Autocorrect Strikes Again: Private Details on Obama, World Leaders Mistakenly Emailed to Asian Cup

The passport numbers and other sensitive information on heads of state attending last fall’s G20 summit were accidentally compromised by an Australian immigration department employee.

The summit was held in Brisbane.

An immigration officer told the Australian privacy commissioner in a November 2014 letter, “The cause of the breach was human error. [Redacted] failed to check that the autofill function in Microsoft Outlook had entered the correct person’s details into the email ‘To’ field. This led to the email being sent to the wrong person.”

The Australian government never bothered to notify the leaders.

The employee had emailed organizers of the Asian Cup football tournament the personal identifiers of all leaders at the summit, including President Obama, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, and the British prime minister, David Cameron.

“The personal information which has been breached is the name, date of birth, title, position nationality, passport number, visa grant number and visa subclass held relating to 31 international leaders (ie prime ministers, presidents and their equivalents) attending the G20 leaders summit,” the officer wrote.

 “The matter was brought to my attention directly by [redacted] immediately after receiving an email from [the recipient] informing them that they had sent the email to the wrong person.”

The officer wrote that it was “unlikely that the information is in the public domain”, and said the absence of other personal identifiers “limits significantly” the risk of the breach. The unauthorized recipient had deleted the email and “emptied their deleted items folder…The Asian Cup local organizing committee do not believe the email to be accessible, recoverable or stored anywhere else in their systems,” the letter said.

The immigration officer then recommended that the world leaders not be informed of the breach of their personal information.