
Deceased GOP Strategist's Daughter Makes Files Public - everybodyknows
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/05/785672201/deceased-gop-strategists-daughter-makes-files-public-that-republicans-wanted-sea
======
nsajko
More context:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hofeller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hofeller)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Commerce_v._New_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Commerce_v._New_York)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_North_Carolin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_North_Carolina)

[https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-
delays-...](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-delays-
decision-census-citizenship-case-after-hearing-evidence-gop-n1014286)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-
que...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-question-
hofeller.html)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-to-review-motive-of-
trump...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-to-review-motive-of-trump-
administration-census-citizenship-question-11561505305)

------
everybodyknows
The files:

[https://www.thehofellerfiles.com/](https://www.thehofellerfiles.com/)

------
leoc
Some possible similarities to the situation with the late Bill Broeksmit of
Deutsche Bank and his son Val:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/business/val-broeksmit-
de...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/business/val-broeksmit-deutsche-
bank-trump-whistle-blower.html) .

~~~
mirimir
_That_ is a very strange article.

~~~
jacobytev
David Enrich, the writer, Burned him purposely. He reappropriated all Val
Broeksmit's work and research - including his deceased fathers documents - and
passed them off as his own.

Enrich included all Broeksmits work into his book. The New York Times
strangely enough supported these behaviors. They've been promoting his book's
release.

Broeksmit and Enrich have been battling it out on twitter. Its an epic fight.

~~~
mirimir
Wow. Thanks.

I guess that Enrich isn't expecting any other potential sources to trust him.

And if the New York Times has supported Enrich's behavior, it damages their
journalistic integrity.

------
viburnum
I found some good advice on one of the slides:

 _Make sure your computer is in a PRIVATE location.

Don’t walk away from it and leave your work exposed. Password protect your
monitor screen – with a short cycle.

Save and log off if you’re going to be away for long._

From "What I've Learned the Hard Way"
[https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NI53QSEta45KNKdkdoGn-
wvpyt...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NI53QSEta45KNKdkdoGn-wvpytN_YOCe)

~~~
jacquesm
How about 'don't spend your life subverting democracy so your family members
can expose you after you die'?

~~~
ruminasean
Seriously. They don't learn why not doing it is the right thing to do, they
just learn how to hide it better.

------
cbsmith
This needs a torrent. Badly.

~~~
hyperbovine
That's the ingenious thing about torrents. Literally anyone can make one.

Anyone.

~~~
MrMorden
From /r/datahoarder:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3D8FF2A3B20CEF8C3EA966F0657F1E4235141090

~~~
jacquesm
Seeding that. Crazy ratios.

------
datashow
"These are matters that concern the people and their franchise and their
access to resources. This is, therefore, the property of the people".

Is this true?

~~~
ajross
Literally? No, it's her storage device and her data on it. This is a
figurative argument about why she wants to release it.

~~~
datashow
How do you know it's her property? I guess it was her father's property and
now is in her possession. Does this automatically become her property? The
device and the data?

I guess we have a generation facing this new problem. I have only seem
discussion about how services like Facebook should handle the data of deceased
people. I didn't realize your kids (and spouse?) can just take your device and
release it. This future seems scary to me.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
While I certainly don't think all things in the digital space map perfectly to
things in the analog space, there's literally centuries of precedence for
descendants of someone who's deceased to make decisions about publicly
releasing their journals, correspondence, unfinished manuscripts, and so on.
Most of Emily Dickinson's poems were published after her death by her sister;
author John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer-prize winning novel _A Confederacy of
Dunces_ was discovered and submitted for publication by his mother after he
committed suicide; Franz Kafka's _The Trial_ was only published because
Kafka's executor defied his dying wish to burn his unpublished works.

tl;dr: I don't think the ethical questions here are affected by whether the
deceased's writing takes the form of ink on paper or bits on digital storage.

~~~
mlyle
But some of this data may be subject to other ownership rights, nondisclosure
agreements, etc.

~~~
mirimir
True. And that's probably why she put it online.

Before it was too late.

