Wired State

You're Hardly the Judge of Who's Big Brother

Here's Ethan Roeder -- the Obama campaign digital director -- telling us "I am Not Big Brother".

This ran on the very front page of the digital version of the New York Times in the center with huge visibility.

It's interesting that somebody besides me must have started to complain about all this digital scraping that Personal Democracy and Tech President have been touting uncritically -- to the point where they felt they had to engineer themselves a spot on the New York Times op-ed page, which they had no trouble getting (to help silence critics of the way Obama does things, I guess).

If you click on Ethan Roeder's name at the end of his column, it takes you right to his bio at Personal Democracy, in case you had trouble "following the networks". Small wonder Andrew Rasej is trying to downplay the Obama data grab.

The Times has no comments open under this brazen thing, but you could go to the Politico discussion.

Let me say this: the guy who is making the big data heist is hardly the one to be the judge also of whether he is Big Brother or not. Say, that logic works a lot like the Soviet/Russian prosecutorial system, where the prosecutor monitors himself.

And the data wasn't always willingly imparted, as we know there are not just non-Democrats in the files, but Democrats who didn't think they were helping the Obama campaign from their Facebook clicks.

It doesn't matter if it is aggregated or already "open to the public" -- what we saw in the prototyping of Second Life is that people really hated it when data-harvesters took data from them that was technically public, but not combined with other data. Like proximity data -- not only what they said, but who they said it to, or where they were geolocated. It's not about "open data"; it's about what you're doing with it.

Of course the Obama campaign mined the data to then tell the "stories" they developed to stampede people -- the "war on women" was pitched out to the single women in their 20s and 30s to scarify them; "voter suppression" was pitched to minorities to scarify them, and so on. What we know from TechPresident is that the campaign deliberately cherry-picked its own campaign messages to tailor to audiences -- which is done by all politicians, but still dishonest and now accelerated behind belief

The "Big Brother" oped also doesn't tell us what the campaign will do with the data -- as we know, they are hogging it.

Here's a handy list of "everything we know" about this campaign, according to ProPublica. But what PP misses is the storifying -- the concoction of the stories like the "war on women" or even "what would you do with $2000" and how that gets done and pitched and how it manipulates people.

Related articles

Harper Reed and the Soulessness of the New Machine

Misbehavioural Scientism

Obama data director: 'I am not Big Brother'

Obama data director: 'I am not Big Brother'

The Early Twitching of the Wired State

President Barack Obama's hands typing in a Twitter session. White House Photo by Pete Souza.

I found this downright creepy. Why doesn't anyone else?!

TechPresident was bragging today about Obama's Twitter tracking. This is paid content but you can see the first paragraphs:

President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign built a set of sophisticated tools to analyze thousands of Twitter conversation, using that knowledge to figure out whether its ideas were being hijakced or surrogates were staying on message, a former Obama for American staffer said Friday.

Michaelangelo D'Agonstino, Obama's former senior analyst for digital analytics, described all this at -- what else? -- Rootscamp. What did the Obama For America team do with all this mined information?

"There were times that I think our social media team would reach out to people, and reach out to someone who was vaguely a surrogate that wasn't in line with messaging, and they would contact them," D'Agostino said

They used a program called Visible Intelligence to mine and "score" tweets.

Michaelangelo "thought constantly about hashtags that would get hijacked or co-opted"  It would get turned around and used mockingly, he complained.

Of course, the left is expert at this far more than the right -- I recall with what exasperation I fled Flood Zone A and tried in vain to get real news about Hurrican Sandy with the #Sandy hashtag, only to find some asshole doing "Romney Storm Tips" as a form of parody. Thanks a lot guy. Or Steven Levy acting like a total asshole, retweeting the report that the stock exchange was under water and the storm had "occupied it". It was false. He took glee in it. He doesn't see his book's wealth as tied to the stock market at all, I guess. I confronted him over doing this -- he shrugged.

Yet the left earnestly believes that it is innocent and it is only the GOP that "hijacks" hashtags.

Of course, let's stop a minute here. Erm, hijacks? You mean...uses the same hashtag in a conversation you are using, but *criticizes* the things you gush about? You mean...people *daring* to criticize the President! Gasp!

See, this is really creepy stuff!

Then this puff piece, The President Doesn't Always Tweet, But When He Does...

Sigh.

In this piece, we see the eight "typical Americans" that the President engages with. We're supposed to be persuaded that they're from "all walks of life" and represent "different viewpoints". Of course they don't. The social media managers are expert at plucking out certain libertarians they can talk to on the left like Daryl Issa and pairing them with their lefty pals who have the same sort of techno-utopian vision. Matching the segments of the left and right that agree on getting rid of SOPA, possibly for different reasons, and then pretending you have had a "bi-partisan debate". This was like John Perry Barlow, Bob Weir, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Gary Johnson getting together on a Yahoo music show special to "Get Out the Vote" and pretending this was all "bi-partisan".

Says TechPresident:

The White House had bought its #My2k post from several days ago as a promoted Tweet, while House Majority Leader was promoting his tweet "Mr. President, time to get serious. Let's protect small businesses and families from a harmful increase in tax rates and cut spending. #my2k"

Conservative-leaning website Twitchy, meanwhile, documented efforts by Republican supporters to "hijack" the Q&A, and mocked initial confusion among reporters about what the right hashtag for the event was, as well as his use of the expression "tweet your member." But Twitchy did not seem to curate any of the actual questions and answers.

Documented efforts? Again, this "hijacking"? Why the hell can't "nonprogressives" use the same hashtag and speak of the topic critically?! Do the progs think the hashtag system is only for them to woot about their enthusiasms?!

Once again, we see the same methods and messages used by whitehouse.gov and all its related accounts on getting ObamaCare passed -- they seem to think that social media exists not to actually debate questions, and not to actually take accountability by answering the public's hard questions, but to use social media by one half of the country as a means to gang up on the other half of the country and "bring them around" -- and essentially browbeat them to death into accepting whatever the proposition of the day is. It is -- I can't say it enough -- profoundly creepy.

One of the things discussed is the private DM that some operators of these accounts engineered to influence people. I was one of those people who got a DM from Joe Biden -- Joe Biden! Real, verified Joe Biden! He followed me! In order to DM me! And wrote "Cathy, use your influence on Twitter to get out the vote!". Little 'ol me, still seen as someone to help Joe Biden GOTV!

 

 

The End of the Conversation at The New Republic

Chris Huges speaking at the DNC in January 2011 about how technology will win Obama's campaign. Photo by Steve Rhodes.

A sad day, reading about how the New York Times has to shed 30 people in the news room, as the Internet revolution eats more of its children -- and never replaces them. All of the big IT firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc -- taken together! -- don't even hire as many people as GM.

I got news for you: one cool digital dude that the New Yorker is hiring to make fun clicky things is not the same thing as 10 thoughtful people who write long pieces of investigative journalism or careful reflection. Like I said on Twitter: what, now we have not only code as law but code as literature?

And then there's New York Magazine to brag that "Chris Hughes is Turning 100" -- an unabashed admission that The New Republic -- which the rich boy Chris bought to help Obama win the elections  like a Russian oligarch buys up newspapers as "administrative resources" -- is now basically a vehicle for this Silicon Valley tycoon's cult of personality. (Fast Company's front page summed it up even last year in this article: The Kid Who Made Obama President.)

Despite centuries of experience that tells publishers to keep a distance from editors -- this is something that the Sulzbergers seemed to understand about the Times -- Hughes jumped in and started elbowing aside the TNR staff and penning editorials -- like the one pumping against SOPA/PIPA -- no surprise there. In a more normal situation, there might have been found editors and journalists to give a more critical take on this Google-manufactured tsunami of opposition to protecting copyright under the rule of law through the courts -- but hey, Silicon Valley is the new normal, not old East Coast guys who haven't realized that C.P. Snow is all turned upside down now.

Here's what I wrote to Chris Huges on Facebook:

The loss of the New Republic as a liberal institution is something I hold you and your Silicon Valley culture directly responsible for, and it's really among the greatest losses of my intellectual life. At least while we have to endure the Obama cult of personality and Timothy Noah on the front page, there is still Leon Wieseltier on the back page. Probably not for long. I refused to re-subscribe when I saw that none of your writers could address the geek open source cult -- one of the greatest threats of liberal democracy in our time -- sufficiently during the shift from social media to Big Data. For now, I still have to look to the WSJ to find any criticism of Obama's big data grab from all our social media pages, and any questioning of where that data will go and whether it will be entrusted to the DNC or only an Obama-approved machine. The day I see you do a critical report on that -- and something like the Mitch Kapor anti-SOPA astro-turfing -- is the day I might subscribe again because you might be upholding liberal values.

