Wtf is this? You're making inuendos about a strategy that has been the province of the Repugnicans and the religious right for years, and now finally one of our guys is getting smart enough to use it - what do you want him to do - use carrier pigeons or something?

As someone said earlier today - Salon and The New Yorker are doing the right's dirty work for them. Is Joan Walsh perhaps a Republican plant?

After all, he's already spying on us.

To build such an ominous database. Gives me a 1984-style case of the willies in any event.

"they can use that (information) to gauge how committed you are to the campaign"

That sentence, all by itself, is chilling.

Datamining has long been a standard province of electoral politics, and as the article says, the majority of the sampling data is volunteered--essentially those whose lives are the most "documented" are in this database because they wanted it.

A campaign that simply cross-references this with other legally available information to decide who to target is really a non-starter when it comes to the "Big Brother" factor.

Hear a harkening to McCain's own style of Mcmarketing. Cos it's about John and you and all the world loves a Mcfool.

It is definitely a tenacious campaign. Since his FISA flip-flop I have tried to "unsubscribe" from the Obama email list three times. The link at the bottom of the emails apparently does nothing. The ObamaSpam keeps coming regardless.

Now when he becomes President he can shift dump my record from his voter database to his enemies database as a "civil-liberties extremist" or what have you. Of course everyone in the latter will be a candidate for warrant-less wiretapping by the Obama administration.

Change you can believe will take you back to the age of Nixon.

I'm happy that Obama's campaign "gets it" and is doing everything possible to be as effective as possible. Democrats aren't going to win any elections by doing things the hard way.

The software has been around for a couple of decades, although it really only hit it's prime in the last decade or so. It's basically a database with spatial information. For example, if you give me your phone number, I can get your address from a database and look up the census information for your census tract, finding out if most of the people in the area are renters or owners, what is the household income, and how many children there are per household. Let's say my husband donates to Obama (yeah, right). He doesn't have a card at the local grocery store, but I do. The grocery store almost certainly sells data about customer preferences (why do you think they give you such nice incentives to always use your discount card?). The campaign can then tie my husband to family shopping preferences and identify whether our household prefers whiskey or vodka. Or beer. They can map all of Obama's donor's, color coded for how much they gave and what their profession is, and, if they have the store data, what they drink. Then they can have Obama visit a local city and get photographed drinking whatever his supporter's prefer to drink.

This could probably be done without spatial data, but it would be far harder - it's easier to see correlations when you can, well, SEE them. And it's hard to tie zip code 73406 to the nearest city with a spreadsheet. A spatial database enables you to see spatial patterns. The hard part is sorting out which patterns are meaningful and which aren't. But there are things they can do with a GIS that they simply couldn't do without spatial data, like targeting a specific neighborhood for donations. They can actually do a search and identify the addresses within a quarter mile of an existing donor and create a mailing list that includes only Democrats at those addresses. That would be almost impossible without a spatial database to help filter data. In the past, they were limited to census tracts and zip codes. Now, there are no limits. By enabling targeting likely voters and likely donors, they don't waste money marketing to people who won't support them. And you can bet they know exactly where the Democrats making more than $50,000 a year with 2 kids are in Ohio.

But I'm not willing to bet that the right wing has not been doing this for years. The major makers of GIS software are very tied into politics, and all it takes is lots of money to build sophisticated databases. How do you think the right manages it's reknowned GOTV efforts? They have to be using GIS.

Final note: Did you know that the software that they use to gerrymander is a Geographic Information System? It's an extension for ArcInfo, a product made by the leader in GIS software, ESRI.

The authors say..."You know, of course, that Obama has your e-mail address. You may not have realized that he probably also has your phone number and knows where you're registered to vote -- including whether that's a house or an apartment building, and whether you rent or own"

This is not a big revelation for anyone who has donated to Obama. Of course they know your address, zip code. You only receive e-mails from David when you have donated. According to election laws when you donate to a political campaign must give your full name, address, zip code and occupation and employer.

They also keep track of the level of your donations. So if you usually give $250.00 they will send you an e-mail appeal for 250.00. Fund raising rule 101, ask the donor to double the donation. Of course if you live in a wealthy zip code, hey will ask you to more than double it.

One of the things that impressed me from the get go about the Obama campaign is how well organized the campaign is.

I'm sure they don't notice little ol' me at all, but I do wonder if they noticed a precipitous drop in interest among people who use debit cards to buy groceries at co-ops, after the FISA bullshit. I'm still going to vote for him, but I already know what the e-mails say, and I'll be keeping my money for the ever-rising cost of co-op purchases.