Civil Disturbance Portland, Oregon - Antifa vs Patriot Prayer - August 4, 2018

Several opposing political groups, including "Patriot Prayer" and "Antifa", faced off in a protest at Tom McCall Waterfront Park Saturday, August 4, 2018. Portland police declared the Patriot Prayer / Antifa protest a civil disturbance and used force, including "flash bang" devices to disburse hundreds of right-wing and self-described anti-fascist protesters. There were arrests and some injuries, but it wasn't immediately clear how many.

The rally organized by Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson was the third to roil Portland this summer. Two previous events ended in bloody fistfights and riots, and one counter-protester was sent to the hospital with a skull fracture.

The counter-protesters were made up of a coalition of labor unions, immigrant rights advocates, democratic socialists and other groups. They included people dressed as clowns and a brass band blaring music.

Dueling protests a month ago ended with Portland police declaring a riot and arresting four people. A similar Patriot Prayer event on June 4 devolved into fistfights and assaults by both sides as police struggled to keep the groups apart.  (ABC News 7, August 4, 2018)

A video showing some of this activity was posted to Vimeo

Christopher Mathias. National Reporter for the Huffington Post has additional coverage on his Twitter feed. 

Wiretap Report 2017

The Wiretap Report for 2017 is available on the US Courts web-site. Of interest in this year's report is that: The number of federal and state wiretaps reported in 2017 increased 20 percent from 2016. A total of 3,813 wiretaps were reported as authorized in 2017, with 2,013 authorized by federal judges and 1,800 authorized by state judges. Compared to the applications approved during 2016, the number approved by federal judges increased 30 percent in 2017, and the number approved by state judges increased 11 percent. No wiretap applications were reported as denied in 2017.

Applications concentrated in six states (California, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Florida) accounted for 81 percent of all state wiretap applications. Applications in California alone constituted 34 percent of all applications approved by state judges.

The most common method of surveillance reported was wire surveillance that used a telephone (land line, cellular, cordless, or mobile). Telephone wiretaps accounted for 92 percent (2,218 cases) of the intercepts installed in 2017, the majority of them involving cellular telephones.

Encryption

The number of state wiretaps reported in which encryption was encountered increased from 57 in 2016 to 102 in 2017.  In 97 of these wiretaps, officials were unable to decipher the plain text of the messages. A total of 57 federal wiretaps were reported as being encrypted in 2017, of which 37 could not be decrypted. Encryption was also reported for 32 federal and 9 state wiretaps that were conducted during a previous year, but reported to the AO for the first time in 2017. Officials were not able to decipher the plain text of the communications in 8 of the state intercepts or 29 of the federal of intercepts.
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Of the 3813 wiretaps authorized in 2017, encryption was encountered in only 4% of the cases. In those cases where encryption was used, it was effective in protecting the content of the communication 95% of the time in state cases and 65% of the time in Federal cases. Properly implemented encryption works, but in the vast majority of cases (96%) it is not being used by the subjects of wiretap orders. (This is probably a good thing since most wiretaps target drug dealers.)

I previously discussed Wiretap Reports in early December 2017.

Google Purchases

Is Google tracking your purchases?  While logged in to your Google account go to https://myaccount.google.com/purchases and see if Google has made a record of your on-line purchases.
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ICE Agents Accuse Portland, Oregon Mayor of Abetting 'Abolish ICE' Protesters

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Monday accused Portland, Oregon mayor Ted Wheeler, of violating the Constitution after emboldening “Abolish ICE” protesters by ordering the police to stand down and openly expressing support for their cause.

The accusations were outlined in a cease-and-desist letter sent to Mayor Wheeler, saying he actively encouraged the protesters and their cause, while making sure Portland’s police wouldn’t crack down on them, thus creating “a zone of terror and lawlessness.”

Portland is among the main centers of the nationwide movement to abolish the federal immigration authority, an idea that is increasingly being embraced by top mainstream Democrats in Congress, including U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The city mayor’s support for the movement led to the occupation of a building being used by ICE, harassment of some ICE employees, and the creation of a camp on a city’s land. - The mayor stated publicly that he supported the protests. “To all demonstrators: I urge you to keep up this effort,” Wheeler said in a press conference last week, according to The Oregonian, though advising protesters to vacate the ICE field office and the camp before the police disbands them.  

ICE officers alleged that some agency employees were denied assistance from the police to deal with protesters, including a disabled Marine veteran who was allegedly confronted by an activist as he was picking up his daughter from a camp.

The veteran was interning at the ICE office on the first day of the demonstrations against the agency. After the demonstrators surrounded the ICE field office, he managed to escape but his car was scratched and tires slashed. He was later allegedly followed by the activists, yet his calls for help were reportedly ignored by the police, who told him that they are staying out of the situation.  (Fox news, July 31, 2018)
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Political activists and anti-government protestors in the Pacific Northwest are often very public and very direct with their actions. While these protests are often peaceful, and political activity is generally protected by the First Amendment, there are those who can and do you threats, violence, and intimidation to make a statement.

Police have no duty under the law to protect individuals citizens, but Mayor Wheeler cannot dictate who the police will and will not respond to based on his own political beliefs.

Colorado Police Shoot 73-year-old Veteran

According to Stars & Stripes (August 2, 2018) 73-year-old Richard Black, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, shot an intruded in his home in order to protect his grandson. Upon arrival of police responding to a 911 call, the responding officers shot and killed Mr. Black when he stepped onto his front porch still holding the firearm he had used to defend his grandson.

A responding officer fired four rounds, killing Mr. Black.

Aurora Police Chief Nick Metz said in the department's first detailed account of the shooting he did not hear the uniformed officers identify themselves as police in body camera video. He acknowledged that Black, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had a "significant hearing impairment" from his military service that may have made it hard for him to hear the orders to drop his gun.

26-year-old Dajon Harper, the intruder that had broken into the Black's home had been released from prison in February after serving time for weapons and menacing charges.  In one of several 911 recordings released Thursday night, a woman who identified herself as Harper's mother told the dispatcher that her son was on drugs but was unarmed. "He's literally kicked in some people across the street door. ... He's on some type of drug or something," she said frantically. "He's running through the neighborhood busting cars, busting in people's doors while they sleep. I don't know what he's on. He's bleeding." The woman later said Harper is "hurting this little baby. He kicked in their door." 

The police chief said Black acted heroically to protect his family but also defended the actions of his officers, including the one who killed Black, a fellow military veteran who was involved in another fatal police shooting just over a month ago.
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Police have a difficult and at times dangerous job. Even if found to be justified, the death of Mr. Black is tragic - shot by police while defending the life of his grandson from a drug fueled violent attacker.

But also of concern is the fact that the police officer who killed Mr. Black had been involved in another fatal shooting just a month earlier. Can we really expect a police officer who has recently been involved in a fatal shooting to return to work after taking a few days off and be stable in the next potentially violent or deadly situation they face?

 

Free Maria Butina

For more than 200 years, Russia and the United States have shared a multi-faceted diplomatic relationship, at one point even sharing a land border when Russia had a settlement at Fort Ross, California. Over this period, the two countries have competed for political and economic influence, and cooperated to meet mutual global challenges.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War, the U.S.-Russian relationship took on a new dimension, and contacts between our citizens expanded rapidly in number and diversity. Russians and Americans work together on a daily basis, both bilaterally and multilaterally, in a wide range of areas, including combating the threats of terrorism, nuclear arms proliferation, HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, and other global challenges. Not surprisingly, there remain issues on which our two governments do not agree, but advocating for stronger relations between the two countries should not, and cannot be a crime.

By now, the exploits of Maria Butina, an alleged Russian agent, are everywhere: according to the charges filed against her by the Justice Department, the 29-year-old used a combination of effervescent charm and gun-rights activism to work her way through the conservative movement, eventually growing close to the leadership of the National Rifle Association. This, federal prosecutors allege, was part of a Kremlin plot to infiltrate the right—and, by extension, the highest levels of government—and build back channels between high-ranking conservatives and Russian officials. (According to several associates from her graduate program at American University, she wasn’t very good at—or concerned with—hiding her intentions.)

So this leaves us with the question, are the Russian intelligence services so bad at what they do as to have a "spy" openly and publically advocate for improved U.S.-Russian relations, or is this the case of a Russian graduate student (at American University) expressing a political opinion and being jailed as a spy?
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Encrypted E-mail

If you communicate via e-mail then your e-mail should be end-to-end encrypted. For web-based e-mail I recommend using either ProtonMail or Tutanota. Both of these providers offer excellent security for your e-mail. There are however other e-mail services that also provide encryption and are focused on security. A July 2018 article on MachTechEasier, The 11 Most Secure Email Services for Better Privacy, discusses some of these privacy focused e-mail services.

