Yesterday GA embedded a nugget of information so significant it merited a post of its own. So here it is.
- City Hall uses web-based email. Which means employees can access their accounts from anywhere via log-in with a password.
- The former IT Department Head, Patrick Ricciardi, assigned the passwords.
Let's say the door to your home opened with a password instead of a key, and Person X provided you with that password. One day you come home to find crumbs all over the furniture, the sofa pillows rearranged, the toilet seat up.
How did that happen?
How many people came in while you were gone?
Did they take anything or just nose around?
Mayor Zimmer found 'crumbs on the furniture' at City Hall and called in the FBI. Person X was suspended.
So the question remains: how many accessed the email accounts of Juan Melli, Dan Bryan, Mayor Zimmer,and other targets at City Hall? When the 'key' is simply a password, the possibilities are unlimited. Anyone could have logged in anytime from anywhere.
And who was Ricciardi close to? He was Beth Mason's videographer for her wethepeoplereports.com, active until 2008. And very friendly with Team Hoboken411.com, the venue for leaked City Hall documents... and GA conjectures the venue for OUR emails-- were the plot not interrupted by our FBI friends.
By 'our' emails I mean mine, Roman Brice's and Kurt Gardiner's.
In fact, this peep show was so easy to get into, GA imagines the confiscated servers sitting in Newark are a treasure-trove of IP addresses of people soon to receive target letters (a.k.a. invitations to star at a federal grand jury near you ). Hence the BIG RUSH by Mason to get these emails out in the public to cobble together a Pentagon Papers defense; that the contents of the emails made their exposure practically a public service. Get it?
The vanishing of Lane Bajardi makes even more sense now. Given that restraint is not one of his virtues.
Public service? Is there a war with Americans fighting and losing their lives in a distant land at stake? Is it thousand and thousands of Americans and their families living in concern for loved ones who are in the service the concern?
ReplyDeleteNo, it's just playing politics and looking for a morsel of a tidbit, any sentence fragment that can be twisted to be something it's not and made into a conspiracy of some sort, (obviously not of the federal conspiracy variety).
All of course in the hopes to create and tailor a fiction from a sentence fragment on Beth Mason's political apparatus of a website Hoboken411.
The only problem with that narrative. There's nothing there. There's your less than a handful of recipes, The Hoboken Journal's occasional joke and nothing of note from MSV.
Eventually it will all come out and get a big yawn like the media silence after Sarah Palin's emails were released in similar quantities.
However the person who broke into Sarah Palin's email account by using the same web based breach you describe here did get into BIG TROUBLE.
There's no reason to believe those involved in this targeting the mayor and other official's emails won't be in equal or far more trouble.
What other reading materials have they gone after is the larger and more important question. One that only the FBI can answer.
At the time of their choosing.
Happy Nightmares minions!
but can't the user change their password after the Admin assigned?
ReplyDeleteThat's how it works at my job
Admin is god. As such they can view any email, any document residing on a server or computer connected to the server all without the user knowing anything.
ReplyDeleteIn business, companies have the legal right to see what communications are being made over its electronic communication system. However, an IT person does not automatically have that access.
They can not access city business documents, release them to others via their own email or through third parties.
That's a crime and is handled as such by the FBI. What's likely to have occurred here is a breach of some city documentation of some sort. The details on all of it will come when law enforcement decides.
tony, I was told this wasn't the case.
ReplyDeleteCity Hall's IT admin assigned the passwords and that was that.
I was given a password at work by my IT guy. I cannot change it. He has access to my computer. I make sure that I leave messages on the screen about how much I can't stand the big brother state I'm forced to work in & how much I dislike him personally. So far, he's not said a word about it.
ReplyDeleteMel, you are a riot.
ReplyDelete