Flood of emails after breach
Spa City mayor finds residents’ personal accounts were used for political purposes
In the days leading up to the city’s school board vote Tuesday, Rachel Contizano’s email inbox was filling up with newsletters from the well-known local online presence called Moving Saratoga Forward.
In them, the conservative-leaning group denounced a school board member who supports the Black Lives Matter movement and a high school English teacher who assigned the book “Gravity,” saying it has sexualized content. The newsletters also pushed its “parental rights” school board candidates and railed against critical race theory, even
though it is not taught in Saratoga Springs city schools. “These emails are dangerous, especially after what happened in Buffalo they are more dangerous,” said Contizano, who has a mixed-race son. “So I called the Saratoga Springs school and spoke to someone there. She said they have been getting calls about the emails and said ‘you know we never sell information.’ And then she said ‘does your son go to rec(reation center)?’ Yes, he does and that’s when it clicked.”
Contizano said she realized she is a victim of a breach that involved thousands of personal email addresses being shared from the city’s recreation department database with at least one administrator, former Mayor Meg Kelly, in October 2020, according to Saratoga Mayor Ron Kim. And as Kim’s office fields more complaints on the breach, which was announced on Monday, Kim said he is learning the addresses have likely been used for political purposes — first in 2020 to oppose a city charter change referendum and more recently to push school board candidates.
This happened despite the assumption that the email addresses, which Kim said could not be publicly accessed with a Freedom of Information request, were for recreation department purposes only.
“We have a lot of people saying that the only way their email could have gotten into the hands of Moving Saratoga Forward or the opponents to charter reform was through the rec department list,” Kim said. “One person said that the email utilized for the rec department had a typo in it and it was just for the rec center and now they find emails coming in from other streams.”
Kelly and the person who is known to manage the Moving Saratoga Forward blog and Facebook page have not responded to Times Union requests for comment regarding the use of the email list.
In announcing the security breach, Kim, who like Kelly is a Democrat, said he has digital evidence to prove that Kelly had the email addresses sent to her Gmail account on Oct. 21, 2020. He said he also determined that former Commissioner of Finance Michele Madigan also got the list after he interviewed employees of the recreation department. He does not know how the list got into the hands of Moving Saratoga Forward, a group that was united with Madigan in 2020 in their opposition to charter change.
Days after the breach, on Oct. 27, 2020, residents who never signed up to be on Madigan’s list, and were advocating for charter change, received an email from “Citizens for Madigan” with the subject line “Vote No on Charter Change.” In the email, she said that the city doesn’t have the funds for charter change and those that want it are “lying and ginning up nasty rumors about your elected officials.”
Madigan, who is also a Democrat, has not returned a Times Union phone call for comment.
Kim said he is getting calls from people like Contizano who are distressed by the emails that they are receiving from Moving Saratoga Forward. At the same time, Kim said he is still trying to determine if the breach was illegal.
The state Board of Elections said election law does not speak to this issue directly and, therefore, the matter doesn’t fall within its purview. The state also said that it is more “an ethics issue and the potential inappropriate appropriation of a public record.”
But the state said if the email lists were obtained “in a manner that isn’t consistent with local law,” the city should file a complaint with police. Kim emphasized that the breach was not the recreation department staff ’s fault. He was told by staff that when the list was demanded by elected officials, recreation staff pushed back. However, those with authority over the staff, which is supervised by the mayor’s office, dictated the release.
“We don’t want this to get lost in the story that the rec department staff, the people that do the work, and the rec commission, did anything wrong,” Kim said. “This is really about people essentially at much higher levels of city government saying ‘you got to do this or there is going to be consequences.’”
Kim also said the announcement of the email breach is not political.
“Once we got this information, we felt we had to release the information,” he said. “We could be sued for failure to disclose. … It’s political because it goes against Meg and Madigan. But that’s an unintended consequence.”