The Critical Compass Podcast - May 16, 2026


What Does the Centurion Project Data Breach Mean for Alberta Independence？

Mentioned
Elections Alberta Nahid Nenshi James
Independence Talk with PJ The Belt & the Freedom Calendar Does Alberta Have Enough Unity for Independence？ ｜ Tanya Clemens

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

130.65

Word count

1,679

Sentence count

55


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, James talks about the Centurion Project, an advocacy group that created a tool to help people find and claim their own voter list. The problem is, the data was stolen from a Republican Party of Alberta database.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi, it's James here at The Critical Compass. I'm back at the Edmonton River Valley and I wanted
00:00:08.160 to talk about the Centurion Project. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is there's a lot we
00:00:16.680 can learn from this situation but there's still a lot of bad and a lot of this is pretty ugly.
00:00:24.120 So first, let's point out how the media is framing this and what are the claims being made.
00:00:33.440 So this is framed as a data leak of 3 million Albertans' information.
00:00:40.700 If you listen to the NDP or Naheed Nenshi, it sounds like 3 million Albertans were doxed at risk of harassment and credit fraud or identity theft.
00:00:53.300 That's the framing right now.
00:00:56.000 So the Centurion Project is essentially an advocacy group
00:01:00.660 empowering people to stand up and take responsibility for those around them
00:01:05.660 and encourage them to vote in the upcoming referendum.
00:01:11.620 That's all it is, and the core idea is quite solid.
00:01:15.420 Where it gets tricky is how they were implementing that,
00:01:18.840 which is through a app and they had a searchable database and you would sign up so this is not
00:01:27.800 out in the open until you sign up you do not have access to this once you sign up you can access
00:01:34.280 this you can search for friends and family you can claim their names and now those are those people
00:01:42.720 are under your wing for you to take responsibility and encourage them to vote so the source of their
00:01:51.040 database that's where the issue currently lies elections alberta originally did not have an issue
00:01:58.480 with their database and they're notified about a month ago they were not originally concerned
00:02:05.760 because they couldn't verify if the list came from 411 canada post or any other third party
00:02:12.720 vendor that will sell lists of names and addresses. So the searchable database was not inherently
00:02:21.520 problematic but the issue came when Elections Alberta found salted names belonging to a voter
00:02:29.440 list given to the Republican Party of Alberta. And the salted names are they are fake names
00:02:37.680 that are unique to a version of that list
00:02:41.780 given to each of the political parties.
00:02:45.440 And so what they would have done is searched for those names
00:02:48.460 and they found those names
00:02:49.620 and it's almost like a fingerprint
00:02:52.060 belonging to that particular version of the list.
00:02:56.500 What we don't know is we don't know
00:02:58.480 if the Republican Party sold that list to a third party
00:03:03.600 if it got stolen from the Republican Party
00:03:06.320 or if it was handed directly to the Centurion project.
00:03:11.500 The investigation is still ongoing and currently we don't know the chain of custody of the actual list itself.
00:03:19.980 Currently the app is not available, so it was taken offline as soon as the cease and desist was given.
00:03:29.880 so right now there's no excel file being passed around there's no giant list on a thumb drive
00:03:40.040 being handed around this data breach was just a sign-in tool that people were using
00:03:48.200 so to frame it like this massive breach of private information is maybe an overstatement
00:03:56.300 and it's not surprising that people would frame it that way they're trying to win political points
00:04:03.900 right now and that's understandable but even with that said I feel like the implementation
00:04:13.600 maybe is a little bit sloppy and exposes greater risk to the movement through through this database
00:04:21.940 I don't think an app was necessary, or I don't think a searchable database was necessary.
00:04:30.960 So one way you could do it, you could have no database and just have people sign up and enter
00:04:37.440 the names of those friends and family members that they're going to take responsibility for.
00:04:43.700 And then if there's any conflicts where there's two people claiming the same person, then you'd
00:04:49.740 have a little prompt and it would get you to resolve that duplicate entry. So essentially
00:04:58.720 you would have a database built from people just self-entering information rather than a searchable
00:05:05.920 database of three million Albertans. Anytime you have a tool or a database there are going to be
00:05:13.980 privacy considerations and that's a hard enough area to navigate when you're a large corporation
00:05:23.200 and you have people dedicated to making sure that no privacy issues arise with your product
00:05:32.660 so just having a database I feel like that's risky and that's providing a a vector of attack
00:05:41.260 regardless of the results of this
