Consultants Deliver Politics To Voters' Inboxes, at Price (political spam)

[Rose Siding]

Millions of Americans who are already trying to fight off unwanted electronic mail from direct marketers are about to get deluged by another source: politicians and lobbying groups.

For the first time, a nationwide list of registered voters has been cross-referenced with multiple lists of e-mail addresses collected from magazine subscribers, catalogue shoppers, online poll participants and the like. The result is that legislators, candidates for office and interest groups can buy more than 25 million e-mail addresses of registered voters and contact them at will.

"This is the next generation of campaign strategies," said Roger Alan Stone, chief executive of Advocacy Inc., the D.C. cyber-consultancy that helped create the new product. (He is not the well-known Republican consultant of the same name).

But privacy advocates are appalled by the development. They see Stone's enterprise as dangerously intrusive and potentially harmful to the public's confidence in government. "What we're talking about here is political spam," said Pam Fielding, co-author of "The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing the Political Landscape."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42517-2004Aug28.html?nav=headlines