With a small group of close friends and family, try to get everyone using the same e-mail provider (i.e. everyone sets up a ProtonMail account). In this way all communication within the group stays on the same network of encrypted servers, providing you enhanced security for your e-mail.

If however you send and receive e-mail between different e-mail services (i.e. ProtonMail and Gmail) the e-mail messages are not automatically encrypted. Encrypted e-mail across domains on a large scale is difficult. On a smaller scale, using Open PGP or S/MIME certificates can be of use.

To set up PGP in your web-mail, install Mailvelope in your browser. If you would like an e-mail encryption certificate, you can get one for free from Comodo. Both of these options work well, but all parties to an e-mail communication must use them for encryption to work.

TED Talks - Ideas worth spreading
Think Your E-mail IS Private? Think Again!

Sending an email message is like sending a postcard, says scientist Andy Yen [one of the founders of ProtonMail] in this thought-provoking talk: Anyone can read it. Yet encryption, the technology that protects the privacy of email communication, does exist. It's just that until now it has been difficult to install and a hassle to use. Showing a demo of an email program he designed with colleagues at CERN, Yen argues that encryption can be made simple to the point of becoming the default option, providing true email privacy to all.

 

 

Free Speech Concerns in Bellevue Political Sign Controversy

Controversy erupted over political messages being held up during a city council meeting. At issue was how city leaders responded, and whether it amounted to a free-speech crackdown.

Most of the political signs were size of a sheet of paper. When it came down to a controversial final vote, the mayor ordered the signs be put away. That request seemed unfair to many people in the audience.

The people holding signs weren't disrupting the meeting, so it is real troublesome for elected officials to be limiting their freedom of speech. According to legal experts on signs and free speech, the bottom line is that ground rules for public comment must be set ahead of time. Signs can't be singled out based on the message. That is known as "content discrimination," which the courts have ruled as unconstitutional. (KOMO4 News, July 18, 2018)
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Freedom of speech is not absolute. You shouldn't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, unless of course there is a fire. But, when government at any level attempts to limit political speech - the expression of a political idea, or disagreement with a government action or policy - that is always a concern and a violation of the rights of the speaker (or sign holder).

Police Misconduct - Motorcyclist Sues King County, WA Sheriff

According to King 5 News (August 1, 2018) the motorcyclist who had a gun pulled on him by a King County deputy is suing the Sheriff's Office

Detective Richard Rowe, who was in plainclothes and driving an unmarked car, pulled over Alex Randall in August 2017. On footage of the incident, Rowe is seen walking up to Randall with a gun pulled close to his chest pointed at Randall.

The suit claims Rowe did not properly identify himself. The suit alleges Rowe used excessive force, and King County’s training policies did not adequately train their officers to handle these daily occurrences.

"The Sheriff’s office clearly demonstrated that they feel no need to hold Deputy Rowe accountable for his actions, that violated Sheriff's office policies as well as my 4th Amendment rights," Randall said in a written statement.

"That’s why I’m following through on this lawsuit, it’s my only recourse to try to [elicit] any change to the King County Sheriffs Department, and in doing so protecting myself and other King County residents from dangerously unstable officers," he said.

Randall is asking for punitive damages and for a correction to King County’s policies that violate state law.

Rowe was placed on administrative leave after the video surfaced in August, and he was suspended in April for five days without pay.
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In an August 2017 video by KIRO 7 News the King County Sheriff stated that he was going to use the video of this traffic stop to train recruits in what not to do.

Motorcyclist Alex Randall stated that if he had not had the camera on his helmet that there would have been no evidence of this police misconduct. How many others in King County have been the victims of this kind of misconduct with no evidence to back them up and no recourse to resolve the matter after the fact.

The King 5 News video Police Misconduct: King County Sheriff's Department 8/16/17 is also available on YouTube.

 

 

Memphis Police Collect Private Facebook Posts of BLM Activists

According to documents newly released by the City of Memphis in response to an ACLU of Tennessee lawsuit police appear to have used a fake Facebook account to friend activists and archive who “liked” their posts.

The documents include a PowerPoint presentation on Black Lives Matter activists who had gathered at a bridge and at an Elvis Presley vigil to protest the police shooting of Memphis teenager Darrius Stewart. In a court deposition stemming from the ACLU’s lawsuit, the police officer who created the PowerPoint presentation admitted to tracking activists’ associations, including their spouses in one case, and the political groups they were involved in, including labor and Palestinian solidarity groups.

