To locate likely allies beyond its 4 million members, the National Rifle Association buys government and private lists of pickup truck owners, people with hunting licenses, concealed weapons permit holders, gun show exhibitors and outdoor magazine subscribers. This information is fed into computers at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, where officials draw up a 'clean' list of people who are not already NRA members and who will be contacted by phone and mail. Using its own carefully culled lists, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League is reaching out to 2 million Republican and independent women in 15 key states that the group believes will be sympathetic to its cause. The trend of data-triggered targeting closely tracks advances in the world of commercial direct marketing, and it offers many of the make, benefits, such as crafting messages relevant to individual voters. It scares the hell out of me,' said John Aravosis of Wired Strategies, an Internet consulting firm that advises groups about online marketing.
Political information is per se more sensitive. . . .
Even Jerry Baumann, an executive vice president at Map Applications Inc., a company that sells database software to the Missouri GOP, predicted the American public could be unsettled as campaigns find themselves in an escalating race to gather more and more fine-grained data about voters. Politicians 'will need to know more about individuals, but the closer they'll come to offending voters' sense of privacy,' he said. They're just very careful they're not blatant about it,' he said. Map Applications, which also works with Iowa Republicans among other GOP and conservative groups, can link more than 40 layers of personal data to a voter's name and address, and then make sense of it all. The information includes voters' ages along with their children's ages, the value of their homes, whether they have bank cards, and their ethnicity.