![\"McCain's](\"\/images\/mccainblackberry.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Very rarely does the public pay attention to what happens to the campaign of a presidential candidate who loses an election. The campaign must of course wind down its operations, dispose of any equipment it can no longer use, settle any debts, and the like. And while it seems commonplace to most of us, it’s only been this past election where mobile technology has really been a huge factor.<\/p>\n
Well, much like Sarah Palin’s clothes<\/a>, All those cell phones, computers and BlackBerries purchased by the McCain Campaign have been relegated to the disposal bin, to be sold off to any willing buyers looking for a deal on some slightly-used gadgets. To the end, this past week McCain’s campaign headquarters in Arlington, VA, held a sale, where all of their election assets – from office furniture to knick-knacks to BlackBerries – could be had for cheap. But how<\/strong> they handled this technological yard sale makes me hope that they cleaned Palin’s dresses, because they sure didn’t wipe their smartphones<\/a>. <\/p>\n \nWe saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.” We couldn\u2019t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.<\/p>\n The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.<\/p>\n And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.<\/p>\n When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night. <\/p>\n We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider\u2019s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Gee, aren’t you<\/strong> glad you’re not a VIP in the former McCain campaign?<\/p>\n It’s really not that hard to wipe the memory off a BlackBerry. In fact there’s several well-known ways to do it<\/a>. You’d think that the campaign who claimed their candidate helped created the BlackBerry<\/a> would know better than to sell one armed to the teeth with sensitive info.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Very rarely does the public pay attention to what happens to the campaign of a presidential candidate who loses an election. The campaign must of course wind down its operations, dispose of any equipment it can no longer use, settle any debts, and the like. And while it seems commonplace to most of us, it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets-widgits-and-whatzits","category-sociopolitical-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}