Police appear to have used a fake Facebook profile, “Bob Smith,” to befriend and gather information from activists, according to the deposition transcript. During the deposition, when an ACLU attorney asked an officer whether he had other accounts that he used beyond his personal account to track social media posts, his counsel insisted he not answer because that would get “into the details potentially of the Bob Smith account.”

Through such methods, it appears police were able not only to collect public social media posts, but also private ones. According to the deposition transcript, Memphis police obtained a nonpublic Facebook post of an activist who had recommended a Saul Alinsky book. The police then not only collected information on that nonpublic post but the names of 58 friends who “liked” the post.

Memphis police spying on activists has sparked controversy over the last two years. Several activists named in the social media posts have accused police of surveilling their homes and workplaces. Local media also reported on how authorities created a “watch list” of activists.  (The Appeal, July 27, 2018)

Gun Rights Activists Defy Court Ruling, Post 3D-Printed Gun Blueprints Online

According to Yahoo News (August 1, 2018) Gun rights activist groups found a way around the temporary order issued by a Federal judge in Seattle, halting the publishing of 3D-printed gun blueprints. They simply published another set of blueprints on a new website, - http://codeisfreespeech.com/ - which they say is activity protected under the First Amendment, and not  covered by the judge's order.

The site features downloadable blueprints for a variety of firearms, including the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the AR-10 battle rifle as well as the Liberator, a single-shot handgun.

It went live the same day that U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik blocked a settlement that President Donald Trump’s administration had reached with digital firearms nonprofit Defense Distributed, which had been granted permission to re-launch its website on Wednesday with blueprints.

http://codeisfreespeech.com/

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These plans have been on-line for the past couple of years anyway. Posting the plans to http://codeisfreespeech.com/ is more of a political statement, standing up against abuse of our 1st Amendment and 2nd Amendment rights, than it is a way to get previously unavailable material published.  Still if you did not have these plans before, you can get them now.

Man Grows Marijuana. Admits It in Court. Jury Sends Him Home.

WSBTV 2 News and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (July 27, 2018) reported that Javonnie McCoy was growing marijuana when the cops came to his Middle Georgia home. He was caught red-handed with it. Almost a pound of it, in fact. He admitted it to police, and later he looked jurors in the eye and said, yep, it was mine. I used it as medicine.

The jurors let him go. He was minding his own business and wasn’t hurting anybody, they reasoned. He just doesn’t belong in prison.

The jury’s decision earlier this month in Dublin, Ga., may have been due to a muddled prosecution of a muddy case. Or it may have been jury nullification, another case of citizens saying prosecutions for pot are not worth law enforcement’s time and effort — or the impact on otherwise law-abiding people’s lives.

It was the second such win in the Laurens County circuit for Atlanta attorney Catherine Bernard, a conservative Republican who’s also a staunch civil libertarian. Late last year, another client of hers ‘fessed up to a jury that he had sold a couple of nickel bags to an insistent undercover drug cop. That client was cut loose after just 18 minutes of deliberation.

And this is no liberal soft-on-crime region. Donald Trump won the county 2-1.
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Did you know that, no matter the evidence, if a jury feels a law is unjust, it is permitted to “nullify” the law rather than finding someone guilty? Basically, jury nullification is a jury’s way of saying, “By the letter of the law, the defendant is guilty, but we also disagree with that law, so we vote to not punish the accused.” Ultimately, the verdict serves as an acquittal.

Haven’t heard of jury nullification? Don’t feel bad; you’re far from alone. If anything, your unfamiliarity is by design. Generally, defense lawyers are not allowed to even mention jury nullification as a possibility during a trial because judges prefer juries to follow the general protocols rather than delivering independent verdicts.

Jury nullification is legal according to the U.S. Supreme Court, but whether or not juries need to be instructed on this right is a different matter. The Supreme Court has ruled that while the power of jury nullification exists, state courts and prosecutors are not required to inform jurors of this power. Accordingly, judges around the country have routinely forbidden any mention of jury nullification in the courtroom.


The True Duty of a Jury

 

 

Workplace Harassment and Discrimination Chatbot

Have you been harassed or discriminated against in the workplace? Have you been unable to receive support or assistance from supervisors and agency directors to make this stop? Do you need to talk with someone, but find that no one is there for you? Do you need to document misconduct in your workplace?

Spot (https://talktospot.com/) is a simplistic online chatbot to report workplace harassment and discrimination without talking to a human. Spot asks a series of questions about the user's experience and incorporates those responses into a report.

