The suspicion Vance Boelter, 57, is accused of having shot the representative of Minnesota Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, at their home on Saturday. The couple died from their injuries. The authorities say that the suspicion also shot the state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman in their home before that night. The couple is currently recovering and are “incredibly lucky to be alive”, According to a declaration of their family.
According to a sworn declaration of the FBI, the police searched the SUV that is believed to be the suspect and found notebooks that included handwritten lists of “over 45 state and federal public officials of Minnesota, including the representative Hortman’s, whose home address was written next to its name”. According to the same sworn declaration, a notebook also listed 11 mainstream research platforms to find people’s home addresses and other personal information, such as telephone numbers and relatives.
The addresses for both legislators targeted on Saturday were promptly available. The website of the Hortman representative’s campaign listed his home address, while Senator Hoffman appeared on his legislative web page, The New York Times reports.
“Boelter persecuted his victims as Prey,” said the American lawyer Joseph Thompson during a press conference on Monday. “He studied his victims and their families. He used the Internet and other tools to find their addresses and names, the names of their family members.” Thompson also said that suspicion has monitored the houses of the victims.
The suspicion has to face different second -degree murder accusations.
Privacy and public security supporters have long claimed that the United States should adjust data brokers to ensure that people have better control over sensitive information available on them. The United States do not have global data privacy legislation and efforts to regulate data brokers within federal agencies have largely canceled.
“The accused Minneapolis Assassin would have used data brokers as a fundamental part of his plot to trace and kill democratic legislators,” says Ron Wyden, American senator of Oregon a Wired. “The congress does not need further evidence of the fact that people are killed according to the data on sale to anyone who has a credit card. Each single American is at risk until the congress breaks down on this squalid sector.”
In many cases, basic information such as domestic addresses can be found through public registers, including the registration data of the voters (which are public in some states) and the data on political donations, says Gary Warner, a long -standing digital scams researcher and director of the intelligence at the DarkTower computer security company. Everything that is not promptly available through public records is almost always easy to find using popular “search for people” services.
“Finding a home address, especially if someone has lived in the same place for many years it is trivial,” says Warner. He adds that for “young people, not owners of houses and less politicians, there are other favorite sites” to find personal information.
For many in the general public and in politics, the violent madness of Saturday leads new urgency to the longtime question on how to protect sensitive personal data online.
“These are not the first murders that were favored by the data broker industry. But most of the previous objectives have been relatively unknown victims of stalking and abuse,” says Evan Greer, deputy director of the struggle of the digital rights group for the future. “Legislators must act before having more blood on their hands.”
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