  • Could have been worse. (Score:4, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @04:54AM (#49377705)

    Luckily the guy didn't email those world-leaders with all the recipients in the to: field, they would 'reply all' for the next 20 years and nothing would get done.

  • Isn't everyone missing the real issue here? It's not that someone mis-addressed an email. It's not that Outlook helped them mess up. It's not that it was leaders' information.

    It's the fact that they were sending this kind of information about anyone in clear text, on an email, at all, to anyone.

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