I finished with a link to Harper Reed and the Soul of the New Machine where I try to summarize years of insights about the open-source cult and how it took over the elections -- and threatens our very freedoms now.

I am so very depressed about the New Republic.... : (

In his piece in New York Magazine, Carl Swanson has a very troubling paragraph

But Hughes wants a single, readable magazine—with photographs!—not two stapled together, and this will entail treating Wieseltier, as one person familiar with the magazine put it, as an employee for the first time. This brewing tension was presumably why, when I was being regaled, quite pleasantly, by Wieseltier, we were interrupted twice by the magazine’s publicist, encouraging us to “wrap it up” by order of the “powers that be.”

It never occurred to me that even after Peretz left, Wieseltier could be cut short in this fashion. The thought that this Silicon Valley-turned-Silicon-Alley mogul would mess even with Wieseltier -- well, it's unthinkable.

“We have to be convening conversations," says Hughes with that brisk engineering muscularity that is a heart-beat behind the faux literary style of Silicon Valley -- even the liberal arts major version.

Christ Hughes is too young to realize that the phrase "we need to have a national conversation on X" is a quintessential socialist slogan, hammered and developed through  many a cadre meeting, of the sort not only purveyed back in the days of the Socialist Scholars' Conference in the 1980s and at DSA meetings, but still pushed today on the pages of Occupy blogs and of course then replayed on lefty CNN. It's part of the Trotskyist and other socialist sects' lexicon. It is so repeated and so now distended through all kinds of networks that few would recognize its provenance, and few would admit that it's part of the socialist shill -- why, how can you claim there is a red under the bed when it's merely about *talking*?

But when the socialists earnestly wheeled out this very well-worn slogan, they pretended that they are all for "dialogue" and "discussion" only -- they pretended then, and pretend now. They act as if disparity of wealth and "the 1/99%" distinct engenders a "need to have a conversation" as if people are sheeple who need to be "awakened" and be "empowered" to "find their voice" or even if they are "all for dialogue" in a democratic sort of way.

But hey, if it were only "a conversation," there'd be no need to block traffic and try to topple institutions like the stock market with Marxist-Leninist concepts sprinkled over the twitters like holy water, you know?

So what are Chris Hughes' "conversations"? Well, here's one where the deck is TOTALLY loaded with non-critics of the Internet and the Silicon Valley "better world" team:

On November 15, the magazine convened what promises to be the first of them, moderated by Hughes and featuring Arianna Huffington and Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley investor who helped found PayPal and funded Facebook. The panel was held in a glass-walled events room at Lincoln Center and built around the putative provocation: Has Twitter Made Democracy Impossible?

I'll see if there is a transcript or tape of that somewhere -- I didn't follow it -- but I would have to answer: yes, it has. Because it was used to put one "progressive" candidate in power, virtually without debate, and help him issue edicts or premature announcements of vetos  -- without any votes in Congress -- over issues like SOPA or CISPA.

I'll write another day what TNR meant in past years, which was most definitely the non-socialist and non-communist left -- the center-left alternative to The Nation or In These Times.

But what it has meant in our time before Hughes was factual criticism of the Republicans, but not merely with the "progressive" memes. The investigative journalism about Perry, that showed Texas under his administration not so much an economic prosperity tale so much as a tale of big government contracts to some businesses was the sort of story that sunk a total campaign -- but convincingly so, with all the real facts presented -- and not merely oppo research facts. The article on Bain, however, *might* have convinced me not to vote for Romney -- and nearly did for awhile -- if I didn't have also on my desk The Wall Street Journal, which could explain that private equity capital saved the steel factory's ass when it was failing, and merely delayed the inevitable, given world steel prices. TNR just didn't put in the context like that -- and they lost my faith.

And with Timothy Noah endlessly on the front page spouting pro-Obama catechism and all those Jonathans doing the same -- there's only Wieseltier most days. Sadly, on Russia, they've hired Julia Ioffe -- and I think I've neatly put my finger on the problem with her: light a candle under her ink, and the pro-Putin lines between the lines will turn purple...To bad we don't have candles anymore on Kindles...

Worst of all, for all that "free and open source" dreck that the Silicon Valley people push, and for all their bragging that they took down the paywall during the elections, THE COMMENTS ARE NOT FREE, i.e. you have to subscribe to comment.

Now, that's actually my proposal of long ago to try to make paid content more viable -- we should all pay to comment and that will filter out the "trolls" (not a term I like to use, but for the sake of brevity).

But TNR gives you no motivation because unlike some other magazines, the author's of the articles never, ever, ever answer even really obvious pointed questions about their work in the comments. And certain readers are allowed to pursue side vendettas they've had for years for endless pages, blocking the long view of everyone else, that moderation appears to be a joke. The editors also never pull out some readers into pull quotes as the Times does, or "picks" or "called out" as Forbes does -- to give some incentive to even bother to write comments.

There are way too many VERY LONG pieces by Evgeny Morozov with never a critique of *him* -- and never any reasoned critiques of the people he so nastily and snarkily hates on, like Jeff Jarvis.

The book reviews still seem good -- Hughes probably hasn't put his hand to them yet, and hasn't turned them into paragraphs that help sell titles on Kindle and Nook.

Will TNR push out Wieseltier -- the last of the thoughtful supporters of Israel and critics of Islamism and its supporters in the West? Will they bring back Peter Beinhart, which will signal the ultimate death of TNR and its conversion into The Fly -- part Daily Beast, part Nation, part GQ?

Will they bring back David Rieff? Will they publish Masha Gessen as an antidote to Ioffe?

Oh, who cares. They will not get my three days' of grocery money regardless. I do believe it's hopeless : (

 

 

 

 

The Inherent Unfairness of Geek Coded Voting Tools

Yet another lefty Scott Walker- hater geek codes up a site and thinks he can be viewed as an honest broker in the voting business. He says his business failed, but his idea is great and is just waiting to be picked up by "the people" who will "carry the torch". Nevermind that this is a guy that thinks anti-Walker protesters "convey information" but by implication, then, their opponents "purvey falsehoods". Fortunately, reason, common sense, and fairness prevailed and the geeks and the lefties and the "scientists" of the Democratic Party who muscled in unions, Occupy, Michael Moore, etc. could not prevail. Scott Walker was not recalled. You lose, good day, sir.

The market voted on this failed web site -- it didn't serve people for all kinds of reasons. He blames the failure on features of his team or his location or lack of full-time programmers or sufficient VC capital. But the reality is, a voting site like this is UNTRUSTWORTHY and will only gain like-minded geeks and their "progressive" pals who want to socialize with each other and reinforce each other, not people really interested in authentic debate and real deliberation leading to consensus in a liberal democracy. These things are awfully hard to replicate anyway online, but they are even more difficult because of the heavily-biased utopian Marxist-style ideals that geeks like this bring to the task.

So typical of the "scientism"of the left. The people who protested against Walker weren't merely "conveying information". They were *expressing an opinion* that they believed municipal unions should enjoy unlimited collective bargaining rights even though they are state unions paid out of the taxpayers' pockets, not in private industry. And these people with "information" in fact then *lost* the recall vote, and Scott Walker was not recalled, despite their hatred of him. Other people had voted for him and wanted to keep him and his plans to reduce the deficit. And you know, when you win an election, that's that, hey don't be a sore loser, as Obama gloaters are telling us now.

Voting is not "broken". Geeks are broken in their understanding of what safeguards are needed in elections. If it were up to them, they'd abolish political parties (Sergei Brin's proposal), and they'd just code up a platform where we'd all vote on prepared propositions and "like" them (Sergei's friends). No thanks! I want real democracy with yes/no votes and deliberation that results in propositions, not "science" that produces them.

You and your geek friends with your worldview may love "OurBallotBox," but the rest of us don't share your views, and you don't have a better idea for us than "patch or GTFO" or "remove" as in "Harper Reed's tips for problem solving". Sorry, but that's not a democracy, it's totalitarianism.

