Finding former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number (2020)

Summary

Act 1: Sunday afternoonSo you know when you’re flopping about at home, minding your own business, drinking from your water bottle in a way that does not possess any intent to subvert the Commonwealth of Australia?It’s a feeling I know all too well, and in which I was vigorously partaking when I got this message in “the group chat”. A nice message from my friend, with a photo of a boarding pass 🙂 A good thing about messages from your friends is that they do not have any rippling consequences 🙂🙂🙂The man in question is Tony Abbott, one of Australia’s many former Prime Ministers. That’s him, officerFor security reasons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on multiple websites.The boarding pass photoThis particular former PM had just posted a picture of his boarding pass on Instagram (Instagram, in case you don’t know it, is an app you can open up on your phone any time to look at ads). The since-deleted Instagram post showing the boarding pass and baggage receipt. The caption reads “coming back home from japan 😍😍 looking forward to seeing everyone! climate change isn’t real 😌 ok byeee”“Can you hack this man?”My friend (who we will refer to by their group chat name, 𝖍𝖔𝖌𝖌𝖊 𝖒𝖔𝖆𝖉𝖊) is asking whether I can “hack this man” not because I am the kind of person who regularly commits 𝒄𝒚𝒃𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒐𝒏 on a whim, but because we’d recently been talking about boarding passes.I’d said that people post pictures of their boarding passes all the time, not knowing that it can sometimes be used to get their passport number and stuff. They just post it being like “omg going on holidayyyy 😍😍😍”, unaware that they’re posting cringe. People post their boarding passes all the time, because it’s not clear that they’re meant to be secretMeanwhile, some hacker is rubbing their hands together, being all “yumyum identity fraud 👀” in their dark web Discord, because this happens a lot.So there I was, making intense and meaningful eye contact with ...