Technocreep (20 page)

If you donate to a U.S. federal political campaign you are required to provide information such as your address and occupation which will make its way to the database of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

This is to conform to what the
Wall Street Journal's
Laura Saunders called “a crazy quilt of federal tax and election laws.”
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She also explains that “donations by individuals of $200 or more in a year must be publicly disclosed to the FEC within as little as 20 days.”

Rules differ for U.S. state and municipal elections, and, of course, in other countries. But the principle, that the public should know who's contributing to a particular candidate, is a pretty fundamental and universal one.

Peeking at political contribution data wasn't a big issue when you were required to make a specific written request to access this information. You often had to wait while bureaucrats handled your query manually; so only the highly motivated bothered to make a request.

Now, vast amounts of government data can be searched by anyone, anywhere, often anonymously. It can also be manipulated with the same data analysis tools that corporations and governments themselves use.

I settled on Philadelphia as the place to investigate the public disclosure of campaign contributions. Like New York, this city was making its government data broadly available. They were also attempting to provide free city-wide Wi-Fi Internet access. These records are online, so there was no need to physically go to Philadelphia. Everything you might want is right there at
OpenDataPhilly.org
.

Since this particular analysis was done several years ago, it is almost certain that some of the details about how the data is presented may have changed. However, unless the law changes, campaign finance data will always be available in some form.

It is important to understand the difference between accessing government data through a user query interface and downloading entire data sets. OpenDataPhilly allows both, at least for campaign finance data.

I plugged a particular name into the query interface. The system churned for several minutes (one of the disadvantages of using query apps as opposed to processing the data yourself) and it gave me my answer. Ronald Rivest of 41 A****** Street, Arlington, Massachusetts 02476 donated $200.00 on May 4, 2011 to Friends of Stephanie Singer. I have redacted part of the street name but the original database was completely forthcoming with the precise address.

­By cross-checking this name and address with some other databases, a technique called “data jigsawing,” I was able to say with reasonable confidence that this contributor was in fact a well-known MIT professor and researcher, who is in fact the “R” in the famous RSA Encryption algorithm.

I think I met him once at a conference, but I know Ron Rivest mainly by reputation. And, let me be clear that there is nothing wrong with someone who lives in Massachusetts donating to a local candidate in Philadelphia. Unusual, maybe, but certainly not illegal.

I knew to search for Rivest's name in this database after downloading and processing the data on my own personal computer, and graphing the geographic patterns of donations. A donation from far-away Arlington, MA, to a Philadelphia local candidate practically jumped off the page.

This geographical analysis revealed some other remarkable facts. It turns out a very significant number of people gave 1719 Spring Garden Street, Philadelphia, PA 19130 as their address on the contribution form.

Specifically, for one of the campaign finance data sets:

86 of 588 people with the surname Smith listed that address

63 of 426 people with the surname Johnson listed that address

77 of 400 people with the surname Williams listed that address.

A quick trip to Google Maps to see if this is the world's largest rooming house reveals that this is the location of the “Financial Office & Electrical Apprentice Training” operation of a Union, the IBEW Local 98.

It is easy to imagine some possible scenarios that would lead to so many supporters of certain candidates having a connection to the union office address, but that would take us into the realm of speculation. But why are addresses required in the first place? One plausible explanation is to differentiate people with similar names. There could be ­certainly more than one “J. Smith” in the campaign contributions file.

Johnson, Smith, and Williams are the most common surnames in America, so I went through the 1,414 people in the file with those surnames, looking for cases where there might be confusion.

Here's what I found:

Among the 426 Johnsons there were three possibly ambiguous entries

Among the 588 Smiths there were eight possibly ambiguous entries

Among the 400 Williamses there were four possibly ambiguous entries

The question for policy makers is whether or not this small additional power of discrimination is worth the wholesale exposing of addresses. Many people, such as victims of domestic violence, have good and valid reasons to avoid having their address posted online for all to see. On the flip side, being able to plot donations on a geographic grid might reveal some interesting information about which parts of the city are supporting which candidate. In this case, however, being allowed to give a union address regardless of personal address appears to defeat the purpose.

Voting is another area where privacy seems vital. Yet each piece of new technology brings more disturbing elements to the ballot box. There's a controversy in some jurisdictions over whether or not it's OK to “tweet your vote” by taking a picture of your ballot at the polling place.

This came up in 2013 in Nova Scotia, when a political blogger posted a picture of his marked ballot on a social media website. He was told he might face a fine of up to $5,000 for violating the province's Elections Act. In the U.S., laws vary by locality but the smartest move is to keep your smartphone and digital camera in your pocket during the voting process.

I reviewed the 2010 Mayoral Election results in Edmonton, AB, in which one candidate won by a sizable margin. In fact, some of his challengers received zero votes in some of the voting stations, such as the “City Wide Hospital Vote.” Let's hope that there was no one in the hospital at the time that he knows personally who claimed they voted for him, because the public record shows otherwise.

In general, when very small numbers are involved, good statistical reporting systems are supposed to report “not significant” instead of giving out information that would allow inferences about specific cases.

Of course, some candidates may be interested to know if they got three or seven or zero votes, so these results are still generally reported as exact numbers. However, in an election where thousands of votes are cast, voter privacy should probably trump candidate narcissism.

While making political contributions (and even voting, except in some places such as Australia) is optional, every property owner pays taxes. The associated database provides a powerful example of the balance between privacy and fairness in the world of governmental Open Data.