Every single one of your ideas for "fixing" the problems of "political social networks" in fact perpetuates the real problems of geek networks antithetical to democracy:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/socialmediaengineering.html
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/02/the-seven-deadly-flaws-of-online-democracy-.html

The typical Redditt style mass site has features like "downvoting" that make it possible for aggressive minorities or intolerant majorities to eliminate dissent from the view. Surfacing and sorting in fact amount to algorithms that usually favour the devs' friends -- the early adapters get more followers, they get listed as the recommended people to follow, they are the power users on the power curve, etc.

Open data? And who gets to slice and dice it? Your friend Nate Silver? With science? And you're sure Nate Silver never makes a political judgement, ever?

You just hate it that "certain radio hosts" can articulate an opinion and get followers, don't you! You wish you could just rule everybody with your Twitter account as a "thought leader"!

Change.org like all left-leaning platforms pretending to be for "everybody" have several severely built-in flaws: a) their cadres promote some petitions and not others that fit their views b) if you ever develop a difficulty in registering and fielding a petition, they simply have no customer service to help you, like all these big platforms, you're toast c) your petition is only as good as your social media network to promote it, if you aren't chosen by the devs. Very, very unfair system.

POPVOX has a very heavy bias problem whereby it lets people post comments only in favour of their vote, and not in criticism of the opposite vote. It is not a real simulation of real democracy where people argue and deliberate with fair conditions. POPVOX also fronts and promotes the ideas they like, they don't create a level playing field:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/02/popvox-or-poxvip-how-a-voting-platform-intrudes-on-democracy-and-skews-the-views.html
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/02/email-from-marci-harris-of-popvox-and-my-reply-are-you-building-lists-for-lobbyists.html

All the makers of all the platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc. claim to be wanting to "effect change" and to "make a better world". What they mean is that they want to weld their own ideas into the platform and then let it be hijacked by data-miners from Obama for America. You see these tools as Trojan horses and stalking horses for your own perspective. And that's why people don't view you as fair and will go on disrupting what you do. Of course, you'll try to deal with them by mute, ban, block but the Internet routes around.

Accordingly, what I saw to all these wannabe totalitarianism who want to code these platforms to engender the "disruptive" -- revolutionary -- change that will destroy "the old order," here's what you would really have to do to ensure real democracy:

1. Not just verify identity but have a plan for fighting those who will insist on preserving anonymity and invoke all kinds of notions of repression of dissent in order to justify their unwillingness to face accountability.  This might mean separating the voting apparatus with secret ballot but verified identity and pseudonymous discussion (backed by real identity).

2. Any propositions must be allowed to be submitted, and allowed to attract votes, with no time limits or thresholds  to be viewed. None. Absolutely none. Every geek-driven site from the WhiteHouse.gov to SecondLife.com injects various restrictive notions to suit their own notions, but these have to be jettisoned. There is absolutely no reason why any system can't have an unlimited number of proposals, votes, and comments, and be reviewed as needed by elected officials. The limits geeks devise here coming out of clutchy little notions of tidiness of binary notions of numerics have to go. In a world where *search* is used to find propositions of interest, any effort to restrict size, frequency, numbers of votes, etc. etc. is unnecessary.

3. Search algorithms must be open and publicized and any notion of secrecy for the sake of preventing "gaming" have to be jettisoned. Devise an open algorithm that has red dye on the gaming, or don't make a voting system. End of story. This is the central flaw of all voting systems.

4. Leave gamification out of the system. Nobody needs any net nerds who get badges and reputational points for posting the most, voting the most, getting the most passed, etc. Democracy works, well, when it works.

5. First Amendment level protection of free speech. No speech codes, terms of service with overbroad language about "incivility," no abuse reporting accepted for "hate speech," etc. etc. Unless somebody has a successful judge's decision from a court proceeding in a libel case or a case of "incitement to imminent violence," they cannot have the platform provider remove speech. Accordingly, no blocks, ban, mutes, downvotes, etc. on speech grounds whatsoever. Offenses like malicious scripts with spam bots may be punishable under the TOS, but not statements that hurt the feelings of thin-skinned geeks and forums divas.

6. Independent, separate, impartial civilian review board that reviews the work of the voter platform. Ideally, a voting platform constituent assembly made up of any registered party, not just geeks who turn out mainly to be technocommunists and libertarians and Democrats, but all parties, should be involved in the decisions about the coding and features, and allowed to vote on feature requests and bug prioritization.

7. NGOs, movements, trade unions, astroturfs like moveon.org or Daily Kos or Red State should also have meaningful participation but not an equal vote to registered parties that developed platforms which their members get to vote on at conventions.

8. No repeal of Citizens' United, and allowance of any political speech in the forum of ads.

9. No one can close anyone else's proposal or proposition, or suggest that it "can't be done" or devise a minimum necessary number of votes for it to be featured or looked at. Surfacing of proposals can be done all kinds of ways, from automatic 15 minutes of fame at first posting, to random features in one column, to most popular displayed. But this has to be looked and debate constantly as to its fairness, or flashmobbing takes over and only the popular get popular attention. No vote is removed if it is "defunct," and not voted on. Get over any fear of "clutter" as this is the Internet where it's only a miniature storage issue. Independent free media is the necessary partner of any voting system.

10. No automatic reputation systems, i.e. through downvotes or upvotes, likes or dislikes, or number of postings. The independent and free media and blogosphere can cover people making propositions with the information they gather about them and the judgements for which they take responsibility.

I'm sure there's lots more, but I can see this is going to be a growing battlefield. We need to get the geeks out of this business and have a serious coalition of normal people enter this field and bat away all their totalitarianisms or we will lose our freedom. I'm not kidding.

 

 

 

"Don't Ask Someone to Work on a Romny App if They Hate Republicans"

Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica believes he's closed the case -- mumbling that some "staff" of the Romney campaign and "volunteers" coded the mess that was Orca -- and never really confirming anything or naming names. Obviously, the firms cited that received campaign money for their services answered that they were under an NDA and couldn't talk.

Funny how Obama's devs who were undoubtedly under an NDA as well could blab as much as they wanted about their work lol.

Another consultant handled by Targeted Victory was Rockfish Interactive, which Sean Gallagher reports was responsible for the failed VP notification app (see the pre-fail puff piece in Ad Age). At long last the coder of the failed app is noted -- and it wasn't that easy to find at first because Targeted Victory also featured the failed VP app on their website as if it were theirs. 

This reminds me of the way it's awfully hard sometimes to find the source of Russian news stories because the little papers are shamelessly copied by the larger papers and some big national paper may have utterly stolen from a little one and made it seem as if it were its own.

Zac spins the fail of the app by noting that the notification app was merely the shell for another piece of software that was later pushed to help people file Romney support messages on social media. Except...people like me don't want dopey pre-fabbed content from dweebs in a campaign -- if I want to write something in support of Romney's ideas I write it myself on Facebook or blogs. I never once clicked on the Facebook ads for Romney simply because my vote for Romney is not about the Republican Party and I don't want Facebook to start pushing that at me and making tht part of my digital footprint.

The spin on this app is that it still was in the top apps downloaded from the Apple store and still notified at least the Romney supporters who weren't "glued to Drudge 24/7" when the VP pick was made because they aren't necessarily news junkies but just want a personal notification.

Hmm, that's not good enough, because they promised it was going to be special. And why couldn't it be? Oh, maybe getting the outsourced shop in Arkansas coordinated with the social media shop in Alexandria, VA coordinated with the Bostin digital director...and then literally Paul Ryan and Romney themselves -- oh, maybe it was all too hard. Why? An app is a speedy thing. If they took their principle and had him stand at the mike at the right time, so to speak, it could have gone from Romney's lips to our ears before the Times. Truly. Why didn't it? What Romney got out of it was a big data haul with all our names and zip codes and maybe some donations. But we got a failed app. Just making a prettily designed app that works fast and downloads properly for people isn't enough; there has to be the content and the candidate connection, for real.

When you study Rockfish and it's story, you can instantly see the pattern I've kept highlighting -- the Romney decision to get boutique firms that have clients from Johnson and Johnson to Wal-mart -- and that perform on a political campaign like it's a brand of shampoo. The best that money can buy.

Interestingly -- FASCINATINGLY, given the arduous discussion at Ars Technica, in making this failed app for the big-spending Romney campaign, this company HASTENED to distance themselves from the Republican brand:

"This mobile app wasn't our idea," said Rockfish Founder Kenny Tomlin. "They wanted to do it and came to us to build it. Which we were excited about ... and they've been great to work with. But we have no intention of politics becoming a focus of our business; we're just a technology partner. We're not a digital strategy agency for the RNC."

