CD’s, Privacy, and the GOP

03/02/2006

Paul Munnis

In the case of the GOP use of a CD to gather information on Gay Marriage, there is a tendency to focus on the Gay Marriage part of the story and miss the larger picture concerning the building of a targeted voter data base organized by wedge issue.

The GOP is putting together a targeted voter list of every voter in Minnesota. They are characterizing each voter and identifying how to approach them by wedge issue item.

One’s position on guns, gays, and abortion is the beginning of a huge tracking trend. Their goal is to get to a point where a guy with a cell phone tied to the database out doing door-knocking can check a street address and know what issue to hit the resident with, what lit to leave, what discussion to hold.

People say this should be illegal and that it’s an invasion of personal privacy.

Yet the first bit of news is that there are few privacy laws in America and there are not likely to be any in the near future.

After what we have been through these last few weeks with NAS spying on American citizens, you can see why.

Also, note that privacy laws are laws that criminals can hide behind.

In a society such as ours, we rely instead of ethical behavior to regulate such privacy invasion. In the case of the GOP—good ethical behavior is lacking.

We now must worry about whether they will invade our PC’s and capture our keystrokes using ad-ware and spy-ware—the sort of thing that fascist governments do to their people.

I’m afraid that their behavior gives rise to the answers and now the DFL has a big problem. Do we emulate them or take the high road and say that we will debate the issues on the basis of the merits of the argument and not try to trap voters and manipulate them by invading their privacy?

It’s hard to do when you want to be competitive and win elections but I opt for the higher ethical path and I hope that my fellow DFL’ers will too—simply because it’s the right thing to do.

I also want to encourage the DFL to sponsor ethics rules for members of the MN Senate and MN House requiring them to forgo such invasion of privacy of voters. 

On this issue we are called to lead.