[amsat-bb] AMSAT Member Mailing list

[Michelle Thompson]

Yes, I can.

That part of Clayton's letter is wrong and has been repeatedly clarified
before. Including at the 2019 annual board meeting, where Tom Clark asked
me about it, as part of the record.

Clayton Coleman was secretary in 2019.

He ran the election.

He decided that candidate statements were limited in length to 350 words,
would be subject to editorial control by AMSAT, and could not include
links. These new rules were given to us right before the 4th of July
holiday with a deadline of the 7th.

This is different than any election before, where statements went directly
to the printer from the candidate, were not limited in length, and no one
from AMSAT leadership (who might be running for reelection themselves) had
any control over the content of their challengers' statements.

We got these rules right before ballots went out. We (four challengers)
already had normal-sized statements on the web and they had been up six
weeks at that point. Those were the ones we wanted to use, and link to.

We knew that as candidates, we had the right to request the mailing list,
and send our own statements, independent of the ballot.

I requested the address list and got the DBASE4 export.

Bruce Perens had already written a letter of support and distributed it
widely on the web. It introduced us and included our four full bios and
statements.

I asked Bruce if we could use his letter in the mailing. He said yes. Since
he was President of Open Research Institute at the time, he wanted the
return address to not be his private home address, but a business address.
That was ORI's address. He was the author of the endorsement, so I used his
preferred return address.

I converted the DBASE4 to a more useful format, fixed the 50 or so
undeliverable addresses, and found an inexpensive printer. Then I sent the
letter from Bruce to the printer, with the bios and statements.

That turned out to be a good thing. Bios and statements were not included
with the ballots mailed out, at all.

If we had not sent the letter, then name recognition would be the primary
factor. We were running against well-known people.

We complained about this. It was unusual departure from the past and seemed
set up to let leadership benefit from being incumbents.

The original proposal from Clayton was for an electronic only ballot.
Patrick said that the bylaws were a bit clunky here and it did need to be
mailed out on paper. Paper was required.

This is a big reason why I made a motion at our one  board meeting, in
March, for a bylaws committee.

This bylaw isn't hard to fix. There's lots of examples out there of
organizations doing electronic voting with working published bylaws.

Bruce made it very clear, when the incumbents stirred up the pot about the
return address, that it was an endorsement from him, this was commonly done
in political campaigns, and it would be grossly improper for me to use
AMSATs return address because that would make it look like Bruce was
speaking for or was from AMSAT. That was not going to happen. *That* would
be improper.

No one candidate wanted their personal address used as a return address. We
were mailing this as a slate and splitting the cost. We didn't have time or
funds to make an organization or rent a box for one letter on short notice.
The printer required a real return address.

No one had the address list except the candidates. Namely me because I
contracted the printer and handled the DBASE4 address conversion. That is a
neat story in and of itself,, for another time.

Bruce only sent the text to me and chipped in some money for postage.

The printing was automated in Van Nuys, CA.

All of this is known to Clayton Coleman and his friends on the board that
signed the statement from this week. It has been explained by Bruce
publicly, and by me several times on social media. Tom Clark brought it up
at the 2019 annual board meeting because of the return address
pot-stirring. I explained it there too. Like I said, it's on the record.

I think insinuating the addresses were mishandled is a deliberate twisting
of honest efforts to scramble to get uncensored candidate statements out to
voters on short notice. We just didn't have a lot of time, and Bruce was
very generous in writing a cover letter.

Again, candidates are allowed the use of the mailing lists for election
purposes.

So, no, there was no breach. Clayton knows all this.

Saying it the way he did is a cheap shot at me, Patrick, Bruce Perens, and
ORI.

 -Michelle W5NYV

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 19:11 Kevin via AMSAT-BB <amsat-bb at amsat.org> wrote:

>   Hello All,
>
>    In a previous email to the BB I posted the link to the letter we all
> received as members.
>
>
> https://www.amsat.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20200710_AMSAT_Leadership_Explains_Legal_Expenses.pdf
>
> I was re-reading it and something caught my eye that I had missed before.
>
> "AMSAT did not provide a copy of its membership mailing addresses to
> Open Research Institute."
>
>     Just how was our mailing list compromised? This seems like a serious
> breech of security, was this a hack? was any other information lost?
> was it ever found out how it happened? is our mailing list as they say
> "out in the wind"?
>
> Michelle could you possibly check from the ORI side and backtrack how
> ORI came into possession of the AMSAT mailing list, was it something
> that was procured online?
>
> AMSAT needs to follow up on this privacy issue and report back what it
> found and any steps that were taken to prevent this from happening in
> the future.
>
>
> I look forward to an answer
>
> 73 Kevin WA7FWF #19623
>
>
>
>
>
>
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