------
jacobush
Life-hacking democracy:

 _Hofeller had manually entered "%18_ap_blk" into nearly every draft of his
mapping software when he mapped North Carolina's districts; "%18_ap_blk" is a
formula that shows the number of African American citizens of voting age in
each district_

He made a custom software program already in the _1970s_ to disenfranchise
blacks.

(From Wikipedia.)

~~~
bsanr2
One wonders what the monetary value of that disenfranchisement has been over
the years. Will we ever broach that issue?

~~~
tomrod
Is this what is called reparations?

~~~
jacobush
Usually that is referring to reparations for slavery. (But it could include
gerrymandering too IMHO. It's something perpetrated by the state against an
ethnic group.)

------
mirimir
There's something odd about that URL.

It takes me to

[https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org...](https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org/2020/01/05/785672201/deceased-
gop-strategists-daughter-makes-files-public-that-republicans-wanted-sea)

Edit: And there's nothing at
[https://choice.npr.org/](https://choice.npr.org/) itself.

This is from a German IP address.

~~~
wyxuan
GDPR compliance. If you used US you wouldn't get that interstitial.

~~~
mirimir
I get that. But there's no page there.

> Unable to connect

> Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at choice.npr.org.

------
Seanambers
This can't be good, there's a scan of a persons passport in there, pictures of
abuse and so on..

------
fzeroracer
It's sad that stories like these end up getting flagged while other political
stories more favorable to the right end up doing fine. It's clear a lot of
people didn't even read the article and likely just flagged it because it
contains 'GOP' in the title.

------
slowmovintarget
The "bombshells" according to the article are that her father planned
gerrymandering for the North Carolina state legislature... like every single
political party in power everywhere where gerrymandering is legal.

The actual bombshell? That "gerrymandering" is pronounced with a hard "g".

edit: I'm seeing from some of the comments that there are worse things in the
actual files. more: Hofeller's actions were gerrymandering based on race,
which is illegal and wrong.

~~~
ajross
Uh... drawing a political district on the basis of race is quite expressly
_illegal_ in the United States. What is newsworthy here is that it's a pretty
clear smoking gun that that is exactly what was happening.

~~~
larnmar
Isn’t a brief glance at the shape of some congressional districts a smoking
gun that it happens all the damn time?

~~~
someguydave
Yes, but if this were a Democrat strategist NPR certainly wouldn’t have
covered it.

~~~
int_19h
NPR covered Democratic gerrymandering in Maryland many times, e.g.:

[https://www.npr.org/2018/01/14/577969855/gerrymandering-
in-m...](https://www.npr.org/2018/01/14/577969855/gerrymandering-in-maryland)

~~~
someguydave
Lol the angle in that story is that Democrats should "give up" gerrymandering
to convince Republicans to do so. I don't think this counts as "pro-
Republican" (or "anti-Democrat") bias.

~~~
int_19h
The point is that it draws attention to Maryland, which is gerrymandered by
the Dems - contrary to your claims that they'd ignore that. Why is it supposed
to be "pro-Republican"?

(Nor is it the only story NPR has on gerrymandering in Maryland, by the way -
merely the most recent one.)

------
throwaway490194
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, we all know that most if not all politicians
are corrupt, so the greater transparency that modern technology offers us to
expose this truly does help to make the world a better place. On the other
hand, the constant obsessive search by one of the parties to discover
“bombshells” from the other while turning a blind eye to the corruption of
their own party is upsetting. I cannot help but feel that this blind obsession
to winning the zero sum game at any cost leads you to become the very thing
that you are fighting against.

~~~
gumby
> we all know that most if not all politicians are corrupt,

We do? Seems unnecessarily cynical. If that were true than by corollary most
if not all people are corrupt, and that does not match my experience by far.

~~~
throwaway490194
Invalid logic. It is not necessary for most if not all people to be corrupt
for the same to be true of politicians. Many people are gullible. Many people
are easily manipulated. This is especially true of those who are young, and
prone to adopt the ideology of the group. But yes, I do believe that a
significant portion of the population possess the brain anomaly that manifests
as narcissism and these people are more successful than others at climbing
political hierarchies because they are unrestrained by conscience.

~~~
throwaway490194
If you are curious about this phenomenon, you might want to research "the
flying monkeys of the narcissist"