To ensure you are being treated fairly where taxes are based on property assessment, you need some information. What is your neighbor's assessment? What is it based on? Does the house next door have a fireplace? A two-car garage?

Historically, this information was made available in hard copy format. In Calgary, AB, for example, the property tax rolls were made available for about a month every year around the time when owners were allowed to appeal their annual assessments.

The tax data was printed out on paper and taken to community centers around town, where eagle-eyed staffers kept watch over them. You were free to make notes on what you saw, but not to take the book away or even photocopy it. Digital cameras and smartphones with cameras were not an issue back then.

Calgary now has a system which allows anyone to view anyone's tax assessment, at any time, 24/7, 365 days a year. Though a great improvement from the consumer's point of view, this system inevitably created problems.

Newspaper reporters went through the data to find the mansions with the highest property valuations and snapped photos of them. The owners of the “Priciest Houses in Town” objected to this attention, fearing kooks and burglars. They were told the data was a matter of public record.

Soon after the system, known as “Fairshare,” was launched, everyone who cared and bothered to look knew the tax value (which mirrors market value in Calgary) of their ex-wife's home, their boss's mansion, and even their garbage collector's house. People grumbled about the invasion of their privacy, but the municipal government persevered.

Then, an unexpected “second-order” problem arose.

Companies who specialized in the business of tax appeals started to write detailed letters to individual taxpayers along the lines of “we see your property is assessed at X dollars. Did you know your next-door neighbors are at only Y and Z dollars? Hire us to get your assessment lowered.”

Spooked by this new, derivative use of their information, the City of Calgary closed the system for a period of time, bringing it back in a much more privacy-friendly manner. You can still find the ­dollar figure for any property simply by keying in the address. You even see whole neighborhoods on a map. However, to get the juicier property data you need to create an account with a password. Your usage can be monitored, and is limited to a certain number of properties per day, in an attempt to thwart the wholesale downloading of data. The City also tracks the Internet address used to make queries and posted a legal disclaimer explicitly banning commercial use of the information.

The new system isn't perfect. Any good computer science student can probably find a way around the IP tracking and other limitations. The twenty inquiries per day limitation is also frustrating to people who may want to search all the properties in a complex for perfectly legitimate reasons. However, the new system has struck reasonable balance between making information available to those who need it, while keeping it from the merely curious and the actively malicious.

Governments are still struggling with idea of “public information.” The line is also blurring between governmental and privately gathered information, which are becoming mashed together into one big data cloud.

Certain life events open normally private matters more fully to public scrutiny, and a divorce is an excellent example of how privacy protection can slip in the interest of public information. Those detailed and sometimes embarrassing lists of assets, chattels, claims, and counterclaims will become a matter of public record in most jurisdictions.
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Anyone willing to head to the musty basement of a courthouse can usually find out who got the house, the car, even the family pet. A nine-year-old Dalmatian hound was the subject of a $2M divorce-related claim involving a Calgary millionaire and his soon-to-be ex-wife. The full settlement details were not made public but we do know that Dad got the dog and the press quoted his stepson as saying “my mom is very wealthy now.”
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If records are digitized, they are probably available from a data broker like Little Rock, Arkansas-based Acxiom, which, according to the
New York Times
, has data on “about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.”
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Acxiom sucks in data and uses PersonicX, a data-based classification system worthy of the NSA. It pops you into one of seventy socioeconomic clusters and life stage groups with cute if somewhat judgmental names like “Mature Rustics,” “Resolute Renters,” and “Midtown Minivanners.”
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Acxiom also offers a “Race model.”

The company can provide data on people who are smokers, gamblers, dieters, etc. They often glean this information using self-reported surveys on sites that offer promotional deals to people willing to complete them.

Completing a survey on one of these sites can sometimes be a humbling experience, as you get “screened out” for reasons of age, income, or some other unknown. But even if you didn't win a prize or earn some of their fake currency, the information you give up in these surveys is being filed, exchanged, sold, and used to target you whenever possible.

One of the creepiest aspects of technology is that you never really know who or what to believe anymore.

You open your email and see that a well-meaning friend has sent you an urgent message: a mutual acquaintance has been arrested for some unlikely transgression. Maybe it's a hoax; maybe not. It turns out there are numerous free websites that make it simple to generate credible looking stories that your friend or co-worker was arrested for “driving naked” or “having sex with a sheep.”
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Even credible news sources get hacked, sometimes by intruders and sometimes by insiders. Long before there was an Internet, when the hard copy version of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
was the world's definitive reference work, I heard about an insider there who used a text editor on the encyclopedia's word processing files to substitute “the Prophet Muhammad” for every instance of “Jesus Christ.” The giant, expensive book set nearly went to print that way.

Online pranksters such as “The Yes Men” have also wreaked havoc. In one case, they were able to tank the price of the shares of Union Carbide by putting out bogus news stories about the Bhopal disaster and how the company was planning to atone for it.

The proliferation of images on the Internet has taken hoaxing to a whole new level. There is ample photographic evidence of Barack Obama smoking all kinds of things all over the Internet. Most of it is poorly fabricated. By doing an “image search” on Google Images or TinEye we can even track all the places a particular photo has been posted. I did this during the first Obama campaign and found that an apparently genuine image of him smoking a cigarette had even made its way onto Stormfront.com, a white supremacist site that has been called “the Internet's first hate site.”
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