President Obama announced Monday a plan to apply to the operation of the federal government the type of computer technology he utilized in his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.
"Back in 2007, when I was first running for this office, I had the opportunity to visit Google headquarters in Mountain View in Silicon Valley to discuss ways we could use technology to allow more citizens to participate in the democracy and bring the government still largely in the 20th-century into the 21st century,” Obama said as he announced the program at a White House meeting.
“After all, we had already set out to build a new type of campaign – one that used technology to bring people together, and then trusted them with that technology to organize on their own,” he said.
But the program presented as a benefit to citizens may not be as altruistic as Obama initially made it appear, according to the author of new book that provides a postmortem analysis of the Republican defeat in 2012 and a critical blueprint for a Republican presidential victory in 2016.
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WND senior staff writer Jerome R. Corsi is the author of "What Went Wrong: The Inside Story of the GOP Debacle of 2012 … And How It Can Be Avoided Next Time."
“A key point of the book is that Obama’s two presidential campaigns have applied advanced computer and data management techniques to capture what Democrats hope will be a new and possibly permanent Democratic electoral majority,” Corsi said.
Corsi noted Obama has applied advanced computer technology to develop the National Security Agency's capability to listen in on every phone call and to read every email sent in America. The Obama re-election campaign reached the point at which every voter in America could be individually profiled and scored for their personal political preferences and their likelihood to vote for Obama.”
Corsi cautioned that Obama aims to use data to control and manipulate citizens as well as voters. The president's attention, he said, remains focused on collecting data on individuals as a means of exerting political power, without regard to the risks of infringing upon constitutional rights to privacy and free speech.
In his announcement today, Obama offered an illustration of how the technology is being applied.
“Today, for example, many online shopping websites help fill in some of your information so you don’t have to enter it every time you log in,” Obama explained. “As a consequence, we’re working on a project called MyUSA that will save you time by doing the same thing with government forms.”
Corsi cautioned that Obama's aim in 2012 was not only to use computer technology and database management science to win an election.
“His goal was to transform presidential politics," Corsi said, "such that any candidate without the resources and computer science management team capable of competing would be left in the dust."
"Obama created an image of himself as a celebrity and reached out on Facebook and in personalized emails," he said. "The messages were designed to make gullible voters feel Obama cared about their needs, with the promise that re-electing Obama would give each voter precisely the benefits they wanted back from the government.”
In "What Went Wrong," Corsi describes how the Obama 2012 presidential campaign targeted the re-creation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition in a modern-day configuration.
Reaching out to African-Americans, Hispanics, single women, labor union voters and young voters just entering the job market, Obama’s computer profiling collected sufficient matrices of data that each voter communicating with the campaign could envision Obama’s re-election would fulfill their personal needs. The offerings included more affirmative action, a new immigration bill that would amount to amnesty, free contraceptives, government-funded abortions, new entry-level jobs and an extension of unemployment insurance, disability benefit and food stamp programs.
“Whether or not Obama had any capability of delivering on his promises in his second term, the 2012 Obama campaign made likely voters feel a part of Obama’s team,” Corsi stressed. “The Google-like feel of the Obama campaign technology was seductive to voters who felt slighted and wanted to hear the message that someone else was to blame.”
Corsi pointed out that Obama-crafted campaign themes played right into identity-politics themes such as “The rich aren’t paying their fair share” or Republicans are anti-women because they oppose abortion.
“Obama did it again today,” Corsi pointed out, “promising that his Google-outreach techniques applied to the federal government would allow FEMA to analyze satellite and aerial imagery to target more effective emergency relief efforts to families needing help in a natural disaster than could be achieved if FEMA had to identify disaster victims in the field.”
Obama noted that after Hurricane Sandy, most victims were able to sign up for assistance using FEMA’s mobile and web apps, enabling them to update and check the status of their applications.
“And FEMA agents went door-to-door in some areas with iPads, helping residents who had lost power and Internet access sign up for disaster relief without leaving their homes," Obama said. "So making sure that we’re delivering services better, faster, more efficiently.”
Corsi pointed out that every time a citizen offers personal information to government via computer technology, the information is easily data banked into an ever-evolving personal profile. The ultimate goal is to influence the his behavior or affect his thinking, often without even being aware of the manipulation.
“In the name of reducing government waste and increasing government responsiveness to citizens, Obama is asking for the computer tools he needs to expand big government beyond dimensions most people imagine is possible,” Corsi warned.
“As we have seen with Obama’s use of the IRS as a weapon to punish those who disagree with him over ideology or issues of political policy, Big Brother under Obama has an insatiable desire for power.
In the 21st century, no American must ever forget that knowledge is power and there is no greater knowledge than that modern computer science equipped with the Internet is capable of collecting and analyzing to know who we are one-by-one.”