Is it ANY WONDER when you have a guy like Kenny Tomlin who is distancing himself as fast as he can in print from Romney so as to keep all his business options only, that the app FAILED? And failed -- for all your literalists and Fiskers out there -- not necessarily because it wasn't pretty and downloadable and nominally worked, and not necessarily because Tomlin didn't support the GOP, but because nobody coordinated the day of show to get the job done right or to have interesting content in it after the flop and put the entire job in the context of campaigning with spirit.

Interestingly, Kenny Tomlin makes the exact points I've been making -- and admits -- big-time! -- that you need party enthusiasm or at least not sabotage:

In the current realm of political advertising, general-market agencies don't do much political work. One reason is that general-market agency employees might resist working for a candidate of a particular party. Another reason is that political campaigns find non-political ad agencies too slow to work with in the heat of a campaign.

"I wasn't worried about alienating employees because it's just a small team working on the business," said Mr. Tomlin. "I wasn't going to ask someone to work on a Mitt Romney mobile app if they hate Republicans. And just like every agency, there are brands and companies you work with that not everyone in the agency likes, but you find the people within who are passionate about it and put them on the business."

Oh. Is that how you do it, Kenny? Really? Say, I have the forums just for you: Ars Technica. Go and talk to all the brains there who will tell you that you shouldn't approach this issue with such discrimination! Why, you should explain that you don't understand their funny squeamishness and ridiculous political correctness! You should tell them that you would handle the obvious problem of coders and digital artists not liking candidates by not giving them the job. You get why you can't give them the job.

Well if you have to segregate your staff that way and make some of them drink out of different water fountains, how can you be sure the entire shop pulls together to get the job done? OH YOU CAN'T BECAUSE IT FAILED.   Who's the person in your shop that *does* hate Republicans that you have to keep these jobs away from them? Do we have to worry? (And what do you know about the AMERCIA accident?)

*Face-Palm* Romney's Digital Director Used Obama's Director of Analytics

Well, if it seemed bad enough that it seems Romney had Al Gore's developer on his aps, and Obama voters in his digital shops who may have not been that much into Romney, but it can and does get worse:  Romney's digital director Zac Moffatt hired Obama's 2008 director of analytics Dan Siroker -- the dude that does the A/B tests. I'll bet there will be more coming out of that nature, and when we finally get the story of who really worked on Orca and how they worked on it, we may know more.

I will continue my operating hypothesis here: Democratic developers -- taken right from Obama's past campaign and Al Gore's past campaign -- plus Obama supporters  -- did not have the requisite enthusiasm, follow-up and sustainability to benefit Romney's campaign and the Republican Party in the future.

I continue to ask whether they sabotaged Romney's digital work -- and by sabotage I mean some act on a continium from deliberately hacking to simply letting things fail through neglect or indifference or spite.

My pursuit of these questions does not in any way mean that I think Orca caused Romney's downfall -- not when the candidate himself doesn't mention anything remotely like technology as a problem, but makes the rather intolerant suggestion that he lost because he didn't have "stuff" to give away to certain constituencies, like Obama did.

But this is a larger issue to pursue for plurality in our country, and I think the Republican party, especially given the tremendous amount of money it did attract for this campaign, including even my little $28 for the first time in my life, has to get accountability on the tech here.

Any human resources person in any political campaign in the land will instantly grasp that the notion of hiring your political rivals' devs is not a good idea, after this debacle.

In fact, each and every one of the firms involved in this debacle should be working to make some persuasive PR statements that they are impartial and professional and work for any client or they cannot be trusted. Even if they make those statements -- and they aren't making them as they don't care or are afraid -- wouldn't take away the sting. Every single operative in every single Republican stronghold related to all things digital has to absorb the lesson of this campaign: keep it all in your own pew and play close attention to the geeks.

You know, that's what Obama did, and he won. He built everything inhouse. He used the top people from different firms, but they were ardent supporters who wanted him to win and gave it their all.

That didn't happen for Romney, and while you could cynically say that's because he's not attractive as a one percenter, dissing the 47% not his constituents, you do have to have a wider concern for how democracy will be achieved in our digital age.

I'm going to keep on commenting on this awful story of the failure of the tech side of Romney's campaign because it has lessons not only for Republican campaigns, but lessons about the larger issue of how we can get reliable, impartial and neutral tools for democracy via the Internet from an ethics-free and cynical geek class that feels no stake in political parties and their concerns.

If you don't think this is a fair characterization of geekdom, well, hear it from the Geek-in-Chief himself, Sergey Brin, who said on G+, on the eve of the elections, that he wishes there were no political parties at all, but just a lot of independents. Gosh, that sounded like a lovely fairy-tale until you saw Sergei's circle-friends offering to flesh out that dream by making Google run a platform for everybody to implement this lovely dream, oh, presumably by clicking up propositions that those nice geeks make up for you.

I should have thought to go to Pandodaily.com first with this because they are more independent than TechCrunch obviously, and bring some of that same thoughtfulness to reporting that TechCrunch used to have (when they were there).

A reporter discussed the tech of the campaign back in September, and naturally focused on Zac Moffatt, and discussed that eternal nerd gr8 deb8 as to whether inhouse/outsource or closed/open are better options,

Romney digital director Moffat defended this strategy, saying:

    It’s hard to challenge the marketplace, because the marketplace is always innovating. The Obama campaign has a hubris based on the thinking that the only way to win is to build everything in house. They have a lot more engineers than us, yes. But they think that they have the only people that understand big data and social media. We leverage IBM who has the very best of the best. They [Obama] don’t dominate technology, but they dominate technology PR.

I have no idea what IBM, or Microsoft did on this job -- we'll keep looking.

My constant blogging and commenting about this situation has amounted to exactly the reverse of what Zac is saying here. He thinks Obama had the hubris because they put it all inhouse and thought they were the only ones who understood big data and social media.

But...it turned out Zac had the hubris (geeks always do) for thinking Obama was wrong to keep it house. As to which of them teams had better understanding of "big data" -- well, that remains to be seen. Looks like Obama does; he won. Winning is only about big data these days and it's not surprising that this concept breaks and that someday, it will be jettisoned, hopefully not violently by angry people with pitchforks and torches who feel disenfranchised by digital gurus.

Pando Daily further reported on Zac's thinking and it is here for the first time -- startlingly -- that I see Moffatt's own interior thinking as he tells us that he had to overcome reticence in himself about hiring from among Obama's old campaign people. Again, we see the "inhouse" versus "outsource" tension:

At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, tech people I talked to approvingly described Obama’s digital team as a “startup within a startup.” Rather than outsource the building of various tools to other companies, it has developed everything in-house.

When I put that claim to Moffatt, however, he protests that the opposite is true. The Obama campaign, he asserts, is more like government. “They’ve pulled everything together and determined that they can do everything best,” he says. “We actually function like a startup. We are finding the best minds and best companies, but if something doesn’t work it’s easy for us to iterate and pivot into a new direction.” By relying on in-house tools, you can very quickly get lumped with cumbersome legacy items that becomes costly over time. “For me, it looks much more like central planning than it does anything else.”

Yet the complaints I've heard from Romney volunteers and poll watchers are that they felt the Romney campaign was too centralized and chilly toward local leaders, and that when Orca failed, it was precisely because it was so centralized, and forcing serial processing and not parallel processing.

Certainly, Moffatt’s team has made strong use of startups. It works with Rally.org for fundraising, Tout for shortform video, Square for field donations, and Eventbrite for, well, guess. Moffatt says Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all been “amazing” partners, to the point where people from those companies are almost like embedded staff on the campaign. The hardest decision for Moffatt to make, however, was signing up to use Optimizely for “A/B” testing. Optimizely was started by former Google employee Dan Siroker, who was director of analytics for Obama’s 2008 campaign. “Once I got over myself, I was able to do that,” Moffatt says with a wry laugh.

Within the Romney campaign, digital’s importance has never been called into question. Two weeks ago, the campaign passed 20 million voter contacts – that’s eight times as many phone calls as were placed at the same time during the John McCain campaign in 2008. Digital, in other words, has proven its scale and flexibility beyond doubt. “Those two have married up to allow us to produce an 800 percent lift, which is really kind of the impressive point,” Moffatt says. “People are always like, ‘Oh does it work?’ I mean, yeah, it works – that’s about as tangible an example as you can see.”

