Alleged Minnesota Shooter Used Data Brokers to Find Lawmakers’ Addresses

Vance Boelter, the man accused of having assassinated a democratic representative of the state of Minnesota and shooting a state senator on Sunday, acquired the addresses of his victims and other alleged targets using information collected by online data brokers, According to court documents obtained by Politico.

According to the report, the police found the names of 11 brokers of registered data written in a notebook which was recovered from the Boelter vehicle. He would also have written: “Most real estate files in America are public” in the notebook. It has already been reported that the police had found a list of other state and federal legislators in his truck, as well as their addresses. It now seems that these data brokers – who collect and sell personal information, including addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and possible parents – have probably been used by Boelter to identify the houses of his victims and other potential targets.

“Boelter has tracked his victims as Prey,” American lawyer Joseph Thompson said on a press conference on Monday. “He looked for his victims and their families. He used the Internet and other tools to find their addresses and names, the names of their family members. ” During the conference, Thompson also said that Boelter sprang the houses of his victims and watched them before attacking. Boelter was accused of six counts, including several second -degree murder leaders, by cable.

In response to the revelation that Boelter would have used data brokers to target and, ultimately, murder Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, two American senators pleaded for a renewed effort to regulate companies. “I have been pleading for a long time for the confidentiality of data for everyone, including the residences of the legislators, and I have encountered resistance in the past.

Klobuchar sponsored an amendment to the Act on the authorization of National Defense which would have enabled federal officials to delete their personal information from online databases. This amendment, which did not succeed, would probably not have protected the Hortman family, because it did not include the protections for the legislators at the level of the state. Likewise, he would not have protected abortion suppliers who were also would have mentioned In the list of boetler hit.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon also spoke out against the availability of personal information for sale by data brokers, and he would work on the legislation to remedy it, for politician. “Congress no longer needs proof that people are killed according to the data for sale to anyone with a credit card. Each American security is in danger until the congress rages on this ladle industry,” Wyden said in a statement in Politico.

The apparently assassination of political motivation which allegedly led by Boelter is not the first body of data brokers used to facilitate an attack. In 2020, an attacker presented himself at the home of District Esther Salas judge and opened fire on her son and her husband, killing the son. The alleged killer was also would have Targeting the Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor. In response to the attack, Congress adopted Prohibiting data brokers from reselling personally identifiable information from federal judges. But these protections do not extend to legislators, or to individuals who are also potential victims of harassment, abuse and violence, without the headlines to accompany it or the increase in alarms.