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Pols Blur Line Between Data Mining, Cyberstalking
theodp writes "Mother Jones reports on Obama's Digital Gurus, the top-secret team of analytics engineers and scientists led by hipster CTO Harper Reed who work on text analytics, social network/media analysis, web personalization, computational advertising, and online experiments & testing from the campaign's Chicago HQ and satellite offices. For OFA (Obama for America), writes Tim Murphy, there is no such thing as Too Much Information. 'In terms of just the sheer amount of data that political candidates have on you,' says UNC Prof Daniel Kreiss, 'I think everyone finds it creepy.' Still playing catch-up to OFA in its data efforts is Team Romney, which reportedly hired former employees from places like Google Analytics, Apple, Ominture, and Overstock.com in an attempt to reverse engineer the Obama campaign's strategy."
...put lipstick on a pig?
Are they using this to campaign in the traditional sense or is the line between PR/Advertisement and "Spy Agency" is growing thinner and thinner. After all, the CIA started merely reading russian newspapers and expanded from there.
Are they gathering information to conduct survailence, and perhaps the type of "blag bag jobs" that become easier and deniable after conducting lengthy intellegence gathering on your subject. Where is the line.
What safeguards do we have in place to prevent these intellegence gathering PR agencies from:
Spreading disinformation on enemies, that sounds plausable, based on information they've gathered.
Digging up dirt on politicians enemies and disemenating it.
Using the social network to intimidate non-likely voters by having their friends shame and intimidate them into voting.
Looking up information on critics, and digging up dirt on critics
Digging up dirt on potential voters to keep them in line with some form of blackmail.
What system do we have to investigate these people should their massive campaigns succeed and their clients now have the power to pardon or otherwise shield them from the legal proccess after being elected.
What happens when these PR goons become the new prateroian guard?
What? Spell first wrong or actually be second, but claim to be frist?
Why not? Or are you suggesting that for /. stories, any sort of quality standard should apply? How silly! You must be new here.
From Obama for America PRIVACY POLICY: "we may use personal information we collect...for any other purpose for which the information was collected....We may store and process personal information in the United States and other countries... You may also opt out of allowing OFA to collect your geographic location by changing the location settings on your mobile device..."
Well, if your beloved FOX News and the other so-called mainstream media outlets aren't reporting on this issue, then it isn't possible to link to their articles instead.
text analytics, social network/media analysis, web personalization, computational advertising, and online experiments & testing
What the fuck does any of these even mean?
If you scrap facebook to send out targeted spam, then just say so.
There's a difference?!
... call the NSA and tell them to hand over their records of all our electronic communications?
for any other purpose for which the information was collected
Gotta love that line. We won't tell you what those purposes might be, but we give ourselves permission to collect information and use it for...whatever we darn please.
... the person you vote for doesn't lie through their teeth about what they'll do when elected.
All they had for divining the future was chicken entrails.
From the Job Boards: "We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers - all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama." 1) Digital Analytics - Data Production Analyst: MySQL, Perl, Python, Netezza, MS SQL, Vertica, Hive/Hadoop, Google Analytics, Optimizely, R, STATA, SPSS. 2) Analytics - Statistical Modeling Analyst: (M.S./PhD preferred), R, STATA, SPSS, Weka, KNIME, SQL HTML, XML, Python, Ruby, Java, C++, Excel. 3) Digital Analytics - Modeling Analyst: R, STATA, SPSS, SAS, Excel, Netezza, MS SQL, Vertica, Hive/Hadoop, Google Analytics, Optimizely.
...while the big telecomms and banks...the big retailers...your electric company...your natural gas company...your credit card company that knows just who you donate to...all those chunks of Corporate America that have far more in-depth information on you and far more experience at mining that data - and far, far more interest in seeing Mitt Romney elected...
Do you suppose they even make Romney and the Republicans pay for that data, or just give it to 'em gratis?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
reverse engineer the Obama campaign's strategy.
Do not say and do stupid shite? Do not have a questionable and shady financial background?
Don't be a dumb-arse Republicantard?
WTF is a POL? I can barely understand the summary, doesn't look like there is a lot of English in there. The first three lines has like 2 verbs. But can we at least have a summary that makes a bit of sense? Like maybe don't use abbreviations when it isn't necessary. My first thought was it was a typo and they meant Polls...
What do the Polish have to do with this?
If much of what they have on me was accurate they wouldn't waste their money calling me and sending me junk mail.
I wonder if they track who hangs up on their calls? I don't think they do: they keep calling me.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This story is such a lie, suggesting Romney want doing this all along. The guy that started Stapples doesn't know how businesses are run, that's hard to believe.
There is only one piece of technology all democracies need in debates and that's real-time fact checking. We have the technology and the ability, it's insane that we haven't implemented it. I'm not a US citizen, but from what I heard there was some effort in the last debate.
Look at what the media did to Ross Perot and Ron Paul. Ridicule them it did. The media also loved Obama in 2007. Loved him, it did. They media can do whatever it wants to.
Wait, your in dc?