But it didn't work. And Moffatt maybe shouldn't have gotten over himself. He might actually have done better to build it inhouse with very gung-ho reliable people who weren't mined from the opposition team.

This is both about a concept for software productions, and about how to win a campaign, and today they are merged.

Sure, Obama's plan sounds to me awfully socialist and Bolshevik, even, secretive and centralized with only the cadres. Romney's plan seemed more market-oriented and merit-driven rather than comrade-driven, the bazaar rather than the cathedral.

Yet in the end, that jumble of supposed merit-based market-delivered capacities broke badly, because they didn't have spirit.

Over at CNN, there was also this report earlier:

Romney uses startup hatched by Obama campaign

Former Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) employee Dan Siroker joined Obama's campaign in 2008 and became the director of analytics, coming up with the idea for the technology that would better target voters during the campaign.

TechCrunch also covered it. 

In my many years living inside what may be the world's largest open source/proprietary combination software project involving ordinary people in the world -- Second Life -- I came to loathe the A/B test stuff. Not because I somehow don't accept "science" and "marketing principles". But because the principles were applied to small samples over short periods of time and didn't always make sense. The metrics were also artificially contrived. They were political, like everything in life.

Digital nerds often look for "conversion". How many sign-ups lead to how many hours on line lead to how many premium accounts with a monthly subscription. They pick things they can measure and care about such as revenue for their coffers or concurrency that they can show off to their fellow geek friends and don't look at other things. Like the virtual worlds GDP. Like the amount of money spent per hour, regardless of membership status. Like how many signups who bought content or made friends retained and their prospects for higher expenditures.

In any event, Romney's splash page probably got 100 times more scrutiny that secondlife.com which has been a subject of ENDLESS debate over the 10 years it has eternally been in beta -- and of course with real-life consequences.

But sometimes I find that the 20-somethings working in these digital agencies are really only finding out what their co-workers and friends think of things and serving up a big dollop of "Works On My Machine" along side it. I could endlessly describe why the websites and apps, which I signed up for, didn't work for me, but who cares? I'm the demographic they think is thrilled with the notion that maybe I could have dinner with George Clooney -- i.e. Paul Ryan lol -- if I donate only $3.

Huge money is at stake. Open Secrets site shows us a budget of $17 million for Targeted Victory. You know, that's a lot of social media work. And for that price tag, you should have apps that work and better repartees on Twitter. And I believe that was unavailable because Romney supporters were not on the job.

My hunch is that in these half dozen companies around the failed Romney campaign there is some morning-after soul-searching and some executives worried about how they look over this loss, especially because of Orca, which taints the whole thing in tech terms. And they are either going to double down and decide they will continue to serve Republican campaigns even with Democratic help, or they are looking around for how they can ensure better team spirit if the top CEOs themselves are Republicans. Maybe some employees are packing their bags -- who wants to work in a firm that serves Republicans when they've just lost? If it's a firm that serves beverage companies, lawn-mower manufacturers, universities and hospitals, AND political campaigns -- with a huge diverse menu like Amazon.com or IBM -- they can weather it.

But they're going to be thinking about this, I'm sure. And not because of my blog, but because the country has been deeply polarized by the Community-Organizer-in-Chief.

Moffatt spent the whole campaign saying why Obama was wrong, and his campaign techniques were right, as interviews like this tell us. Yet they didn't work. Somehow, when you have the idea that "I can't help it if people go to MittRomney.com and then go somewhere else" -- you havn't realized that your job is to make sure they do stay there.

 

 

 

Packet Rat

In his follow-up blog on Orca, "Orca was no fail-whale says Romney's digital director", former Navy man Sean Gallagher (@packetrat) tries to pretend that there's some conservative blogging conspiracy out there, of which I'm ostensibly a part with my post, and pretend that in these conservative blogs, weepy sore losers in the GOP have claimed that the Orca software failure was the reason for Romney's loss.

Nonsense. I haven't written that and neither have any other blogs that I've seen -- and there aren't that many. Demanding answers for why the voting technology for 30,000 volunteers serving half of America's voters in a voting campaign isn't spinning conspiracy theories, it's demanding accountability from geeks on a job. That's okay to do!

Most articles about the Orca failure arev on the left and liberal side of the blogosphere and the mainstream media. There's a reason for that: there's not as much attention to tech issues in the conservative movement.

Now there will be!

Here's how Sean puts me into the limelight with a sort of synedoche, making it seems as if there is a whole cabal of these bloggers out there, when in fact it's only me on a small blog that isn't even much covering elections and politics but critically covers Internet policy (so it intersects):

"For whatever reasons, the conservative bloggers have latched onto Orca as the reason it all fell apart," Moffatt added. Those bloggers have suggested that developers with Democratic sympathies somehow acted as a fifth column within the Romney camp. Targeted Victory was singled out by some bloggers because a few of its developers worked for Al Gore in the past.

I don't know how Moffatt came to this conclusion, or whether he read my little blog, but there aren't any blogs I've seen -- Red State etc -- or mainstream right-wing media -- National Review -- that in fact claims that Orca is the reason for the failure for his campaign. They only talk about the harm to volunteers and the GOTV and how that did hurt some votes. I think I saw one line of vote and state columns that was trying to calculate whether Romney could have won some states if the rate of GOTV worked. But there was no concerted claim that Orca caused Romney to lose the 2012 election -- as a concept, this only existed in Sean's mind as something he needed to prove to demonize the right.

My blogs are all on the record and don't claim that; so are my tweets. Wanting to know who is responsible for the failure and not accepting Gallagher's soft touch on Moffatt is not a conspiracy theory or belief that technology made or broke Romney's campaign.

But Orca is a little like Nixon's five-o-clock shadow on TV, yanno?

It's ok to ask questions about it.

Red State talked more conceputally of management problems and the problem of outsourcing. Others talked about user frustrations. None of them examined the devs behind the scenes.

But, using a sort of journalistic sleight-of-hand very common among Internet journalists, Sean then segues into his own opinion about what he thinks is out there, right after the sentence where he's quoted his newsmaker, and made it seem "bloggers have suggested that developers with Democratic sympathies somehow acted as a fifth column"

But I'm the only who has written anything like this, and of course, it's a contraction of my more nuanced argument, but indeed I've flagged the problem with these tech firms: they can't get good help for something like Romney's aps because the help doesn't vote for Romney or care for Romney or other Republicans. "Fifth column" is his McCarthyesque word, not mine, but it does summarize the problem: as a class of people, geeks are liberal, left-leaning or libertarian; the major social media platforms have all boosted Obama and been used heavily by Obama (his town-halls); and it's hard to understand how we will have any diversity of political expression under those circumstances.

We won't.

We didn't.

I'm told by zillions of geek fanboyz of Obama and all things community-organized in the Ars Technica comments that coders can rise above their political prejudices and do a good job. Oh? I don't believe. I don't even see that sort of statement by any of these firms. I'm just not buying it, and everything I know about coders -- and I've had considerable exposure to them -- let's me know that I'm absolutely on the money asking why Al Gore's guy is going to be able to build a good Romney ap.

Targeted Victory was singled out by some bloggers because a few of its developers worked for Al Gore in the past.

In fact, there's only one blogger who did that -- me. And there's also only one developer who worked for Al Gore. But don't let that stop the Rat from trying to make it into an entire trend lol. God, do I know these sorts of journalistic tricks.

I knew from the first moment Sean Gallagher made the snotty Twitter snark to me that he would do his own reporting, thank you very much, and rely on "the facts" that I would get some sort of nasty. I didn't know whether it was a boot, block or ban -- but I underestimated Sean the Navy man -- he was able to write an entire blog post about little old me on his high-profile blog site and get lots of views.

Then there was the added favour that he, or his friends, or his fanz performed for me -- posting his article to Fark. Given that this posting occurred two days after his article ran, I don't think it's because in fact it got all this huge attention; I think it was put there to sic the mob here. That isn't a conspiracy theory or paranoia, duh, that's just logic and good sense about how geeks work when they try to Google-bomb people. And of course it could be utterly coincidental, it just got picked up by some goon and that was that.

 Writes Gallagher:

"Why do they have Al Gore's dev working on Romney's social media development?!" blogger Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick asked. "Truly, how can they expect dedication?" She also singled out another developer who is African-American and "who has a 96 percent chance of being an Obama voter… I will be accused of 'racism' for even flagging. But it's the truth."

