Did Personal Data Aid Obama Campaign?

Townhall ^ | 7/6/2013 | Carol Platt Liebau

[knak]

The IRS has been credibly accused of targeting conservatives as a way to minimize their participation in the 2014 elections. But there is a mirror image to their suppression in the last cycle; the Obama campaign's utilization of Big Data to bring liberal partisans to the polls.

It was something that the press writing of admiringly both before and after the election, for example:

Time: How Obama's number-crunchers helped him win

Businessweek: Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big-Data Brains

Other outlets have confessed to some trepidation:

Gizmodo: How the Obama Campaign Uses Your Personal Information to Get Your Money and Your Vote

In the aftermath of the kerfuffle about metadata being used for national security purposes, it's worth asking whether (and what kind of) personal information somehow found its way into the hands of political people for the President's political benefit -- because there is significant benefit to any political campaign that can "mine" such data. Note that the companies involved in the NSA data-collection collection matter were huge Obama supporters.

[TheOldLady]

And if they were to target someone, their “text” would be made to implicate them, guilty or not.

[FreedomPoster]

My state (GA) has open primaries. While your vote is secret, which ballot (Dem, Republican, Independent) you choose in the primary is not. This is valuable information, obviously.

[103198]

Thank you very much for the posting. I'm going to pick up and read a copy of IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation as a result.

Do you know anything about SAP? It was formed by three ex-IBMers in Germany.