The Digital Age of Voting and Privacy
Halloween, October 31 @ 1404 Siebel Center
5:30p - 6:30p :: The Digital Wild West of American Politics - Matthew Cheney
6:30p - 7:00p :: Dinner courtesy of SIGMiL
7:00p - 8:00p :: How Technology Changes Your Privacy - Michael Perry
The use of technology has changed the landscape of politics in the United States and has fueled one of the most interesting and engaging elections in modern memory. The use of creative and targeted online fundraising strategies allowed underdog political candidate Barack Obama to out-raise the legendary fundraising network of Hillary and Bill Clinton and allowed fringe candidate Ron Paul to set fundraising records with a primarily Internet based outreach effort. Effective use of social networks and blogs has energized and mobilized a historic proportion of young and student voters and behind-the-scenes Get out the Vote (GOTV) and voter file technology have allowed for the organization and creation of a omplicated set of online tools that will drive "the right" people to the polls more than ever before.
This lecture will focus on how technology is being used in the 2008 election by considering how each major presidential campaign has used technology to mobilize their supporters and push out their message and what this means for American politics going forward. Many examples will be used from the current 2008 campaign and previous election cycles - Dean for America in 2004 and the DNCC efforts in the 2006 congressional campaigns. Speciļ¬c areas to be considered will be: online fundraising, internal campaign technology and voter file integration, digital messaging and dissemination, use of social networks, rapid response practices, and online journalism and the effect of the blogosphere on the political news cycle.
Matt Cheney is a managing partner of a ten person San Francisco based consulting company that develops strategy and technology for socially motivated clients such as the Kiva (microloans), NASA (space exploration), and Partners in Health (health care to the global poor), Silicon Valley savvy business types like Sun Microsystems (education tools) and Intel (open source communities), and academic institutions like Stanford (online publications) and UCSF (library services). In the political arena, Cheney worked on half a dozen congressional campaigns, assisted with litigation as part of several voting rights cases, spent the 2004 election helping coordinate election efforts in the Alaskan cold, developed some neat GOTV techniques using social networks for the Iowa primaries, and is working on a couple citizen engagement tools for the 2008 election. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received many degrees and did an unreasonable number of academic and social projects.
The statement "You have zero privacy anyway, get over it" was made some 6 years ago by one of our more abrasive industry leaders, and things have only gotten worse. Advances in technology are enabling applications such as location tracking, political profiling and classification, and even real time streaming face recognition. Worse, most often this data is collected without consent and with no real assurance of confidentiality, or even legal or constitutional protections.
We are only just beginning to understand the consequences of having our entire lives archived and sold to the highest bidder, to say nothing of rampant government surveillance. Those who are not careful with protecting their personal information and online activities are in for some unpleasant surprises in the future: be it from a bitter divorce case, character attacks in a frivolous lawsuit, political opposition, or just plain old marketing spam that arrives at exactly the wrong time.
By day Michael Perry is a mild mannered reverse engineer owned and operated by Riverbed Technology, slaving away at accelerating broken monopolistic protocols from the Evil Empire and generally helping to make the intranets faster by several orders of magnitude. By night, he transforms into an ardent supporter of digital rights, privacy, and anonymity on and offline. Mike believes that not only is it every person's right to opt-out of the Database Nation, it is also in their self-interest to do so, and to have company. In a world where our minute-to-minute thoughts are archived by IP address in search engines, Mike believes Tor is desperately needed not just by political dissidents, but by everyone.