This paragraph isn't in my blog as such; it appears to be taken from a tweet and parts of some paragraphs are merged together, I'll  have to find it all. But indeed, I've asked this question over and over.

I haven't "singled out" any black person in some racist rant; I've pointed out that a black developer, 96% likely to vote for Obama, may not be enthusiastic enough to make a good Romney ap or work on a demanding project for Romney.

Here's what I actually wrote:

Sure enough, what I found were two guys who looked like very likely Obama voters. And that's ok to say. That is our reality. That isn't racism. That's a report on how the world runs now -- Obama won 50% of the vote because he was able to count on minorities who voted in far larger numbers, and count on the fact that the older conservatives are mainly white -- and didn't even turn out for Romney (and not only because the software broke down).

Here's what Sean wrote further:

Moffatt said that this kind of thinking puts too much faith in a single piece of software. "Anyone who knows campaigns knows this was all baked in before that day—there was no magic, Orca wasn't a silver bullet," he said. "But on the flip side, when you're on a campaign that has only six months of infrastructure time, sometimes you have to throw a Hail Mary. It's really hard to go up against someone who has four years of lead time."

Er, no. It doesn't put "faith in a single piece of software". It asks why this software broke down. You know, it is very, very simple. The goddamn thing didn't work; many people asked why; they found that the digital manager farmed a lot of stuff out and didn't keep good control and oversight of it, as he himself appears to admit.

But that's why *I* ask who the devs were, and what their political sympathies were, because I don't understand how this job got done without the spirit and determination that is in a political campaign of true believers.

Again, here's what I actually wrote -- and you can see where Gallagher put the contractions and did the slicing to fit his caricature of the "right-wing" and a "racist".

And there is nothing wrong with that, and that is the norm. But it does mean you have to ask, if you are the Romney campaign, whether someone who is going to go in the morning and vote for your rival is really going to stay up all night with the Monsters and the Red Bulls and do for you everything possible to fix your clusterfrack.

This is just due dilligence. But it's the kind that nobody wants to talk about, nobody will mention, and I will be accused of "racism" for even flagging. But it's the truth. And would you rather have me say the answer is "incompetence" -- as Ekdahl is saying -- because they are minorities? Or hear that they may  not have done their utmost to pre-test and re-test and trouble-shoot precisely because it wasn't a vocation, it was just a gig, and they were voting for somebody else anyway?

Because there isn't some other reason -- like "technology doesn't work". It worked for Obama! Technology works, you know lol?

Neither of these devs seems to have tested their work. Well, Moffatt tells us lamely that it was "tested in another setting" -- but that's double talk. User testing would have caught some of these problems.

I've been deluged with hate comments on both Ars Technica and Fark claiming that I don't seem to know how software projects work. But as you can see, I wrote about the need to test work, and do user-testing.

Did MindSHIFT Technologies Mess Up Orca for Romney?

Oh, I missed this yesterday -- because I was working and only noticing the tweets about Russia and about the whole Petraeus thing (we need to give that series of nested-doll scandals a name).

Sean Gallagher, who so nastily portrayed me in his blog on Ars Technica because I kept after him about Orca, and has not named any developers since his second follow-up article was posted on November 12 now announces casually on Twitter:

Waiting to hear back from Best Buy subsidiary mindShift on what dev they did for Romney campaign. They do .NET and web apps, data center ops

Indeed!

mindShift is one of those firms that "takes IT off your plate" if you are not a specialist and "outsources it" (i.e. takes it off your plate) if you are a specialist. Who knows if they were near the Romney campaign? How did he find that out?

Sean likely picked up this scuttle by mining ycombinator chat, where some of the best tech gossip is, looking at the comments on other blogs, going and combing through Linked-in, looking at job boards for geeks to see where the jobs were farmed out for this project, which may have been disguised or described vaguely, talking to people who hang out in bars with tech people on various projects, calling his pals who know where the projects are, or...just waiting for his cell to ring or his DM to light up on Hootsuite because these are all the ways you find out stuff as a tech journalist. Or maybe he sat in an IRC channel all day. I don't have time for that and am not paid to do that.

Or... maybe he just, you know, Googled around, and found things like this.

Most journalists know to go work all those sites -- whenever I needed to find which congressmen was getting lunched up and getting consultant fees from the government of Kazakhstan, I would look at those sorts of sites.

Yeah, all that gov 2.0 dreck out there with all that sites telling you how much the interns make in every government office (but never Beth Noveck's salary at the White House OSTP) -- occasionally are worth something! From Open Secrets, with the registered campaign secrets, we find this tell-tale line:

Mindshift Technologies

$811,214

28

Given what a large-ticket item that was in the campaign -- nearly a million dollars in 28 payments -- it sure does sound like a big software project for a company that does, as Sean said on Twitter, "data center ops"

Yeah, an election campaign is really just like a big call center, you know!

So....now I'm going to ask the question very loud and clear here: who were the devs on this job? Were they Obama voters? Were they really willing to do a good job for Romney?

Because it matters.

$811,214!  But that may not have been for Orca -- it's not that much money, really, for software.

It's actually nothing compared to what Targeted Victory got for social media work and analysis (and they didn't work on Orca, but did work on some of the other aps, including the failed VP pick ap):

Targeted Victory

$17,187,005

43

What the Fark?! In Which I Am Flash-Mobbed by 5,000 Haters

Piggy in Lord of the Flies.

The last two days, this blog has been deluged with about 5000 more hits than usual from something I'd never heard of called Fark -- which seems to be like a cross between Redditt and 4chan.

They've featured my blog on their front page of articles in the Politics section to ridicule, and so hundreds of boys are having a fun time there breaking my glasses. Here's what the headline says:

Some Conspiracy Gal:  Romney's ORCA system failed not due to incompetence, but instead liberal programmer sabotage. Bonus: includes totally "not racist" accusation of a specific developer being a "likely Obama voter"

The rule there is that if you are Talking Points Memo or American Thinker or Slate, some established blog, you get a logo and a mention of that blog; if you're just a little guy like me, you get called a name.

Cruise through the comments and you'll get a feeling for the Second Life/Sluniverse/Second Citizen sort of atmosphere -- you'll recognize my RL picture, my avatar name, etc.

All of these people sound exactly like Cristiano Midnight and about 50 Woodburies on Sluniverse.

My reply -- to them, and posters at Ars Technica, who at least are 10 times more intelligent and civil.

Hello, Flies

I had never heard of Fark before about 5000 of you deluged my blog, but I guess you're sort of like a Redditt or 4chan? Excuse me, my glasses seem to be broken.

First, I see that nearly all of you have anonymous forums names, while I'm using my real name and my real name and avatar names are linked. Kinda unfair fight, eh? I notice that it enables you to find my real-life picture and post it and ridicule me, after first guessing that I might be overweight. It's been falsely said that I was the real estate queen in Second Life bombarded with the penises -- in fact that was Anshe Chung but I was involved in that story as well because the griefer spoofed my name and account using my email address and made some people think that attack was done by me (later this was cleared up completely when the real culprit came forward and was also banned). 

Second Life has taught me a lot about how insecure dweebs on the Internet behave, and Fark has tended to reinforce those lessons. None of you can be linked to your RL pictures, although some of you are undoubtedly obese; no one can know you're a dog even as you gawk at me. Fun, eh?

I happen to have a male avatar in Second Life because I have the freedom to do so in a virtual world. Are you against people having freedom on the Internet? I have no doubt that out of the 5000 people deluging my blog, at least a few have made female alts in online games and may even be ashamed of this.

If in fact you chose your anonymous handles because you don't want to be judged by your RL looks or affiliations and want to be free to comment in an autonomous realm of pure thought, then why aren't you according the same courtesy to me, and just dealing with what I write and my ideas? The reason I've added a "Google Witch-Hunters" note to my page here is because I get tired of the hysterical caricatures drawn of me because my ideas dissent from the geek status quo on issues like open source software or Internet governance.

Let me address some of the issues here.

I believe that it's more than fine to ask questions about the consulting firms and developers that failed miserably for the Romney campaign; in fact, it's imperative. And that's not because I believe somehow Romney would have won if the tech worked -- he likely would not have, given the GOP's inattention to demographics and modern realities.

But these firms have an awful lot of power and money, as a Bloomberg news report illustrates, and they have an awful lot of control over our public commons and democratic process now. That's why I ask questions about them.

