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RNC Outsourced Voter Database to India
roj3 writes "PCWorld and other sources are covering the story of how the Republican Party outsourced work on their massive Voter Vault project to India. "When the Republican Party clinched close gubernatorial races in Mississippi and Kentucky in 2003, it relied heavily on its Voter Vault database to get people to the voting booths. Though party officials are tight-lipped about what's inside the Vault, they've acknowledged it contains records on an estimated 168 million voters. ... PC World has recently learned that the major development work on the Voter Vault was done in India." The work, done by Compulink Systems of Maharashtra, occurred during the same time that a Russian hacker (RyDen) compromised their site. Thankfully, they are pretty sure that no data was compromised. Who do you trust less with your personal information, marketers or politicians?"
Who in their right mind would trust a politician?
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
[The following is worth repeating and is comments that I submitted in another thread of discussion.]
Any high-tech job that can be outsourced will be outsourced. You will see a continuous shrinking of the high-tech labor force.
Both political parties claim that free markets require the free exchange of goods and services (which includes labor) between the USA and other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and fusing the American market with the Chinese/Indian/Mexican market maintains the free market in the USA. Unfortunately, the politicians are just playing a verbal game with economics.
Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market -- with relatively little government intervention (compare to, say, China). So is Japan, Canada, and the rest of the West. However, Mexico, China, and India are not free markets. Excessive government intervention has damaged the markets in those economies, and they cannot provide jobs for millions of underemployed persons.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e. millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects the market dynamics in the USA. The underemployed Chinese are a continuing stream of cheap slave labor; jobs are then transferred from the USA to China.
The USA is no longer a free market because non-market forces (in this case, Chinese government intervention) is altering the dynamics of the labor market in the USA. The verbal game that politicians play is to simply define the USA to be a "free market", ignoring the fact that the Chinese government is now grossly affecting the labor market of the USA.
Similar comments apply to both India and Mexico.
Similar comments apply to H-1B workers and illegal aliens from Mexico: the American government has, in effect, actively used H-1B workers and illegal aliens to intervene in the labor markets in both high tech and low tech. Illegal aliens have destroyed the upward pressure on wages in the market for unskilled labor. H-1B have hurt salaries for engineers. Shortages are a normal part of any labor market, and they are an upward force on salaries/wages and working conditions. When the government actively works to wipe out such shortages in the low-tech market and the high-tech market, the government is damaging market forces.
If you hate what is happening to our country, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
Remember, the parties don't have any special access to private information. I would expect that everything in this database was pulled from data in the public record. This is probably similar to databases used for gerrymandering. They have the voting results for every race by precinct. They have demographic information for every block from the census data. They have voter registration data (it's public record). They can correlate all of that to determine where they should go to get more voters that will likely support them.
I think I should have a right to know what kind of data a private organization has about me.
I say we outsource the Republican National Committee's jobs to India!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
"Our main story tonight: technical work is being outsourced to India.
In other new, the sky is blue and water is wet."
so?
Iverson says the RNC hired a different Seattle company, Advanced Data Center Systems, to perform work on its Voter Vault.
So they hired a Seattle firm that turned around and subcontracted its work to someone else. It's not government data, it's not classified, and the "leak" could've happened here. I don't see the relevance.
--trb
The post makes it sound like the GOP went "Fuck Americans, we're going to build this thing with cheap labor! Ah ha ha ha!"
RTFA....directly from the PC World piece...
"Two years prior to the 2002 elections, the RNC hired Advanced Custom Software (ACS) of Seattle to build a Web-based database to help campaign workers target likely Republican voters. According to information posted on Elance.com, an online directory of outsourcing firms, ACS subcontracted development of the database to Compulink Systems of Maharashtra, India."
It's a fair bet that when the GOP found out about the outsourcing (and the fact that ACS is basically nothing but a front company for Indian firms), THEY put a stop to it. Also from the article:
"...all work done on Voter Vault since 2002 has occurred in the U.S."
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Why would it be a security threat? Both the Democratic and Republican databases are gathered from publicly available information sources. You're probably (and justifiably) concerned that your name may be on list in another country, but frankly, it already is. If you've ever bought anything on the web, this same information is on marketing lists in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, China, the Phillipines, etc. It's an unfortunate side effect of the information age. Information may not neccessarily want to be free, but it does get around rather easily now.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
...meanwhile, the GOP would like to strip you of all your freedoms while calling it 'Patriotic'.
I just read this today, there is a movement in the party to start monitoring people who pray at mosques. Why? Because of their religion.
Yea, since when do we need freedoms to be free anyway?
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Oh yea the republians are the ones comitting voter fraud /Sarcasm
First we'll outsource IT jobs.
When people start to complain about that - we'll outsource the press, so that we don't actually get any information on what is happening anymore.
When bloggers expose what is really going on and we lose trust in the system, we can outsource our government.
After the government is outsourced and we all become citizens of whatever country has annexed the United States, we'll all be citizens of one country again.
See...outsourcing solved in just a few easy steps.
I see the whole outsourcing issue from two angles:
1) A truly free market is, in my oh so humble opinion, the ideal economic system. All else being equal, the work should go to they that can do it at the desired balance of cost and quality.
2) All else is never equal; I don't know of a truly free market anywhere on the planet. There are other factors than cost and quality, such as the Wal-Mart problem, also known as "the race to the bottom." Also, unit cost at retail is quite different from the true cost, when all other factors are accounted for.
With every single transaction, the buyer is making a choice (and to quote Rush, "even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"). I personally choose to boycott Wally World (going on two years) and Microsoft (never given 'em a penny, even indirectly). I am quite willing, within certain limits, to pay more up front to support my local economy or entities that I deem more worthy of my business. I don't feel that decision should be forced on anybody, however. You are free to buy all your groceries at Wally World, but I do feel that's extremely short sighted, for reasons the vast majority of slashbots don't need to read again here.
I do however feel that "public" entities have an obligation to deal exclusively with local businesses whenever feasible. If Microsoft wants to produce software using foreign labor, fine. That's their right, and it's my right to hold that against them if I so choose when making a buying decision. But with public institutions, we don't really have the right to withhold our money, so they are strongly obligated to spend it in a fashion that more directly benefits the stakeholders.
Both major political parties are, technically, private corporations, but in practice they are public institutions. That obligates them, from an ethical point of view, to act as such, which in this case means using American labor whenever possible.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
You know you've hit the bullseye when you get modded flamebait. Congratulations.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Kerry's still going to lose.
Instead of scraping the bottom of the barrel for muck now, you should have offered a decent presidential candidate last year. We all have the Democrats to blame for four more years of Bush.
This reply is as relevant as the story to which it is attached.
#19845
If your post is flamebait then the original article is flamebait. It's obvious that the point of posting the article was "ooh, look! Republicans are trying to screw you out of your job.
[jib]
errmm.. its a bit more than just 'names and numbers' sonny boy. its also organized, pre-culled, ripe. it could be used, in the hands of terrorists, for ill gain!
i can think of ways to use it harmfully, and i swear: i'm not a ter'rist.. i'm not even clever or smart! imagine what those brainiacs in al-q'aeda are capable of, fer cryin' out loud..
[/jib]
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
To avoid risks like voter information going to India, more states should do as North Dakota has done. In North Dakota we have no voter registration, just show up with proof of residence for 30 days, or sign an statement to that effect when you arrive at the polling place.
(Of course in ND, the poll workers know pretty much everyone... and any fraudulent change in the total number of votes in a precinct would get spotted before the day was out.)
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
"Washington State corporate records indicate that ADCS and ACS share the same address and were registered by the same agent, Steve I. Cummings."
Same agent, same company, add a letter. Now it becomes a 'different company' but more importantly one 'based' in the US so they can dodge the question easier. Does work done in a vnc session off a server farm in Seattle qualify as 'done in the US'?
Private information provided to corporations will sooner or later be accessed by the government, by law, by threat or by force. Private information collected by the government will not always be provided to corporations. Plus the government is accountable, at least in principle.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
"Who do you trust less with your personal information, marketers or politicians?"
What people should be asking is, why aren't we allowed a voice in both choices? The politicians seem quite happy to restrict a businesses use of information but never allow such restrictions on themselves.
This should not be a surprise, Congress is immune to many laws the burden American businesses.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.