second floor

http://www.kqed.org/programs/radio/forum (click here for realmedia stream)

Fri, Feb 29, 2008 — 9:00 AM
Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez

	Download (MP3) (Windows: right-click and choose “Save Target As.” Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose “Save As.”)

Yesterday, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader named San Francisco’s own Matt Gonzalez — a former Board of Supervisors president and mayoral candidate — as his running mate. Guest host Rachael Myrow talks with both Nader and Gonzalez about their campaign.
Host: Rachael Myrow

yes.  that is a hamster-based paper shredder.

“white house copied over e-mail tapes”:

The White House acknowledges recycling backup computer tapes of e-mail, a practice that may have wiped out many electronic messages from the early years of the Bush administration, including some pertaining to the CIA leak case.

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If e-mails were not saved on computer servers and copies were overwritten on backup tapes, the White House might have violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall into the categories of federal records or presidential records.

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Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about leaking Plame’s identity.

“It appears that the White House has now destroyed the evidence of its misconduct,” Weismann said.

vanity fair profiles aristotle inc. and their political data mining and micro-targeting operation. while it’s tempting to criticize what they do, they offer their services to anyone and they use publicly available information. this should really raise questions about the personal information we choose to divulge and how we manage and protect that information with privacy laws. as more and more information about us gets aggregated online, the possibilities for it being used in ways we didn’t consent to obviously increases. i don’t know if we even realize just how much information about us is floating around in the internet ether right now… (slate with some online privacy tips)

“big brother inc.”:

“What we do is help a campaign run more and more like an effective business,” Phillips says as he types on his laptop, bringing up on a large projection screen the profile of an actual voter in Atlanta, whom we’ll call John Smith.

Phillips hits a button and up pops Smith’s basic information—address, phone number, etc. A click of the mouse brings more personal information—his photograph, his age and occupation, the names of his adult family members, his party affiliation and approximate income. Another click summons the exact amounts of political donations he has made. Phillips clicks once more, and a kind of molecular model appears on-screen, showing every political donor and potentially influential person Smith is linked to, in Atlanta and beyond, with dozens of interlocking nodes. Each node leads to the profile of another voter, about whom Aristotle knows just as much or more.

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An example of Aristotle in action: During the 2000 Republican presidential-primary season, Arizona senator John McCain was the media-darling challenger to Texas governor George W. Bush. Bush loyalists in Virginia decided to play hardball, holding the state voter lists hostage, according to a McCain campaign official. Without access to them, McCain couldn’t get the 10,000 signatures he needed to put his name on the state ballot. McCain’s desperate campaign managers called Phillips, who went to work immediately, creating a targeted list of Virginia Republicans known to vote in primaries and cross-referencing that with Aristotle’s files on Internet users in the state. Soon, matching subjects were seeing banner ads on their computer screens urging them to give the senator their signatures. McCain’s name was on the ballot in a matter of days. (It’s worth noting that Bush and McCain were both Aristotle clients in 2000.)

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