ANybody ever hear of Voter Emailing Company? Just got this email.

[napi21]

Elected officials, candidates and advocacy groups supporting specific candidates for office would like to contact you through periodic e-mail regarding important issues. Electronic communication provides you with the ability to:
Tell candidates what issues you think are important.
Get information about relevant events when they occur in your local area.
Learn more about candidates running for office so you can make an informed choice on Election Day.
Please follow the instructions at the bottom of this message if you do not wish to receive
e-mail from your elected officials.

Thank you for your time.

Voter Emailing Company
2001 S St. NW #630
Washington, DC 20009



Who are they and what are they looking for?

[shraby]

1. Probably spammers looking for more

email addresses.

[TayTay]

2. Press Release from last year

24.8 Million Email Addresses Now Available for Political Communications from the Voter Emailing Company; Political Groups Can Target Voters Through Email Just Like Direct Mail
Business Wire 08-06-2004


WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 6, 2004--One of the major stumbling blocks to effective online voter communications has now been overcome: voter email addresses are now available for targeted political communications. The Voter Emailing Company and Voter Contact Services announced the roll-out of a comprehensive database of 24.8 million national voter email addresses.

"Our database combines voter file information with email addresses to provide campaigns with the tools they need to finally reach-out to known voters through email," said Roger Stone, partner of The Voter Emailing Company. "Now a campaign or political organization can target known voters to vote for the candidate or issue they are advocating."

"We have dozens of clients who are effectively targeting voters through email to build grassroots organizations, persuade voters, raise money online, get out the vote, and request vote-by-mail ballots. It is truly changing how campaigns can use the Internet to win on Election Day," said Max Fose, partner with The Voter Emailing Company and former Internet Manager for John McCain's 2000 Presidential campaign.

Voter Contact Services, one of our nation's most reliable and comprehensive sources of voter lists and information, partnered with Voter Emailing Company to add email addresses to the national voter file. Voter Emailing Company matched the voter file against 200 million email address records from multiple sources to accurately match and append 24.8 million email addresses to the voter file.

In addition, a "Welcome" email message was sent to every voter matched to both clean the list of "bad" email addresses and ask permission to continue communicating with the voter. The list was purged of those opted out of further communications.

Voter Emailing Company reports that the successful match rate is more than 15% using multiple databases - yielding more than 24 million voter email addresses nationally. The email addresses have a large number of uses - including donor/volunteer recruitment, generating grassroots support for legislation in key districts, creating turnout to political events/fundraisers, voter persuasion, issue advocacy, GOTV, and, of course, fundraising. The email list was recently used successfully in California in combination with direct mail to gather petition signatures for a statewide ballot initiative.

"Voter emails are now another viable and extremely cost effective form of voter communications to add to a campaign arsenal," said Max Fose. "Now, we not only have TV, radio, print advertising and direct mail, but we can send several emails for a fraction of the cost of these other advertising methods to reinforce our message to voters. For example, we are able to send 100 separate emails to a list of 1 million voters for the same cost as one piece of direct mail to the same list."

About Voter Emailing Company, A Partnership of Corporations

Voter Emailing Company (VEC) partners have been on the cutting edge of computer voter communications technology for 40 years. VEC was formed in 2003 to create successful email voter communications by creating the first national voter database of voter email addresses. For more information visit www.voteremailing.com.

About Voter Contact Services

Voter Contact Services (VCS) has been building voter files and helping campaigns use them to win elections for 30 years. VCS is largest independent voter file firm in the country and have an unmatched record of fast, reliable service. VCS's National Political DataBase contains in-depth counts and demographic information on their voter file of more than 148 million voters, nationwide. For more information visit www.vcsnet.com.

CONTACT: Voter Emailing Company Roger Stone, 202-265-6510 Max Fose, 202-285-8885

[Lerkfish]

3. "roger stone"? is he the same tanned protege of Rove?

or do I have a different guy?

[TayTay]

4. One and the same

Big time Rethug bad guy, direct mail protege of KKKarl.

[TayTay]

5. The Data Merchants are going in interesting directions

Just some snippets from a Data Theft hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee in 5/11/2005 (You can see this hearing for yourself. Go here and click: http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/witnesslist.cfm?id=1491)

Sen. Kerry is questioning Mr. Sanford of LexisNexis; which has acknowledged having a huge databae of info gathered about Americans. The Sen. is asking about what possible uses that kind of personal, medical and financial info could be used for and who it could be sold to:

KERRY: Would either of you sell to a political committee?

SANFORD: Senator, we have legal research business, news and business information services. There's nothing that would stop them from having access. I don't think they would qualify for permissive use under TLBA (ph) or the BPTA (ph), though. I mean, those are around fraud detection and prevention and law enforcement type of permissible use.

KERRY: But is there anything to stop a committee from -- have you sold anything to a political committee?

SANFORD: Not that I'm aware of, no, Senator.

KERRY: But could they buy?

SANFORD: I don't believe that's a customer segment we serve.

KERRY: But could they?

SANFORD: I don't believe they would get credentialed, but I can find out. It's not a question I've heard before. But I don't believe -- I've never heard -- I've been around with the company since its inception, and...

KERRY: Well, do you have a means of checking, so that...

SANFORD: We have a business purpose criteria upon which we'll enroll people as customers. I don't believe political committees meet the business purpose; therefore, I don't believe we would set up a customer account with them.

KERRY: What about a political consultant, who is doing sophisticated political analysis, polling analysis?

SANFORD: I don't believe they're customers of ours, nor do I believe we'd serve them.

KERRY: You "don't believe," but there's no set of guidelines with respect to...

SANFORD: I'm trying to be very specific. There are very specific guidelines about who we serve as customers. I've never heard of this customer segment being anybody we serve.

The preponderance of our customers are large insurance companies, large financial institutions, trying to process transactions so a consumer can get some kind of benefit -- an insurance policy, a job -- large retailers or large customers of ours. We don't have very many customers that aren't in the large commercial -- space (ph) or government enterprises.

BILL NELSON: May I ask a follow-up on that. But if one of your large commercial customers asked for this information and you had some reason to know that they were going to use it for political purposes...

SANFORD: Our customers, by and large, have to send us -- they're asking questions an application at a time, so I'm not sure how they come in and ask that question anyway.

The most likely way they could present themselves is through the direct marketing business, where we don't sell sensitive personal identifiable information in any way.

But -- again -- I'll be happy to get back to the senator and the committee on that. I'm not aware this is a market we have any interest or any services to.

SMITH: Like I said earlier in the hearing, Senator, this is a question that didn't register Republican or Democrat, but maybe both sides are pretty interested now.

Scary stuff, if ChoicePoint and other data merchants get into the business of selling all your personal info to political consultants and PACs.