bytes and ballots

According to a U.S. House Government Reform Committee report (quotes here from a Los Angeles Times story):

Incidents of lost or stolen personal data at federal government agencies are more widespread than previously thought, affecting all 19 federal departments and millions of citizens since 2003, according to a congressional report released Friday.

Most of the nearly 800 incidents of data losses have never been publicly reported. The "vast majority" were not accidental misplacements, but rather outright thefts of computers or data disks containing sensitive information such as Social Security numbers. In some cases the data were used inappropriately by employees and private contractors, the report said.

And here are some of the specifics:

According to the report, recent incidents included:

• The loss in March of a Defense Department portable data drive that included personnel records of more than 200,000 Marines who served from 2001 to 2005. The report said the department sent a notification letter to the Marine Cops and the affected Marines.

• The loss of a Department of Education magnetic tape containing the personal information of more than 11,000 student loan borrowers.

• An unauthorized breach of an Air Force database compromising personal data of more than 30,000 members of the military.

Other incidents of data loss were reported to the committee by the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, State, Treasury, Commerce and Veterans Affairs.

The Commerce Department, for example, reported 214 incidents of lost or stolen computers at the Census Bureau. Veterans Affairs officials reported their data on two large spreadsheets covering hundreds of security and privacy breaches, the report said.

In most cases, the report said, there was little evidence that thieves used the data to steal people's identities. However, the report did cite one identity theft scheme last year by a Health and Human Services contractor that affected more than 1,500 people.

A few incidents have involved hackers looking to use citizens' personal data for illegal purposes, the report said.

A report by Edelman and Technorati found that four of the most influential blogs in the U.S. relate to politics:

A research project by public relations firm Edelman and blog search engine Technorati ranked the 10 most influential blogs in five markets. In the U.S., four of the top blogs were tech related and four were devoted to political passions on the left and right. (Boing Boing, another blog deemed "most influential," covers society and culture with a heavy dose of tech trends.)

To rank a blog's status, the study relied on Technorati's system of tallying a blog's unique in-bound links from other blogs as a proxy for influence. By this measure, techy site Engadget ranked the most influential. The site is part of the AOL-owned Weblogs network. Boing Boing and Gizmodo, another gadgets blog, follow. Other top 10 blogs include The Huffington Post, Daily Kos and TechCrunch.

And of the top 100 blogs in the U.S., 25% deal with politics.

There was recently an article in the Chicago Tribune on "political trackers", focusing on a series of other examples of "political tracking."

Today's Los Angeles Times has a story on political "trackers", following the Burns Senate campaign in Montana:

Trackers — using inexpensive hand-held cameras and having the ability to post clips almost instantly on YouTube and other video-sharing websites — have become a major element in several campaigns.

The most notable tracker moment this year came in Virginia when Republican Sen. George Allen used the word "macaca" to describe his Democratic tracker, a 20-year-old Indian American man.

Allen's critics say the word was a racial insult; Allen says it was a "made-up word" that intended no offense. The senator nonetheless apologized, and the issue dominated news coverage of the campaign for days.

In some ways, the work of trackers is not new. Opposing campaigns have long followed what the other guy was saying, trolling for a slip or worse. In 1987, for instance, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s presidential campaign was torpedoed when opponents unearthed the Delaware Democrat's use of bits of speeches lifted from other public figures.

But back then, opposing campaigns had to either persuade the news media to pick it up or invest in a campaign ad to get their message on the air, said Michael Cornfield, vice president at ElectionMall.com, a nonpartisan campaign-technology firm.

With YouTube and related technologies, publicizing material now is much less cumbersome — and less expensive.

But here is an interesting claim in the story:

Although candidates of both parties post their television advertisements on YouTube, the Democrats appear more inclined — so far — to use the technology.

In the Montana race, Republicans have periodically tracked appearances of Burns' Democratic opponent, state Senate President Jon Tester.

But the GOP has posted only one: a recent call by Tester to repeal the Patriot Act.

That opens the door to some interesting research questions: Are Democratic campaigns more likely to use YouTube for "tracking"? Is that because their campaigns are more tech-savvy, or because they perceive that YouTube's demographics are ones that Democrats wish to target? And of course there is the bottom-line research issue here: do voters view these materials on YouTube, and are they influencing their decisions?