8 ms·

Deceased GOP Strategist's Daughter Makes Files Public

153 points by everybodyknows 7y ago

everybodyknows 7y ago
The files: https://www.thehofellerfiles.com/ https://www.thehofellerfiles.com/
nsajko 7y ago
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_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Commerce_v._New_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_North_Carolina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_North_Carolin... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-delays-decision-census-citizenship-case-after-hearing-evidence-gop-n1014286 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-delays-... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-question-hofeller.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que... https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-to-review-motive-of-trump-administration-census-citizenship-question-11561505305 https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-to-review-motive-of-trump...
cbsmith 7y ago
This needs a torrent. Badly.
- hyperbovine 7y ago
  That's the ingenious thing about torrents. Literally anyone can make one. Anyone.
  - MrMorden 7y ago
    From /r/datahoarder: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3D8FF2A3B20CEF8C3EA966F0657F1E4235141090
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Seeding that. Crazy ratios.
  - squarefoot 7y ago
    There are many tools easing the process: ctorrent, buildtorrent and others allow torrent creation in a single command line, and qBbittorrent contains a gui panel for creating them as well.
  - cbsmith 7y ago
    That's true. Though there's a killer first step. First you have to get the data.
viburnum 7y ago
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-wvpytN_YOCe https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NI53QSEta45KNKdkdoGn-wvpyt...
- jacquesm 7y ago
  How about 'don't spend your life subverting democracy so your family members can expose you after you die'?
  - ruminasean 7y ago
    Seriously. They don't learn why not doing it is the right thing to do, they just learn how to hide it better.
jacobush 7y ago
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 7y ago
  One wonders what the monetary value of that disenfranchisement has been over the years. Will we ever broach that issue?
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Is this what is called reparations?
    - jacobush 7y ago
      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.)
Seanambers 7y ago
This can't be good, there's a scan of a persons passport in there, pictures of abuse and so on..
datashow 7y ago
"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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
      - datashow 7y ago
        It is true there are relevant precedents. I guess the difference is that in this digital age the scope of data is far greater than data on the paper. I don't know whether this truly matters.
slowmovintarget 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - slowmovintarget 7y ago
    That I missed. I should have read more carefully. Thank you for the correction. I agree that that is disgusting.
    - bsanr2 7y ago
      So, now the question becomes why, unprompted, you launched into such a vehement defense of the nature of his work, without understanding the nature of it.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - filoleg 7y ago
        Because he thought he understood it fully, but, turns out, he didn’t. Which is exactly why he asked the question and then apologized when he got corrected.
  - larnmar 7y ago
    Isn’t a brief glance at the shape of some congressional districts a smoking gun that it happens all the damn time?
throwaway490194 7y ago
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.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  This goes well beyond corruption, it is clear disenfranchisement based on race.
  - someguydave 7y ago
    When black Americans vote for Democrats at rates above 90% how could you draw districts without racial implications?
    - lupire 7y ago
      That's an excellent question, which makes me wonder the Republican Party was not satisfied disenfranchising Democrats and catching Blacks as collateral dammage, but insisted on disenfranchising Blacks specifically.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      By explicitly not selecting for voting behavior for any party during the drawing of the districts, but basing the borders of the districts purely on a geographic or statistical property such as area and/or population. As soon as you start taking voting behavior into account you will be favoring either one or the other party.
    - fzeroracer 7y ago
      For starters, the GOP could instead try and figure out why black Americans vote overwhelmingly in favor of Democrat and update their policy stances to reflect that. Instead, they're deciding to draw districts to lump them together so they can disenfranchise them and make their vote worth less. So you're right there are racial implications, and it's certainly on the side of the GOP.
mirimir 7y ago
There's something odd about that URL. It takes me to 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 https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org... Edit: And there's nothing at https://choice.npr.org/ https://choice.npr.org/ itself. This is from a German IP address.
- wyxuan 7y ago
  GDPR compliance. If you used US you wouldn't get that interstitial.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    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.
leoc 7y ago
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-deutsche-bank-trump-whistle-blower.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/business/val-broeksmit-de... .
- mirimir 7y ago
  That is a very strange article.
  - leoc 7y ago
    No denying that.
  - jacobytev 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
fzeroracer 7y ago
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.

