Enlarge / White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer takes questions on February 7. His home address, phone and personal e-mail were discovered in the domain registration data for his now-defunct personal blog. (credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images)
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has gotten a lot of grief from some quarters for a variety of reasons. Among them are his problems with information security—including his apparent posting of passwords to his Twitter account. But the latest privacy problem Spicer has on the Internet is one that thousands of others who have embraced the Internet have had, and it’s mostly the fault of the Internet’s archaic address book—the Domain Name System.
In 2009, Spicer registered a domain for his personal blog—seanspicer.com. He updated his domain registration data in March of 2010, apparently after moving into his home in Alexandria, Virginia. And when he did, he used his own personal home address, phone number, and e-mail account. That information, as Mashable reported on February 6, is still publicly accessible through a whois lookup against the Domain Name Service, as published by his domain registrar GoDaddy. The phone number matches one associated with Spicer present in the DNC e-mail breach posted by WikiLeaks.
Spicer’s Yahoo e-mail account—which was part of data exposed in the MySpace, Dropbox and LinkedIn “mega-breaches” discovered in 2016—is also associated with a number of other domains, including those bearing the name of family members. These sites have largely been taken down (as in the case of theelephanttrunk.org, a Republican-themed online tie store), are still essentially blank template sites (including stateoftherace.org), or are parked. The parked domains include: