The Critical Compass Podcast - May 16, 2026


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


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

130.6513

Word count

1,679

Sentence count

55


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.
00:11:54.000 if you want to support the critical compass you can use the buy me a coffee link or even the
00:11:58.880 button on youtube the thanks button will let you donate through there we are volunteering our time
00:12:04.800 when we go to these events when we film the speeches we edit it all together when we're
00:12:09.360 doing our podcast and we're just trying to bring some good information to you so feel free to
00:12:17.840 support us, even liking, commenting, subscribing, that'll do wonders for the algorithm.
00:12:25.520 Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one.
00:12:47.840 Thank you.