Last fall the Republican National Committee paid $900,000 for “data services” to a Delaware-registered limited liability corporation that had existed for only three weeks.
The company receiving the money has no online presence and has not been used by other campaigns or committees. But there is one clue about the company, Howler Insights LLC, in paperwork the RNC filed with the Federal Election Commission. Howler’s Arlington, Virginia, address and suite number are the same as a conservative data firm whose work for the RNC was placed on hold nearly three years ago after a massive data breach.
The incident left personal information such as voter registration details, names, addresses, phone numbers and potential ethnicities of about 200 million Americans accessible to anyone on the internet. At the time, the security consultant who identified the breach called it the “largest known data exposure of its kind.”