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why would anyone screaming his head off in public find it creepy that someone was listening? if no one is listening, conversely, why would anyone waste his breath? any information the candidates' campaign staff might have on anyone is largely limited to what he or she broadcast. in my case, any information they have on me couldn't possibly help them, since inasmuch as I am an educated and informed voter, my first criterion for deciding how I will vote is membership in and/or the support of the Democratic or Republican parties. I consider membership in or support or nomination of either to be an automatic disqualification for receiving my vote. George Washington warned us about political parties, and morons that the American people were, they didn't listen, and promptly formed political parties, pissing all over the sacrifices all those revolutionary war soldiers had just made in the name of their freedom.
any info they might have on me personally therefore isn't worth shit, so even if they have shit, they don't have shit, in a form of fecal quantum superposition. see?
You're their prime target. Kinda like a Christian converting you.
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Just got an email today from the Obama campaign thanking me for voting. Pretty crazy.
All of this is wasted.
LED lights webhttp://www.xsled.net
They are right and just in doing this. Information should be free. Where the catch is, is that we deserve to have the same level of detail on their private lives and internet activity. Sadly that's not the case. The problem isn't out lack of privacy, the problem is the disparity between "us" and "them" If they know everything, and we know nothing, that's a cast system.
The ultimate example of data mining affecting elections is surely caging? Mining the data to find a group likely to vote Democrat, then excluding them from the roll by cross referencing it with other databases, such as drivers ID.
This is where the 'you need an ID of type X, Y or Z but not J,K,M' laws come from. The database tells them that they can exclude democrats or Ron Paul supporters by requiring the ID be of certain types.
This is where the game of sending serving soldiers in Afghanistan who are black, a letter asking them to confirm their right to vote to their USA address. Of course they're not there, they're in Afghanistan. So Rove then uses that to block them from voting. Since black soldiers tend to vote democrat it swings the vote:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/18/greg_palast_on_billionaires_ballot_bandits
But none of this matters, the teleprompter will decide the election, not the vote.
http://youtu.be/pKaXqoC4DjE?t=3m3s
First, because it's from Mother Jones, those reliable purveyors of unbiased and accurate information... oh, wait.... nope... they were the ones who released the edited tape of Romney with the 47% comments, and then after they were caught they fessed up and released the unedited tapes... which turned out to still be edited...
Yeah, I know, Romney said "47%", but we do not have the full context, and the point I am making here is NOT that we should view the comment differently but rather that the veracity of the publication is sub-optimal.
Second, because all the lefty hipsters who support Obama and read Mother Jones and simultaneously think "information should be free" (while also thinking our government is EVIL if it stores information about people and tracks them) are backing a politician (Obama) whose people are more dedicated to (and more skilled at) building huge databases of info about them, snooping on them, tracking them, targeting them, etc than any other political leader in US history... and since Obama currently RUNS the government, that data is effectively in the hands of the government (it's in the hands of the guy who RUNS the government) but without any of the safeguards that would apply if somebody like the FBI had gotten it directly ha ha ha ha...
My apologies for the threadjacking; I'd really like to raise a key point I seem to think these campaigns tend to overlook.
.. why can't they do enough research to model the effects of their decisions over the next dozen years?
If campaigns are so keen on doing whatever they can to get one guy into office
I'll make it very simple: If you want my vote, prove to me that your choices will benefit our Country. A Billion dollars spent to obtain a four year career ought to be sufficient to prove that. Do *that* FIRST! Then you'll get my vote.
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
Because if they did something illegal like that, a hero like Bradly Manning would squeal on them and we'd all know the crimes that they'd been up to.
Self explanatory. Never heard of a Pol.
How politicians subvert and manipulate the people so to get elected and do something else, other than what they promised, based on the spying on the peoiple...
This is not what the founders of this country intended when they formed this Republic (as opposed to a democracy)
> You're their prime target.
Their prime target is the undecided voter. I'm definitely not that.
> Kinda like a Christian converting you.
The Christians I know believe in evangilizing by example. The occasional door-to-door missionary around here takes no for an answer.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
We need a government because a running the country like a business would suck the resources dry, no matter the cost to the people. I'm sure you wanted the minimum wage abolished as well?
I'm a college aged voter and I'm one a key member of Obama's target audience. I poke around all sort of political websites, subscribe to mailing lists and what not. If Obama's analytic are supposed to target specific potential voters, then they're doing an awful job. I haven't received any sort of advertisement specifically geared towards me in any respect. I've seen the occasional generic Obama 2012 web banner but nothing that piqued my interest more than a used car ad. Likewise from Romney. I don't feel like I'm being cyberstalked. I think there are other websites that do a lot worse and are much more insidious in how they gather and use customer data.
I had a similar opinion about the acronym ICT. Information and Communication Technology means porn surfing and sex chat.
Poster is too logical. Have IRS perform audit. And make all his private tweets public.
Durring the 1950s, Hoover and the FBI vehenatly denied the black bag jobs they were doing, and that all suspected communists were throughly investigated and everyone who wasn't a communist was cleared.
The truth was diffrent, according to newly released documents.
Google also states that its vast troves of data it collects on you are soley to assist you, and it never uses your data for mallicous means.
I am glad that Obama's campaign values privacy, I really am. But I also take such bold statements with a grain of salt. Just as I take democratic party values with a grain of salt, they've all proven to bend, break, ignore, or otherwise make exceptions for, when it comes to their friends and allies.