[Lnc-business] DRAFT RESOLUTION on the use of "Big Data"

[Starchild]

	Ever heard the following observation about George Orwell's dystopian novel: "1984 was not an instruction manual"? 

	I much appreciated that dark witticism when I first heard it, and still do. But lately it occurs to me that 1984 actually is a kind of an instruction manual. Not in the sense the original observation intends to warn us against, of would-be totalitarian leaders using it as a blueprint for imposing control, but in the sense of instructing the rest of us about what kinds of developments to be on guard against; what kinds of conditions we must not allow to come into being.

	In the spirit of trusting you my colleagues to grasp the implications of this material enough to read it as a pro-freedom and not an anti-freedom instruction manual, the following Newsweek story from June 8 addresses a topic that I believe demands our attention as a political party:

http://www.newsweek.com/2017/06/16/big-data-mines-personal-info-manipulate-voters-623131.html

	A couple excerpts (much more at the link, and well worth a read):
> The speaker, Alexander Nix, an Eton man, was very much among his own kind—global elites with names like Buffett, Soros, Brokaw, Pickens, Petraeus and Blair. Trouble was indeed on the way for some of the attendees at the annual summit of policymakers and philanthropists whose world order was about to be wrecked by the American election. But for Nix, chief executive officer of a company working for the Trump campaign, that mayhem was a very good thing.
> 
> He didn’t mention it that day, but his company, Cambridge Analytica, had been selling its services to the Trump campaign, which was building a massive database of information on Americans. The company’s capabilities included, among other things, “psychographic profiling” of the electorate. And while Trump’s win was in no way assured on that afternoon, Nix was there to give a cocky sales pitch for his cool new product.
> 
> “It’s my privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data and psychographics in the electoral process,” he began. As he clicked through slides, he explained how Cambridge Analytica can appeal directly to people’s emotions, bypassing cognitive roadblocks, thanks to the oceans of data it can access on every man and woman in the country...
> 
> To illustrate, he walked the audience through what he called “a real-life example” taken from the company’s data on the American electorate, starting with a large anonymous group with a general set of personality types and moving down to the most specific—one man, it turned out, who was easily identifiable.
> Nix started with a group of 45,000 likely Republican Iowa caucusgoers who needed a little push—what he calls a “persuasion message”—to get out and vote for Ted Cruz (who used Cambridge Analytica early in the 2016 primaries). That group’s specifics had been fished out of the data stream by an algorithm sifting the thousands of digital data points of their lives. Nix was focusing on a personality subset the company’s algorithms determined to be “very low in neuroticism, quite low in openness and slightly conscientious.”
> 
> Click. A screen of graphs and pie charts.
> 
> “But we can segment further. We can look at what issue they care about. Gun rights I’ve selected. That narrows the field slightly more.”
> 
> Click. Another screen of graphs and pie charts, but with some circled specifics.
> 
> “And now we know we need a message on gun rights. It needs to be a persuasion message, and it needs to be nuanced according to the certain personality type we are interested in.”
> 
> Click. Another screen, the state of Iowa dotted with tiny reds and blues—individual voters.
> 
> “If we wanted to drill down further, we could resolve the data to an individual level, where we have somewhere close to 4- or 5,000 data points on every adult in the United States.”
> 
> Click. Another screenshot with a single circled name—Jeffrey Jay Ruest, gender: male, and his GPS coordinates.
> 
> The American voter whose psychological tendencies Nix had just paraded before global elites like a zoo animal was easy to find. Cambridge researchers would have known much more about him than his address. They probably had access to his Facebook likes—heavy metal band Iron Maiden, a news site called eHot Rods and Guns, and membership in Facebook groups called My Daily Carry Gun and Mopar Drag Racing.
> 
> “Likes” like those are sine qua non of the psychographic profile.
> 
> And like every other one of the hundreds of millions of Americans now caught in Cambridge Analytica’s slicing and dicing machine, Ruest was never asked if he wanted a large swath of his most personal data scrutinized so that he might receive a message tailored just for him from Trump.
> 
> Big Data, artificial intelligence and algorithms designed and manipulated by strategists like the folks at Cambridge have turned our world into a Panopticon, the 19th-century circular prison designed so that guards, without moving, could observe every inmate every minute of every day. 

