{"id":6385,"date":"2017-01-25T14:30:05","date_gmt":"2017-01-25T22:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/01\/25\/news-222\/"},"modified":"2017-01-25T14:30:05","modified_gmt":"2017-01-25T22:30:05","slug":"news-222","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/01\/25\/news-222\/","title":{"rendered":"Controversial Park Service tweets arose from old Twitter passwords"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Two instances of tweets from U.S. National Park Service accounts that became political hot potatoes in the last few days were the result of bad password management, according to officials.<\/p>\n

The first incident took place on inauguration day when the main National Park Service account retweeted images from a CNN reporter that compared unfavorably the crowd size at President Donald Trump’s inauguration with that of President Barack Obama’s in 2009.<\/p>\n

When Trump began to openly dispute the images and smaller crowd sizes, the National Park Service deleted the retweet and apologized.<\/p>\n

“We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you,” it said Saturday<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then on Tuesday, an account of the Badlands National Park<\/a> in South Dakota tweeted a series facts about changes to the earth’s climate. They were immediately interpreted as a challenge to Trump’s assertion<\/a> that global warming is a hoax “created by the Chinese.”<\/p>\n

They were quickly deleted too, so on Wednesday White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked if the new administration had ordered the Park Service to censor itself on Twitter.<\/p>\n

He said that wasn’t the case.<\/p>\n

“An unauthorized user had an old password in the San Francisco office and went in and started retweeting things that were in violation of their policy,” he said of Saturday’s incident.<\/p>\n

White House press secretary Sean Spicer speaks to reporters at a news conference on Jan. 25, 2017.<\/p>\n

He didn’t address Tuesday’s Badlands tweets, but the National Park Service told a reporter for Buzzfeed<\/a> that they too were the result of password misuse by a former employee.<\/p>\n

The tweets noted that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are at an all-time high and the acidity of the planet’s oceans is up 30 percent since the beginning of the industrial revolution.<\/p>\n

The tweets were retweeted thousands of times and their deletion only served to amplify their message. It also spawned the creation of several parody accounts including an “AltUSNatParkService<\/a>” one that has attracted more than half a million followers in less than a day.<\/p>\n

The National Park Service’s national and San Francisco offices did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/category\/security\/index.rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Two instances of tweets from U.S. National Park Service accounts that became political hot potatoes in the last few days were the result of bad password management, according to officials.<\/p>\n

The first incident took place on inauguration day when the main National Park Service account retweeted images from a CNN reporter that compared unfavorably the crowd size at President Donald Trump’s inauguration with that of President Barack Obama’s in 2009.<\/p>\n

When Trump began to openly dispute the images and smaller crowd sizes, the National Park Service deleted the retweet and apologized.<\/p>\n

“We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you,” it said Saturday<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[11062,10643],"tags":[11067,4314,714,1932],"class_list":["post-6385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computerworld","category-independent","tag-government-it","tag-internet","tag-security","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}