It's not political, but the International Business Times has an interesting story about the rise of "spear phishing": personalized spam.

A new study by Cisco Systems Inc. found an alarming increase in the amount of personalized spam, which online identity thieves create using stolen lists of e-mail addresses or other poached data about their victims, such as where they went to school or which bank they use.

Unlike traditional spam, most of which is blocked by e-mail filters, personalized spam, known as "spear phishing" messages, often sail through unmolested. They're sent in smaller chunks, and often come from accounts the criminals have set up at reputable Web-based e-mail services. Some of the messages are expertly crafted, linking to beautifully designed Web sites that are bogus or immediately install malicious programs.

I suppose this will mark me as a naif, but I had never thought of this particular bit of criminality.  On hearing of it, though, it strikes me as obvious--and bound to grow.  According to the article, personalized spam only represents four-tenths of a percent of all spam, but if it's much more effective and less likely to be caught by a spam filter, then smart criminals should quickly add it to their arsenals.  And as immense databases full of personally-identifying information proliferate ever-wider, there will be more targets.  We live in interesting times.

Consumer data is one of the most frustrating areas of voter file design, especially if you're interested in transparency or an open-source methodology.  Large parts of the voter file process use publically available data, and can be duplicated by any group with relatively low levels of equipment and technical skill (for example, witness my tutorial effort, which I absolutely promise to get back to after the election).  There's no such ability for data appends.  After the jump I'll explain why.

Patrick Ruffini annotates an article in Salon about Barack Obama's microtargeting efforts.

Once the data is (yes, is, prescriptivists--I went there) in a standardized format, we move from the realm of "interesting" into "faintly creepy".  The information from Secretaries of State or state parties is generally pretty innocuous--name, address, maybe phone number or age.  The appended consumer data, on the other hand, is more unsettling.  There's nothing on there that would do real damage if anyone knew it--no credit card numbers, nothing that people could use to steal your identity--but it can be kind of strange to think who realizes that you own two dogs and a cat.