An Anti-Trans Doctor Group Leaked 10,000 Confidential Files

[Nevilledog]

https://www.wired.com/story/american-college-pediatricians-google-drive-leak/

A DOCTORS’ ORGANIZATION at the center of the ongoing legal fight over the abortion drug mifepristone has suffered a significant data breach. A link to an unsecured Google Drive published on the group’s website pointed users last week to a large cache of sensitive documents, including financial and tax records, membership rolls, and email exchanges spanning over a decade. The more than 10,000 documents lay bare the outsize influence of a small conservative organization working to lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender.

The American College of Pediatricians, which has fought to deprive gay couples of their parental rights and encouraged public schools to treat LGBTQ youth as if they were mentally ill, is one of a handful of conservative think tanks leading the charge against abortion in the United States. A federal lawsuit filed by the College and its partners against the US Food and Drug Administration seeks to limit nationwide access to what is now the most common form of abortion. The case is now on a trajectory for the US Supreme Court, which not even a year ago declared abortion the purview of America’s elected state representatives.

The leaked records, first reported by WIRED, offer an unprecedented look at the groups and personnel central to that campaign. They also describe an organization that has benefited greatly by exaggerating its own power, even as it has struggled quietly for two decades to grow in size and gain respect. The records show how the College, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as a hate group, managed to introduce fringe beliefs into the mainstream simply by being, as the founder of Fox News once put it, “the loudest voice in the room.”

The Leak

A WIRED review of the exposed data found that the unsecured Google Drive stored nearly 10,000 files, some of which are compressed zip files containing additional documents. These records detail highly sensitive internal information about the College’s donors and taxes, social security numbers of board members, staff resignation letters, budgetary and fundraising concerns, and the usernames and passwords of more than 100 online accounts. The files include Powerpoint presentations, Quickbooks accounting documents, and at least 388 spreadsheets.

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