	The choice for us seems clear: Will we emulate Alexander Nix, or side with Jeffrey Jay Ruest? Do we get on the big data bandwagon and attempt to beat the authoritarians at their game by being cleverer at manipulating people's personal information than they are, or do we condemn the practice and put our trust in the public to appreciate those who refuse to engage in such methods? Be manipulators, or speak out against manipulation? 

	The Newsweek piece discusses how big data analytics has advanced, and will likely continue to advance at a rate such that by 2020, the analytics used in the 2016 campaign will look like "horse and buggy" technology. Already, writes author Nina Burleigh, "On any given day, Team Trump was placing up to 70,000 ad variants, and around the third debate with Hillary Clinton, it pumped out 175,000 ad variants."

	Of course it wasn't just the Trump campaign. According to the article, "The Democratic National Committee has used Catalist, a 240 million–strong storehouse of voter data, containing hundreds of points of data per person, pulled from commercial and public records."  Further on, Bureigh tells us:

> Democratic strategists say Facebook’s microtargeting abilities, behavioral science and the stores of data held by other social media platforms like Twitter and Snapchat are tools that won’t go back inside Pandora’s box. They, of course, insist they won’t be looking for low-cognition voters high in neuroticism who are susceptible to fear-based messages. But Big Data plus behavioral science plus Facebook plus microtargeting is the political formula to beat. They will use it, and they won't talk about how they will refine and improve it.

	Panopticon be damned, if the temptations to a candidate, or a party, of going down Nix's road aren't already obvious, read the article and I think they will be. The dangers likewise. I hope it's no mystery which side I come down on. I think we should listen to Edward Snowden, whose point of view Burleigh's piece describes thus:

> Speaking to a Big Data industry conference in Washington May 15, fugitive National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden implored his audience to consider how the mass collection and preservation of records on every online interaction and activity threatens our society. “When we have people that can be tracked and no way to live outside this chain of records,” he said, “what we have become is a quantified spiderweb. That is a very negative thing for a free and open society.”

	With all this in mind, I offer the following resolution. Does anyone have any suggested changes in wording before I ask for co-sponsors?

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Whereas a growing ability to harvest, analyze, and manipulate data has during the past few years increasingly enabled "microtargeting" in which hundreds or thousands of data points about specific individuals, harvested from online sources, are run through algorithms and analyzed using behavioral science in order to sell people products, or push political candidates or messages; and 

Whereas algorithms and data harvesting abilities are expected to continue to rapidly increase in sophistication; and

Whereas our Republican and Democrat opponents in the 2016 United States presidential election were already cynically mining "big data" to employ "microtargeting" against millions of Americans without, in most cases, the knowledge or consent of these individuals that their personal data were being used to send them tailored messages different from those sent to other voters; and

Whereas such practices represent a clear and present danger to freedom, with NSA whistleblower and libertarian hero Edward Snowden warning that,“When we have people that can be tracked and no way to live outside this chain of records, what we have become is a quantified spiderweb," and calling this "a very negative thing for a free and open society"; and

Whereas we reject the top-down, authoritarian mindset underlying these and other unethical policies and practices of the "cartel parties" and the government institutions they dominate, and exist instead to defend the rights of the individual,

We therefore hereby resolve that the Libertarian National Committee will not use "big data" under this or any other name, to engage in "microtargeting" under this or any other name, by obtaining and analyzing large numbers of data points about specific individuals without the explicit consent of those individuals in order to market, advertise, or promote our party or candidates to them, or to raise money from them, and urge all Libertarian candidates and campaigns to make a similar pledge.
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Love & Liberty,

                                 ((( starchild )))
At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
                        RealReform at earthlink.net
                                (415) 625-FREE
                                  @StarchildSF

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