There are 3 main steps to record and report your experience with Spot.

• Interview with Spot. Spot asks a series of questions about what you remember. You can answer or skip any question. The chat takes as little as 10 minutes or as long as you need.
• View the confidential record of your interview. Email yourself a time-stamped PDF version of the record and keep it safe. It can be used as high-quality evidence if you need it.
• Optional reporting. Create an optional report to send to your organization. Delete the parts of your interview that you don’t want to share. Spot sends reports from our email server, so you can choose to stay anonymous.

Is Spot the same a talking with a trained human psychologist? No, and it's not intended to replace mental health counseling and treatment. However, psychologists are broadly positive about the technology. Its cognitive interview questioning style aims to produce the best account of the situation. This documents the harassment and discrimination and lets you work through and record the details of the event(s).     (Circa, August 1, 2018)
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Last week I wrote: Raising PTSD and Workplace Mental Health Consequence Awareness - Agency misconduct has devastating effects on the targeted individual. Not only does one feel that their job is in jeopardy, they may also start to feel physically ill and emotionally harmed. This can create liabilities for the agency / employer, including:

    Occupational health and safety violations;
    Actions for negligence or intentional infliction of mental suffering; or
    Actions for defamation per se.

More importantly however a hostile workplace and agency misconduct results in direct harm to the targeted employee and general harm to the morale of the agency itself. Whether an employee is suffering mental health consequences as a result of a specific traumatic event, or as a result of a long-term problem within the agency, supervisors must ensure that resources are made available to these injured employees - and made available without recrimination or negative affect on the employee for seeking help.

The Spot Chatbot can help you document events in your workplace. Spot is currently free to use.

Investigative Reporting Course

This intensive course will help you take advantage of Internet sources such as court cases, public data and news archives. It is designed to improve the efficiency and efficacy of your in-depth research.

Tools used: Google Search, Google Scholar, Google Public Data Explorer, Google Maps, Google Earth Pro

9 Lessons - 92 Minutes
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You don't have to be a reporter to benefit from this course. If you are interested in improving your on-line research skills, this is just one of the courses at the Google News Initiative Training Center that will benefit you.

 

More than 450 People in Florida Ordered to Give Up Guns Under New Law

Hundreds of gun owners in Florida have been ordered to give up their guns under a new law. The Risk Protection Order, signed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, aims to temporarily remove weapons from gun owners who have been deemed by a judge to possibly be a threat to themselves or others.

Since the law took effect in mid-March we've learned the number of risk protection cases filed in Florida now total 467, as of July 24th  and according to the FL Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (DOACS).  DOACS oversees gun permit licensing in Florida and is notified when a petition is filed.  An agency spokesperson revealed just over a quarter of risk protection cases filed so far involve concealed license firearm holders whose license temporarily is suspended once the order is granted.

Attorney Kendra Parris is critical of the new law saying the "it violates the Constitution". She believes after four-and-a-half months, Florida’s version of the ‘red flag' law as its also known is starting to reveal some disturbing grey areas, specifically among individuals who don't have histories of violence or mental illness. These are individuals who are often exercising their First Amendment rights online. They used Constitutionally protected speech on-line and they were hit with the risk protection order because of it. (ABC News, July 30, 2018)
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It is worth noting that when individual's who've had their firearms seized by the state hire attorneys and fight back in courts they are winning their cases and having their firearms returned.

If a person if adjudicated, by a licensed mental health professional (psychiatrist) to have mental health concerns that make him / her a threat to self or others, then perhaps this should be taken before a judge for review allowing firearms to be seized to help ensure the safety of the person with the mental health concerns. But as the red flag laws are now written, individuals with no mental health training are ordering the violation of individuals' Constitutional rights because they might pose a threat, maybe in six months or a year; or perhaps because some government employee didn't like the comments made by these individuals on social media.

 

   

Federal Judge Blocks Release of Information on 3D Printed Guns

On July 12, 2018 I wrote that the Government Will Allow Defense Distributed to Distribute Gun-Making Software.  That has now changed...

A federal judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order late Tuesday (July 31, 2018) to stop the release of downloadable blueprints and instructions on how to build an untraceable and undetectable plastic firearm using a 3D-printer. (ABC News, July 31, 2018)
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Building a firearm at home is not difficult. There are a number of web-sites and videos that show anyone with basic skills how to do so.