We know about the CIA chief's mistress and their emails; but we can't seem to find out who coded Orca, you know? Why is that? Ars Technica, which has done the best reporting on this, is reticent about naming names, and has given Zac Moffett, digital director of the Romney campaign, a very soft touch in interviewing him -- Sean Gallagher is protecting one of his own tribe there. That's why I ask questions and keep asking questions because I don't believe tech writers will write critically enough of their fellow geeks.

Zac Moffet's firm -- from which he was temporarily on leave for the campaign -- is Targeting Victory. That's why people assumed (and I wasn't the first) that they'd either have coded Orca *or know about it*.  Again: this firm isn't irrelevant to the story because it's Zac's firm. It's not clear if he will return to it after this debacle, but it's his firm.

Zac Moffet -- from Targeting Victory, featured on their web page -- gave an interview to PBS bragging about his digital work for Romney and about Orca about people "off the grid," i.e. not reachable by traditional TV. One in three voters is not reachable by a TV ad. "It has to scale," says Michael Beach, who worked with Moffet on the digital side of the campaign -- which really is the entire campaign these days.

I wrote a blog *asking questions about this* because that's what bloggers do to try to get at the truth. When it turned out Targeted Victory had *not* coded Orca, I updated my blog with additions and corrections, but I certainly pointed out that lots of questions were still in order. Um, do you do that every time you write something outdated, incorrect or false about someone on Fark?

And it's not as if the spotlight should be removed from TV now just because they didn't code Orca. After all, they were responsible for another failed ap -- the "VP pick" ap. That was much ballyhooed and failed -- for reasons that seem a combination of technical and managerial -- the regular media scooped it so that the entire gimmick flopped -- those waiting on this ap to give them the news were the last to know (it served as a data-scraping tool).

In the past, Targeted Victory also messed up on a social media campaign for Michelle Bachman. And their social media work in general was lack-lustre for Romney in competing with the Obama machine. Why? How?

Let's leave aside the issue of whether anyone likes these candidates or not, and again, leave aside the issue of whether Romney might have done better if they were less incompetent.

What's operative here is that before, people running for political office only had to count on a few big television networks professionally organized and trained to follow them, along with radio and  newspapers. These media outlets were well aware that they had to do the job serving the public interest. They tried to be fair, for better or worse. There were also outlets that had a known variety of known political leanings that came as no surprise.

Today, all that is up-ended, as they have to wade out into a storm of social media, and depend on various start-ups and up-starts in these Silicon Valley operations to guide them through these digital storms. These firms are large and small, known and unknown, but they are like shadowy middlemen between the mainstream and new media outlets and the candidates -- they are like Madison Avenue advertising firms now moved into politics, with vast Internet reach.

Now a little firm like Targeted Victory is like a big TV station and can reach millions of people using the tools of social media and blogs. So it's more than fine to ask for *accountability* of such people in this process. (Targeted Victory is not in Silicon Valley, but is in Alexandria, VA, but has the culture of that kind of organization in California as we know from Moffett's numerous boisterous and bragging interviews.)

When I found out that in this organization top-heavy with managers and marketers and only two devs and a program manager, one of the devs was Al Gore's former dev, I rightly and legitimately asked the question of how this could work out in a firm that mainly took on Republican campaigns.

And when I saw that the other dev was black, I noted that he was very likely an Obama voter, and asked how that would work out for Republican campaigns. I noted that making that observation is not racist, because whenever you mention race, people are nervous and hysterical and looking for a way to discredit your ideas and invoke racism.

But it's not racism, it's a report: we're told reliably that 96% of black people voted for Obama. They did.

Commenting legitimately on this fact on a blog on political affiliations isn't urging anybody to be kicked out of a job, discriminated against or lynched. God forbid. That would be crazy. Nor -- again -- would commenting on this fact of political life mean that minorities in and around the programming for Romney are suspect of sabotage and "lost it for Romney". Obviously, the reasons for Romney's loss are both more grand and more complex.

But it is saying that maybe they aren't suited to the job of running Republican campaigns.

If Newt Gingirch's dev promised he'd really help on the Obama back end, would you really believe him? Of course not.  If Michelle Bachmann's dev was in the firm that took Obama's digital work up -- would you worry? You would. If a WASP millionaire with a double last-name and an expensive suit sailed up in his yacht and said he'd like to work for the Democrats, wouldn't someone ask about the 1 percent? They would. Hatred of the rich is big.

Now, the GOP desperately needs to modernize (and so does its ecosphere of publications and websites -- so far we've only see Red State say they are ready to drain the swamp of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck or the birthers). And they need to recruit and hire for campaigns more blacks and Hispanics and women and LGBT and other minorities. How will they do that? I don't belong to this party so it's not my problem, but I care enough about diversity of political opinion, not just diversity of races to ask the question: what do we do in a democratic society when race is now a marker for a very defined political belief system? I didn't make that so by my blog or observations; Obama and his campaign managers and the media made it so.

As we learned on G+ today, Sergei Brin would solve this problem by having no political parties in some sort of utopia of lovely independents covering independently in name and spirit. I roll my eyes 360%. The first thing that would happen under such a regime -- and a regime it would be -- is that those helpful coders in the comments would create a Google-run, Internet-based "voting" system that would just have people vote up issues with "likes" (and never vote no) -- on propositions that the nice people at Google would frame (or say, change.org). That would in fact be totalitarianism, not freedom, but I don't doubt for a minute that you Farkians would find it quite compatible with your cultural style and politics.

There's the larger issue, too, of the left-leaning and libertarian geek class. And to comment on this reality for our lives isn't to whistle for a witch-hunt or believe in loony conspiracies, it's to ask how we can have pluralism in our politics. How can we trust the managers of voting systems? How can we expect that a GOTV campaign will *work* for the people who gave up their time and treasure to get involved in the elections?

A fellow on Ars Technica said that he feared telling me the names of the Orca developers because a loon who thinks they were to blame for Romney's loss will come and assassinate them. Really, guys? That sounds like a total trumped-up excuse to avoid taking responsibility for your coding messes. He invoked Congressman Gifford's wounding and the killing of her aids and constituents. But Giffords wasn't shot by a member of the Tea Party, but by a loon. Let's get a grip here: Republican campaigns -- the only opposition party we have now to the party of power -- have to rely on people who are afraid of being assassinated if their shoddy programming is exposed? Good Lord, that's preposterous.

Orca didn't work, and it's more than fine to ask why, and to seek accountability not only from Zac Moffett, who is tap-dancing around this like Fred Astaire, but all the 80 people in his digital workshop with the bean-bag chairs, and from the Orca developers and Targeted Victory. Did they treat this with cynicism and even neglect that amounts to sabotage because their hearts weren't in a Romney victory? Well? I know I'm asking the right hearts-and-minds question, and soon it won't be just me asking it, but every single board room where big money was involved in this campaign will be asking it -- in part because your mob helped get the word out. Thanks!

Why indeed is Al Gore's dev doing Romney's ap work? How the hell does something like that happen?

But more to the point, why did Orca fail?

Now herr -- I get it that software projects have various stages, having taken part in them time and again. And derr -- that involves testing and reiteration and bug-elimination and all the rest. Many comments here talk about short time frames, the methodology of software, with that arrogant nastiness that assumes nobody knows how that works -- when most people are taking part in live beta experiments 24/7 just by being on Twitter or Facebook and following their "issues".

From what we gather from comments on forums, these digital wunderkind coding Orca used the Agile software cult for their work. No surprise at the result there! Agile creates an alternative universe of fake user questions completely untethered from real users, and creates Stakhanovite work plans with dictatorial personages running the show with "roles" assigned them by managers imbued with the cult. Maybe Obama used Agile systems and got results because he had the cult built in already around his persona. Romney couldn't because he didn't.

We haven't heard much about the mission or plan or schedule because nobody is talking. We only know what the guy himself responsible for the mess is telling us -- which is not how you get to the bottom of a news story. Moffett says they tested in Boston, but not the nation.

Yet from what I gather talking to ordinary party activists in various states, and from what I see on their blogs, a complaint was about the over-centralization of this campaign, with all paths leading to Boston, and not enough local autonomy to run the Romney franchise in local conditions. That's not a software problem, except it is; it comes out of the dictatorial software management cults that can hold sway in an organization and become too rigid to adjust to humans.

As I've noted in my past blog, the Indian firm said to be the outsource firm denies that it was involve. Accenture won't comment. These big consulting firms are hugely skilled and covering their trail and keeping their own social media footprint invisible -- especially with Google bombing.