The files: https://www.thehofellerfiles.com/ https://www.thehofellerfiles.com/

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_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Commerce_v._New_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_North_Carolina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_North_Carolin... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-delays-decision-census-citizenship-case-after-hearing-evidence-gop-n1014286 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-delays-... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-question-hofeller.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que... https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-to-review-motive-of-trump-administration-census-citizenship-question-11561505305 https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-to-review-motive-of-trump...

cbsmith 7y ago

This needs a torrent. Badly.

hyperbovine 7y ago
That's the ingenious thing about torrents. Literally anyone can make one. Anyone.
- MrMorden 7y ago
  From /r/datahoarder: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3D8FF2A3B20CEF8C3EA966F0657F1E4235141090
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Seeding that. Crazy ratios.
- squarefoot 7y ago
  There are many tools easing the process: ctorrent, buildtorrent and others allow torrent creation in a single command line, and qBbittorrent contains a gui panel for creating them as well.
- cbsmith 7y ago
  That's true. Though there's a killer first step. First you have to get the data.

viburnum 7y ago

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-wvpytN_YOCe https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NI53QSEta45KNKdkdoGn-wvpyt...

jacquesm 7y ago
How about 'don't spend your life subverting democracy so your family members can expose you after you die'?
- ruminasean 7y ago
  Seriously. They don't learn why not doing it is the right thing to do, they just learn how to hide it better.

jacobush 7y ago

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 7y ago
One wonders what the monetary value of that disenfranchisement has been over the years. Will we ever broach that issue?
- tomrod 7y ago
  Is this what is called reparations?
  - jacobush 7y ago
    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.)

Seanambers 7y ago

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

datashow 7y ago

"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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
    - datashow 7y ago
      It is true there are relevant precedents. I guess the difference is that in this digital age the scope of data is far greater than data on the paper. I don't know whether this truly matters.

slowmovintarget 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- slowmovintarget 7y ago
  That I missed. I should have read more carefully. Thank you for the correction. I agree that that is disgusting.
  - bsanr2 7y ago
    So, now the question becomes why, unprompted, you launched into such a vehement defense of the nature of his work, without understanding the nature of it.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - filoleg 7y ago
      Because he thought he understood it fully, but, turns out, he didn’t. Which is exactly why he asked the question and then apologized when he got corrected.
- larnmar 7y ago
  Isn’t a brief glance at the shape of some congressional districts a smoking gun that it happens all the damn time?

throwaway490194 7y ago

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.

jacquesm 7y ago
This goes well beyond corruption, it is clear disenfranchisement based on race.
- someguydave 7y ago
  When black Americans vote for Democrats at rates above 90% how could you draw districts without racial implications?
  - lupire 7y ago
    That's an excellent question, which makes me wonder the Republican Party was not satisfied disenfranchising Democrats and catching Blacks as collateral dammage, but insisted on disenfranchising Blacks specifically.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    By explicitly not selecting for voting behavior for any party during the drawing of the districts, but basing the borders of the districts purely on a geographic or statistical property such as area and/or population. As soon as you start taking voting behavior into account you will be favoring either one or the other party.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    For starters, the GOP could instead try and figure out why black Americans vote overwhelmingly in favor of Democrat and update their policy stances to reflect that. Instead, they're deciding to draw districts to lump them together so they can disenfranchise them and make their vote worth less. So you're right there are racial implications, and it's certainly on the side of the GOP.

mirimir 7y ago

There's something odd about that URL. It takes me to 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 https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org... Edit: And there's nothing at https://choice.npr.org/ https://choice.npr.org/ itself. This is from a German IP address.

wyxuan 7y ago
GDPR compliance. If you used US you wouldn't get that interstitial.
- mirimir 7y ago
  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.

leoc 7y ago

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-deutsche-bank-trump-whistle-blower.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/business/val-broeksmit-de... .

mirimir 7y ago
That is a very strange article.
- leoc 7y ago
  No denying that.
- jacobytev 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

fzeroracer 7y ago

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.