WORLD'S SIMPLEST HANDGUN?

https://www.full30.com/video/24c60f11a6a7df2a5b9d158280d7965b

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyp9YPlaoow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk3VuDiKwH8


You can even buy a kit to assemble a DIY Survival 410 Shotgun from pieces of pipe.

The blocking of the release of the 3D firearm instructions seems to be little more than political maneuvering and rants about President Trump. The government should never be able to censor information from being available to the American people.

Your City is Watching You

RTE Ireland's National TV and Radio Broadcaster (July 10, 2018) published an interesting article: "Your city is watching you", asking the question " if you are a law abiding citizen, should the amount of surveillance you encounter on a daily basis be a matter of concern?" 

With all its digital surveillance apparatus, the contemporary city constitutes a reverse format of the Panopticon, the penitentiary model conceptualized by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. This consisted of a circular building with prison cells surrounding a tower in the middle where a single watchman had direct visual contact with all the cells. As inmates couldn’t tell which way the watchman was looking, they had to assume that they were being watched at all times, which in turn regulated their behavior.

Nowadays, we are all standing in the tower in the middle and subject to the surveillance of a network multiple cameras, audio monitoring systems and several types of sensors. Although we are so used to it that we take it for granted and it doesn’t necessarily impact on our behavior in public space, we know for certain that we are being watched. However, what we don’t know is how all this personal information about us which is harvested in public space is processed, where it is kept and for what reasons it is being processed.

But should we be concerned?
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Scalable Anonymous Disposable Desktops (SADD.IO)

SADD.IO (Scalable Anonymous Disposable Desktops) is a free web-based product that allows users to anonymously control self-destructing, Tor routed desktops through their web browser.

Created for Ethical Hackers, Cyber-security Experts, and Privacy Enthusiasts, SADD.IO allows users to anonymously control self-disposing desktops through their web browser. We route all internet traffic through the Tor network and destroy our desktops forensically to ensure true Internet Anonymity and Privacy.

Users do not have to enter any personal information about themselves to use this service. Nor do users have to download any external programs. SADD.IO is accessible from your phone, laptop, iPad, you name it.

A 2-minute YouTube video introduces SAAD.IO here.

I have tried SAAD.IO and I do like it. I should note however that the connections are slow, but they do work and provide you with an anonymous TOR connection to the Internet through any connected device.
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Canada Is Using Ancestry DNA Websites to Deport People

According to Vice News (July 26, 2018) the Canada Border Services Agency has been collecting their DNA and using ancestry websites to find and contact their distant relatives and establish their nationality. Individuals using these sites to look at their family tree should be aware that their confidential information is being made available to the government and that border agents may contact them to help facilitate the deportation of migrants.
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LifeLock ID Theft Protection Leak Could Have Aided Identity Thieves

LifeLock's identity theft protection service suffered from a security flaw that put users' identities in jeopardy. The event forced its parent company, Symantec, to pull its website down to fix the issue after it was notified by KrebsOnSecurity. According to Krebs, an Atlanta-based security researcher discovered the vulnerability through a newsletter email he received from the service. Upon clicking "unsubscribe," a page that clearly showed his subscriber key popped up. That allowed the researcher to write a script that sequences numbers, which was able to pull keys and their corresponding email addresses from the service.
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Data Is a Fingerprint: Why You Aren't as Anonymous as You Think Online

A July 13, 2018 article in The Guardian: "Data is a fingerprint: why you aren't as anonymous as you think online" showed why even "So-called ‘anonymous’ data can be easily used to identify everything from our medical records to purchase histories". 

In August 2016, the Australian government released an “anonymized” data set comprising the medical billing records, including every prescription and surgery, of 2.9 million people.

Names and other identifying features were removed from the records in an effort to protect individuals’ privacy, but a research team from the University of Melbourne soon discovered that it was simple to re-identify people, and learn about their entire medical history without their consent, by comparing the dataset to other publicly available information, such as reports of celebrities having babies or athletes having surgeries.

The government pulled the data from its website, but not before it had been downloaded 1,500 times.

This privacy nightmare is one of many examples of seemingly innocuous, “de-identified” pieces of information being reverse-engineered to expose people’s identities. And it’s only getting worse as people spend more of their lives online, sprinkling digital breadcrumbs that can be traced back to them to violate their privacy in ways they never expected.
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Data sets about people are seldom truly anonymous because we each do things that are uniquely identifiable within the data set, especially when combined with information obtained from additional / external data sources.