If the Roll Call report is true, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, it shows John Kerry to be somewhat of a hypocrite. His campaign platform (http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/civilrights/) says that "Kerry believes that Ashcroft has violated civil liberties and abused his authority with invasions of privacy without justification." How does Kerry justify his own invasion of privacy? At the very least, this should make privacy advocates pause before they back Kerry. He has some explaining to do. It's starting to look like both major parties like to talk about privacy but don't have the common decency to follow their own rhetoric. -Declan --- http://www.rollcall.com/pub/49_87/news/4616-1.html Kerry E-Mail Move Irks Privacy Experts By Ethan Wallison Roll Call Staff March 4, 2004 Sen. John Kerry's (D-Mass.) presidential campaign used a controversial marketing practice offered by one of the country's three credit bureaus to collect additional information last year about people who, according to the campaign, indicated that they would like to help the candidate in the primaries and caucuses. --- Subject: Kerry's campaign snooped on volunteers Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 11:43:02 -0600 From: Andy Ringsmuth <andyring@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> Declan, according to Drudge: http://www.drudgereport.com/flash4.htm Kerry's campaign took volunteers information and matched it up with data provided by at least one of the Big Three credit reporting bureaus to skim additional information about volunteers. Definitely a good topic for Politech, in my opinion. -Andy Below is the text from Drudge: Kerry Campaign Collected Info On Volunteers Thu Mar 04 2004 10:53:35 ET Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign used a controversial marketing practice offered by one of the country's three credit bureaus to collect additional information last year about people who, according to the campaign, indicated that they would like to help the candidate in the primaries and caucuses. ROLL CALL reports on Thursday: The contracts with Equifax Marketing Services worth about $36,000 called for the company to find so-called 'appendages' in its massive consumer database. Appending is a practice that involves plugging bits of information into databases in order to collect e-mail addresses or flesh out consumer profiles. The practice has been widely attacked by consumer advocates, who consider it invasive. Marketing experts believe Kerry's campaign is the first political committee to make use of the append, a relatively recent innovation that has emerged as retail commerce has increasingly moved online. Developing.... _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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