Time to Reconsider:::GOP Voter Vault Shipped Overseas

[banana republican]

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.

<snip>

It's not necessarily risky to ship your data overseas, but Compulink Systems did suffer a security incident in May 2001. During the period when Compulink was working on the Voter Vault project, its Web site was compromised. On May 10, 2001, a Russian hacker using the handle RyDen defaced the Compulink site, as shown on a page maintained by Attrition.org.

<snip>

On the Elance site, Compulink had described the Voter Vault as "a warehouse of Voter Data, preferences, affiliations and a lot of demographic data that the Republican Party uses for its analyses before planning election campaign strategy." That page has since been removed but a cached copy from Google still shows the language.

Besides the political hot button of using offshore developers in the middle of a recession, some experts question the security of shipping possibly sensitive data around.

<snip>

DataMart, which would be considered the Democratic equivalent of the Voter Vault, is an open-source application created by PlusThree, a software developer with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Vice President of marketing David Brunton says PlusThree did not outsource any of the development work on the DataMart.

Neither party is willing to reveal much about what's inside their databases. According to published reports, these databases combine publicly available data--such as voter registration records and individual political contributions--with consumer data obtained from data mining companies and personal information gathered from phone calls and door-to-door canvassing. According to a report in Business Intelligence Pipeline, a single record in the DataMart can contain more than 300 separate pieces of information.


http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117930,00.asp

And just what prey tell is in the GOP database??? And Where did they get it??? Which data mining companies???
AT&T; Verizon; Bell South perhaps???

[DBoon]

1. from the NSA?

these days, it wouldn't surprise me

[AndyA]

2. The GOP probably has a computer linked directly to the NSA.

I'm sure Bush wouldn't see any harm in that. Of course, if the Democratic Party wanted to do the same thing, why that would be ridiculous! Hypocrisy is alive and well and working for America in Washington.

[DBoon]

3. We need to run Democratic campaigns assuming this is the case

We need to assume that republicans have access to NSA intercepts, know all the behind-the-scenes planning, and have tons of very private embarassing information they are free to dump at a moments notice.

I'm afraid this is just the reality of the world we live in now.