Via the Daily Dot. Somebody's gonna get fired! This is some gape-worthy lack of judgement, but I'd be surprised if it has any lasting impact. The Bush camp will spin it as an unauthorized mistake -- albeit a really careless and stupid one that has compromised the privacy of so many Florida citizens:
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush hasn’t even yet formally declared his desire to run for president in 2016, but he’s already started what appears to be a major privacy blunder.
His new project, the Jeb Emails, a massive, open database of correspondence to and from his jeb@jeb.org email address, publishes the names, messages, and email addresses of his constituents who emailed him during his eight years in office.
“I emailed Governor Bush when the state was going through the initial insurance crisis,” one woman, whose AOL email address was among those in the database, told the Daily Dot. “I have never [given authorization] to publish the emails, but then [they] never said they were confidential or proprietary property of the Governor's office. They were just emails.”
"I am fine with it on the emails concerning homeowners insurance," the woman added. Ones about "illegal immigrants," however, embarrassed her. "My feelings have changed on that subject and I wold hate to unduly upset anyone," she said.
It’s difficult to estimate how many different personal email addresses are in the database, and many come from Floridians’ work accounts. But the number is easily in the thousands and more likely in the tens of thousands. The governor’s office didn’t respond to an emailed inquiry about what information, if any, they did choose to redact, though it appears as though phone numbers have been obscured.