Say, you could organize a Fark-scapade to somebody's blog ridiculing them on the Internet, and you're done, you know? Very easy to manipulate masses in places like this, I see it all the time from 4chan or somethingawful.com

You people aren't stampeded and manipulated, are you? You all think for yourselves right?

Then tell me why Al Gore's dev or Obama's 2008 director of analytics were anywhere near Romney's jobs. That's all.

 

Who Will Watch Those Unwatched Watchers?

I'm not surprised that the New York Times is tending to see the Petraeus scandal as a problem of "big government surveillance" rather than as a problem of abuse of power. As I commented about the commenters under another news story (that earned me a Times pick today):

What's so troubling about so many reader comments is that they are willing to excuse sexual infidelity in these powerful people without examining that their offenses are really about abuse of power, not sex.

Every one of them seems to have used their position of power or proximity to power to try to achieve personal ends. That's wrong.

I wasn't surprised to see Chris Soghoian, now working, surprise, surprise, for the ACLU in another march through the institutions, quoted as the expert.

Chris Soghoian has troubled me for some time. He's the latest darling of the Soros set (a former Soros Fellow) who is typical of the highly-educated and credentialed brash new generation of privacy gurus and Internet specialists who make civics a science with themselves in charge. He's always earnestly, with a sense of nearly-exasperated certitude, telling people they are wrong, or got it wrong, or should do it this way or that because he says so and he's a smart person. That would all be fine if there were Soros funding of multiples of people like this with different views that clashed and debated and enabled, well, an open society.

But they are all the same, all pushing the "progressive" line, and nearly indistinguishable in their love of the Wired State and their vision of themselves as the good, wise people in charge of it while all those low-information voters and Wal-mart shoppers and gun-toters cling to their religion.

I was gratified to find a kindred soul in my assessment of this problem recently on Quora -- at least that gamified time-sink (which I tend to ignore for months on end) is good for something. An anonymous person writes about my blog:

For me, the 'Jump The Shark' moment was Rebecca MacKinnon speaking at TED Global (http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca... ) I never attended a TED conference after the year she spoke. (I hope she's proud of herself, after fanning the flames in Libya. She thinks an elitist core of do-gooders should control the Internet, and she blames a secret Cabal of Jews for controlling the iOS store. Really!  And the lefties in the audience eat it up.) For a good critique, see the 'Wired State' blog. (http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wir...)

To be sure, Soghoian never speaks of Wal-mart or guns or SUVs or chik-fila-A sandwiches -- but he doesn't have to. Now that he's at the ACLU, we know that it's green tea and vegetarian wraps!

But seriously, what Soghoian is busy doing now with all this CIA scandal business is telling these high powerful officials in the Obama Administration how to become more secret in their private lives. That rots. Why, just because they're Obama's?!

Yes, that's essentially what this post is all about -- pro-tips on how you shouldn't fall for that dumb trip, practiced by Second Lifers and Plurkers cheating on their spouses who always fail, and use that draft-email-in-the-folder thing. Der! And then, use Tor! Well, or VPN. But Tor! Tor isn't discredited at all for Soghoian as it should be; he's one of those people utterly uncritical of Jacob Appelbaum.

Of course, what his post is really an advertisement for is the ACLU's position on demanding a new privacy law because of "modern life", i.e. supposedly the Internet and all things digital are all so brave and new that we simply have to have different laws with different principles.

Nonsense.

What the ACLU wants is this;

Current loopholes in our privacy laws allow police to access many types of electronic communications -- emails, text messages, private information held by Google and Facebook -- with just an administrative subpoena. That means law enforcement can gather tons of information on suspects anytime information is relevant and without ever going to a judge.

But if they have to get an administrative subpoena, that's already a check on their power. They also have to be mindful when they do go on a hunting expedition that what they get has to stand up in court. That's the context of the rule of law that in fact pretty much holds up in the US, certainly by contrast with Russia or China and which in fact makes people prefer to live in this country than elsewhere with more arbitrary rule.

In the days before the Internet, police and their detectives might trail people, sit near them and see who they meet with, follow them, even hear their conversations on the street. All this would go into an operational report as surveillance necessary to investigate and prosecute a crime. If you followed someone, you didn't get a separate warrant to go down the street; a warrant to sit next to them in a cafe; more permission to see who they met in the cafe; and even further permission to follow them out of the cafe.

What people like Soghoian can't concede is that surveillance of open Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. in social media is the equivalent of the meeting in the cafe and the conversation on the street and following the people met in public. It's also the equivalent of a wiretap on a phone -- widely accepted as normal police work.

Yet Soghoian and others in his circle want to make anything that is digital or Internet of cell phone related untouchable, secret, and impervious to government scrutiny -- as if EVERYTHING on the Internet is like the sanctity of the home.

I find that incomprehensible and unacceptable. How are the police, the FBI and the CIA going to stop crime and terrorism? The Internet is public. Much of what goes on in socializing on it is in public. To be sure, there are private exchanges, but the police wiretap on the old land-line phone seemed to be far more acceptible to these new privacy gurus than the tap of social media and cell phones. Why? They are no different.

Naturally, you want police not to abuse their powers, and you want them to have probable cause and warrants and material that stands up in court. But Soghoian and Rebecca McKinnon and all the other digital extremists want to create a separate autonomous space where they can roam free, they can be in charge, and no one -- not the public or the government -- can ever see what they are doing while they attempt to influence and take control. It's really a stretch of the concept of "inviolability of the home" because they use this concept to set up the Wired State, which isn't even a shadow government; it *is* the government.

All that happened in this Petraeus case, it seems to me, is that the FBI, those bumbling gumshoes, stumbled on the Wired State as it works now in its early stages, and thought it seemed unlawful and tried to put it under surveillance and act on it. They suddenly found people who lived in a different realm, an autonomous realm, where they could have affairs with people in power, share classified information with them (Broadwell appears to have known about Libyan detainees in the Benghazi tragedy), and use their positions to bully others they think are in their way -- who do the same thing back to them. Lovely!

Yes, it's more complicated than just the old story of love triangles making you vulnerable to the KGB, because when Broadwell used her proximity to power to bully a socialite, Jill Kelley -- who doesn't seem to have had the best grasp herself on what "abuse of proximity to power" means, either! -- that led Kelly to call on her FBI friend and sic her on Broadwell. So very Second Life!

But other FBI agents brought into this drama then discovered the Petraeus connection and the connection to the NATO General Allen and all the rest of it splashed out on the pages of the news today.

Yet  all this in fact *rightful* activity uncovering *abuse of power and proximity to power* is what the Wired State gang wants to squash, stop, and declare some kind of gross violation of civil rights. They don't want the FBI to do its job serving as a check against the all-powerful CIA. Because it's Obama's.

Hence Soghoian's post and the ACLU's campaign. Soghoian has a plan to protect privacy:

More broadly, this scandal centers around email, and it’s a reminder that the legal protections for email fall far short of what they should be. We need to modernize our privacy laws—for example by passing the proposal that is now before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and we need protections that cover metadata of the kind that was apparently so central in this scandal.

But that means the FBI wouldn't have access to the meta-data in a routine probe either, nor the police, even if they had an administrative warrant, which he doesn't accept as legitimate. The meta-data, however, is the exact same thing that a policeman would see if he followed somebody out of a cafe when they met somebody, and kept following them to see where they went after that. Would a cop on the beat spotting a known thief going to fence his stolen i-phones request a warrant for permission to view the "meta-data" of where he went to sell the hot goods and who was in the chop shop? Of course not.

Evidently Soghoian would be reluctantly willing to let the FBI or other law-enforcement agencies get at meta-data and track emails if they get a court order -- but I wonder. I don't see that in the ACLU's material. Maybe it's implied.

What's troubling to me as well about Soghoian is that he's terribly worried about the government  agencies having access to people's email and social media account and obsesses about that.

But meanwhile, the party which he undoubtedly backed in the elections just now, the Obama Truth Team, is busy mining voraciously every social media gesture from here to kingdom come.  Not only are they data-mining like it's the Klondike Gold Rush, they're manipulating people with this data using a bunch of behavioural scientists. And that is okay? And that doesn't bother him?!

There's just something that doesn't sit right here; Soghoian gets urgent and nearly hysterical about the NSA scanning Americans in theory by key-word searching masses of email content; but in practice when it's about the very head of the CIA in the Obama Administration, he wants to gives them tips how to hide their email with lovers better.