Wahlen Alberta warnte Ende März vor missbräuchlicher Verwendung von Wählerinformationen, sagt Journalist | CBC-Nachrichten
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-voter-list-complaint-9.7185287
Wahlen Alberta warnte Ende März vor missbräuchlicher Verwendung von Wählerinformationen, sagt Journalist | CBC-Nachrichten
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-voter-list-complaint-9.7185287
3 Kommentare
[From the Globe and Mail Article: Amendment to Alberta election law hindered probe into alleged misuse of data, watchdog says](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-elections-alberta-personal-data-danielle-smith/)
> Elections Alberta, in a statement on Friday, said the legislation governing its ability to conduct investigations prohibited it from launching a probe when it received Ms. Gerson’s tip.
> “Elections Alberta is held to a very high standard on what we can and cannot investigate. The legislation requires that we must have ‘reasonable grounds to believe an offence has occurred’ to start investigations,” spokeswoman Michelle Gurney said in a statement.
> The “reasonable grounds” provision was added to the Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure Act when Justice Minister Mickey Amery introduced a raft of amendments to the province’s elections laws in 2025.
> The new standard is difficult to meet.
“This is similar to the amount of evidence that, in a criminal matter, police would need to have to arrest someone,” Ms. Gurney said. “Reasonable grounds is a much higher standard than ‘grounds to warrant’ (which was our previous old standard), or ‘what might seem obvious’ based on a complainant’s suspicions or beliefs.”
So from what we know the whole database system at the centre of this story was some innovative system developed in the US that some separatists decided to trial to help them campaign during the upcoming separatist referendum. The website that contained the database with the offending data from EA was active for over a month. Also all it took anyone to access the database was just an email address and a password. There were no guardrails to accessing this data.Once someone successfully registered they could search up the names of 3 million albertans, claim them and then send them a questionnaire about their opinion on separatism.
The concerning part of this whole story is that this huge privacy breach has local and worldwide implications. Nefarious actions across the world had access to millions of albertans data for over a month and EA could do nothing about it. It’s very possible that these actors could have easily downloaded this data too. So that jilted ex of yours, an angry separatist that hates you and state actors in places like the US, china, india, russia and etc now have access to your data for free. So many people’s lives are in danger now because of this.
I can’t see how the Centurion Project and potentially the separatist movement are going to be able to survive this since some Stay Free Alberta canvassers were directly involved in the Centurion Project. I really hope smith or the court system does the right thing and puts a pause on the potential separatism referendum until this data violation is dealt with.
> „Please know that I found the evidence that you provided to be compelling, and I want to reassure
you that I take the unauthorized use of the list of electors very seriously. Unfortunately, I was
unable to discount the potential that data you attributed to being from the list of electors was not
from another legitimate source such as Canada Post or the various data brokers.“
> If you have compelling evidence of a crime, you don’t not investigate said crime because it’s possible a crime wasn’t committed. You, you know, look into it?
– https://www.readtheline.ca/p/scoop-jen-gerson-elections-albertas