Elections NB doubts voter data targeted by laptop thief

The province's chief electoral officer doesn't think a thief was after voter data when he stole two Elections New Brunswick laptops Friday night.

Although one of the laptops did contain "sensitive" personal information about every eligible voter in the province, the computers were stolen from an office down the hall from Elections New Brunswick, said Michael Quinn.

No thief would know what was in that King Street office, he said.

"The office that the computers were stolen in is not identified as Elections New Brunswick at all. It's a different sign on it, a different government office."

This is the second potential privacy breach for the agency in the past few weeks.

A staff member at Elections New Brunswick accidentally distributed computer discs containing the same personal voter information that has now been stolen, including phone numbers, dates of birth and driver’s licence numbers.

A total of 57 CDs containing the data were sent to Members of the Legislative Assembly and to the Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties.

The province's privacy commissioner has said such personal information is valuable to fraudsters for identity theft.

There are 553,000 people on the voters list.

Still, Quinn is confident the "sensitive" data on the stolen computer is secure.

"This computer was password protected, the data was encoded, and it is linked to a Government of New Brunswick domain account, which requires a specific sign-in to access, all in keeping with current government policies for information security."

The second laptop did not contain any voter data, Quinn said.

Meanwhile, a third provincial government laptop was stolen from Invest NB's office in the HSBC building across the street around the same time, officials say.

No data was on the computer itself, making any security issues "non-existent," said vice-president Louis-Philippe Gauthier.

The two Elections NB laptops were being used by Bell Canada employees to create a new software application for the agency, said Quinn.

Unlike computers in the Elections New Brunswick office, they were not locked down, he said.

"The contractors relied on the fact that they were in a secure building and they were in a locked door that was locked every night."

Locks to that office, as well as the main Elections New Brunswick office, were broken, said Quinn. But locks on the doors into the building were not, he said.

The privacy commissioner, Speaker of the legislative assembly and Office of the Premier have been advised on the break-in, Quinn said.

The Fredericton Police Force is investigating.

Cpl. Rick Mooney said it's possible the thief was looking for personal information from the voters list.

"Certainly the question becomes what's the motive here? Is it in relation to information that's on the computer, or is it someone who's looking for a quick sale of a laptop computer, which does happen quite frequently here in the city.

"Again, these are questions we have as we move forward with the investigation," he said.

A male suspect was captured on video surveillance, said Mooney.

Premier David Alward says he wasn't aware of the break-in because he was out of the area until late Monday night, but he said he's going to look into the situation.

"Certainly any time there is a potential release of personal information, it's something that should concern all of us," he said.

Asked about the previous breach involving the CDs, the premier said: "The government and various parties moved very quickly to ensure that people's information was protected and that is something that government has to take very seriously and we do take it seriously," said Alward.

"And we'll continue to work to ensure that people can have full confidence that their private information is protected."

On Monday, Anne Bertrand, the province's privacy commissioner, said she felt the privacy breach did not lead to any sensitive information being made public.

All of the CDs have been retrieved, along with affidavits that any copies that were made have been destroyed, she said.

Elections New Brunswick officials said new procedures have been put in place to prevent any similar breach involving voter data.