Now that the Texas company, Buxton Co., has been identified it is likely that they will not be used much, at least by Romney, in the future. It is no secret now, but other candidates will flock to this new treasure trove of prospective open pocketbooks. It all sounds so conspiratorial and mysterious.
I enjoyed the AP report which described the Buxton system as using -- powerful computers to access thousands of commercially available databases sold behind the scenes to corporations. Of course, if the databases are commercially available, I would hardly describe them as being sold "behind the scenes." That description sounds like a cloak and dagger operation from a Mission Impossible movie. It described the search as based on psychographic information about Americans. What could be more conspiratorial and personally invasive than that?
Do not be fooled - this type of flamboyant language is written by PR people for Buxton. Obama supporters will jump on this situation like bees on honey. It sounds like a setup to me with Romney caught in the act of doing nothing, but standard operating procedure for locating people who might want to support his campaign. However, Romney's actions have been recast as a dark plot to invade our pocket books.
I donated to Cain's campaign. I now receive emails from several republicans to donate to their campaigns, sometimes with a Cain reference and sometimes not. If Cain's donor database is matched with my zip code from a publicly available government database, using a normal personal computer, then Cain knows my average family income, education, house value etc. - psychographic stuff. The information comes from standard zip code data averaging, not from any personal data base on me. However, my description of this data mining activity is not nearly as provocative as the AP report.
I believe this data mining report will give the starving media pundits some artificial nutrition for the next few days.
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