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Personal Statement from Frank Gormlie on Having His Email Hacked

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AnnieLane - Politifest2012 044

OB Rag dude and SDFP Editorial Board member Frank Gormlie.

Some of OB Rag Email Contacts Stolen – As He Calls for His Former Contacts to Email Him

By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag

Yes, it is true, and at first, I sort of laughed it off, as I went ahead and changed my password to the email account that was hacked on Thursday, June 19.

But then I realized all 2300 of my email contacts were gone ! – stolen by the hacker. Hundreds of  those were my OB Rag email accounts. (It was my personal yahoo email account that was hacked – not the OB Rag gmail account.)

This is a real blow – as it’s through emails that I contact OBceans, planning and town council leaders, other activists, other journalists. And now I have none. I have no way of contacting the hundreds of people on my “OB Alert” list for example.

Yes, I’ve contacted Yahoo and they’re working on it and hopefully they’ll be able to re-establish all my contacts.

In the meantime, without painful and time-consuming reconstruction of my contact list through old emails, etc, I don’t have any means to contact people – outside phone calls and one-on-one’s of course – like friends, family members, and associates.

This has all forced me to think about the whole issue of emails. Emails are certainly a two-edged sword. How many times have you angrily or emotionally or unthinkingly sent off an email and then later regretted it. I have.

But also it was via emails that I established this online version of the OB Rag. Back in the early days of this publication, in late 2007 and early 2008, before we were known, I used to send out hundreds of emails to friends and other people I had contacts with. Slowly we were able to build up both our readership and my email contact lists.

Back in 2010, I was laid up on the couch for weeks due to medical problems.  I learned that local San Diego tea parties were organizing a big rally down by the County Administration building.  I felt strongly that progressives had to bear witness to this extreme right-wing gathering – that was to include at least one guy with a gun strapped to this hip – but I was on the couch.

So, I turned to the internet, to my email contact list and for a couple of weeks I kept sending out emails every day until I had commitments from at least one hundred progressives. On the day of the rallies across Harbor Drive from each other and even though it rained we had plenty of folks singing songs and waving signs. It had worked – and I had never done anything like that, as I’ve always relied on leaflets, fliers, phone calls, etc to organize rallies.

And of course, email has a dark side.  The other week I received a google – like email request from a woman I’ve known for years.  Trouble was she died a year ago.  Other friends of hers also received the same exact email request. I hope her family didn’t get any.

Right now, though, the only way I can communicate with everyone is through this OB Rag post.  I ask you – if you were on the following email lists, please help me to re-construct them:

  • If you are a supporter of the OB Rag and were on our support email lists, please send us your name and email to the OB Rag email account: obragblog@gmail.com
  • If you are a friend, associate or acquaintance who has been sharing emails with me, please go ahead and email me at my yahoo account – it’s been fixed.  If you are too squeamish to do that, send it to the OB Rag account – obragblog@gmail.com
  • If you wish to get on an “OB ALERT” email list – a list that is alerted for important community events, issues, rallies, meetings (I don’t mean the Chili Cook-offs), please send me an email via the OB Rag: obragblog@gmail.com

Thanks to those who are helping me to do this.

And I apologize to anyone who received the bogus email message purportedly from me, supposedly stuck in the Ukraine, asking for financial help.  Be aware of these scams – as I certainly am not the first or last to be victimized by these hackers.  We found two sources of being hacked: Pennsylvania and Nigeria.  They were able to hack into my busy email account and redirect my emails to another email account with my name but one that only they could open.

Such is the world of emails.  The good and bad and ugly.

Frank Gormlie

Frank Gormlie

A lawyer and grassroots activist, I was finally convinced by Patty Jones to start the OB Rag, a blog of citizen journalists, after she got tired of listening to my rants about the news. Way back during the Dinosaurs in 1970, I founded the original Ocean Beach People’s Rag - OB’s famous underground newspaper -, and then later during the early Eighties, published The Whole Damn Pie Shop, a progressive alternative to the Reader.

Comments

  1. Frank, it might be a good idea to establish multiple accounts with different services and use them all simultaneously. That way you have multiple address books in case something like this happens again. Or have a separate address book that you keep outside the email accounts.

  2. Mr. Gormlie:
    Any and every thing computerized that has connection to the Internet should be backed-up in a form that has no normalized Internet connectivity.
    For example, I have all my email contacts reproduced on a Word document in a folder that would be very difficult to access from anywhere outside my own computer (nothing is impossible, of course). This could also be stored on a thumb drive. If you are really careful/paranoid, you could also make a hard copy.
    Also, I recommend you set your outbox NOT to “send messages immediately”. This way, you can amend, or even cancel, something before it is sent.
    Sorry for your invasion of privacy.

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