00:05:45.180 investigation. If the
00:05:49.100 Centurion Project broke the rules, then they should be held accountable
00:05:53.000 100%. But even if they're squeaky clean
00:05:57.140 and they got the list from a reputable source
00:06:00.680 and it is not actually the Republican list, it's not a voter
00:06:05.100 list, it's a third-party aggregate list, even
00:06:09.120 with that, this tool still is a vector for criticism and it's also a vector for people
00:06:16.820 to abuse this tool. If there's names that are in here that aren't on 411, then that's
00:06:23.200 a vector of attack. I looked on 411 and I searched some friends and family members,
00:06:29.340 even searched myself, and most of them were not on them. With any of these lists, there
00:06:35.700 generally the ability to opt out to make sure that you can't be searched. It's important for
00:06:41.700 high-profile individuals, judges, survivors of domestic violence, and others that do not want
00:06:50.260 to be easily found. So we can't just say that 100% of this information can be accessed publicly
00:06:58.500 anyways because that that's not entirely true so even with this tool antifa could sign up for this
00:07:07.620 tool jump on and do some searches and harass some of the canvassers or other people in the movement
00:07:15.700 so that that's a possibility and maybe that wasn't thought about in that that way that
00:07:21.700 so anytime we have something like this there is the possibility of bad actors abusing this tool
00:07:27.140 or somebody maliciously using a tool for something other than the intended purpose.
00:07:34.580 With that being said, the voter list itself, the list of electors and names and addresses,
00:07:42.320 that exists in some form and during an election cycle it's predicted that 10,000 to 15,000 people
00:07:50.080 have access to this list in some form or another.
00:07:53.200 and that's political parties that's staff members and that's volunteers doing canvassing and so
00:08:00.740 maybe not the entire list but portions of that list for that writing so in one sense it wouldn't
00:08:08.740 take much for an individual like an antifa member to get a few different volunteers and now they
00:08:14.340 have access to the names and addresses of an entire city. So if anything good
00:08:22.620 comes out of this, it would be a greater discussion on the access and use of
00:08:30.600 these voter lists. I personally feel like Elections Alberta should have it and it
00:08:36.520 should never leave their hands. I don't think it should be given to a single
00:08:40.420 political party or advocacy group or anybody. It should just be for elections. Nobody likes
00:08:48.520 unsolicited texts or calls anyways, and I don't think that's going to convince most people.
00:08:56.720 So if we can revise that, and if that comes out of this, then I feel like that's a good thing to
00:09:05.300 come out of this this potentially bad situation so unfortunately this entire investigation
00:09:13.940 is painting the movement in a bad light even if the investigation finishes and the centurion project
00:09:21.860 is completely innocent i don't think you'll undo the damage that it's done it's given a lot of ammo
00:09:32.980 to those who want to smear the movement. All they have to say now is you can't trust these people
00:09:38.900 with data. I don't know how this investigation will go. We're still waiting on more information,
00:09:46.660 but I know this will continue to be weaponized against the movement.
00:09:51.860 Even the simple act of Elections Alberta sending 500 cease and desist letters to people who logged
00:09:58.740 on to the website to access the tool that's going to be used to smear the movement as well
00:10:07.460 it again it makes it look like there's a list floating around being shared a giant excel file
00:10:17.060 etc if people don't have access to the tool they don't have access to any of the search functions
00:10:24.340 these individuals who logged in were never given a file they weren't given an excel sheet they
00:10:31.820 weren't given something that could be distributed so that that is the difference there the other
00:10:38.560 odd thing is that elections alberta would even declare an investigation because that pushes it
00:10:45.980 into the court of public opinion and we know that once the damage is done it's hard to
00:10:54.000 undo that damage in the public eye once they've already made up their minds. And this is how it
00:11:02.000 works. You have a loud headline and a very, very quiet retraction. Or in one article, loud headline,
00:11:12.260 then you scroll down to the bottom and maybe they add a little bit of context, just a little bit.
00:11:18.720 So this is what we're fighting against and we have to be extra careful going forward.
00:11:24.000 And like I've said before, we can't be directing our hatred towards each other.
00:11:29.440 These frustrations from something like this.
00:11:31.740 We cannot go around demonizing every other person in the movement
00:11:35.000 just because they haven't matched your level of outrage.
00:11:39.620 So we have to keep a level head.
00:11:41.720 We have to stay positive.
00:11:43.480 We have to keep focused on communicating to friends and family members
00:11:47.520 and helping to share the message.
00:11:51.820 Thanks for sticking to the end.
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00:12:47.840 Thank you.