Yes, I can.
That part of Clayton's letter is wrong and has been repeatedly clarified before. Including at the 2019 annual board meeting, where Tom Clark asked me about it, as part of the record.
Clayton Coleman was secretary in 2019.
He ran the election.
He decided that candidate statements were limited in length to 350 words, would be subject to editorial control by AMSAT, and could not include links. These new rules were given to us right before the 4th of July holiday with a deadline of the 7th.
This is different than any election before, where statements went directly to the printer from the candidate, were not limited in length, and no one from AMSAT leadership (who might be running for reelection themselves) had any control over the content of their challengers' statements.
We got these rules right before ballots went out. We (four challengers) already had normal-sized statements on the web and they had been up six weeks at that point. Those were the ones we wanted to use, and link to.
We knew that as candidates, we had the right to request the mailing list, and send our own statements, independent of the ballot.
I requested the address list and got the DBASE4 export.
Bruce Perens had already written a letter of support and distributed it widely on the web. It introduced us and included our four full bios and statements.
I asked Bruce if we could use his letter in the mailing. He said yes. Since he was President of Open Research Institute at the time, he wanted the return address to not be his private home address, but a business address. That was ORI's address. He was the author of the endorsement, so I used his preferred return address.
I converted the DBASE4 to a more useful format, fixed the 50 or so undeliverable addresses, and found an inexpensive printer. Then I sent the letter from Bruce to the printer, with the bios and statements.
That turned out to be a good thing. Bios and statements were not included with the ballots mailed out, at all.
If we had not sent the letter, then name recognition would be the primary factor. We were running against well-known people.
We complained about this. It was unusual departure from the past and seemed set up to let leadership benefit from being incumbents.
The original proposal from Clayton was for an electronic only ballot. Patrick said that the bylaws were a bit clunky here and it did need to be mailed out on paper. Paper was required.
This is a big reason why I made a motion at our one board meeting, in March, for a bylaws committee.
This bylaw isn't hard to fix. There's lots of examples out there of organizations doing electronic voting with working published bylaws.
Bruce made it very clear, when the incumbents stirred up the pot about the return address, that it was an endorsement from him, this was commonly done in political campaigns, and it would be grossly improper for me to use AMSATs return address because that would make it look like Bruce was speaking for or was from AMSAT. That was not going to happen. *That* would be improper.
No one candidate wanted their personal address used as a return address. We were mailing this as a slate and splitting the cost. We didn't have time or funds to make an organization or rent a box for one letter on short notice. The printer required a real return address.
No one had the address list except the candidates. Namely me because I contracted the printer and handled the DBASE4 address conversion. That is a neat story in and of itself,, for another time.
Bruce only sent the text to me and chipped in some money for postage.
The printing was automated in Van Nuys, CA.
All of this is known to Clayton Coleman and his friends on the board that signed the statement from this week. It has been explained by Bruce publicly, and by me several times on social media. Tom Clark brought it up at the 2019 annual board meeting because of the return address pot-stirring. I explained it there too. Like I said, it's on the record.
I think insinuating the addresses were mishandled is a deliberate twisting of honest efforts to scramble to get uncensored candidate statements out to voters on short notice. We just didn't have a lot of time, and Bruce was very generous in writing a cover letter.
Again, candidates are allowed the use of the mailing lists for election purposes.
So, no, there was no breach. Clayton knows all this.
Saying it the way he did is a cheap shot at me, Patrick, Bruce Perens, and ORI.
-Michelle W5NYV
On Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 19:11 Kevin via AMSAT-BB amsat-bb@amsat.org wrote:
Hello All,
In a previous email to the BB I posted the link to the letter we all received as members.
https://www.amsat.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20200710_AMSAT_Le...
I was re-reading it and something caught my eye that I had missed before.
"AMSAT did not provide a copy of its membership mailing addresses to Open Research Institute."
Just how was our mailing list compromised? This seems like a seriousbreech of security, was this a hack? was any other information lost? was it ever found out how it happened? is our mailing list as they say "out in the wind"?
Michelle could you possibly check from the ORI side and backtrack how ORI came into possession of the AMSAT mailing list, was it something that was procured online?
AMSAT needs to follow up on this privacy issue and report back what it found and any steps that were taken to prevent this from happening in the future.
I look forward to an answer
73 Kevin WA7FWF #19623
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official views of AMSAT-NA. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb