CALIFORNIA YANKEE

Fort Hood hero: President Obama 'betrayed' shooting victims

ABC News reports that Sergeant Kimberly Munley, one of the two then police Sergeants who stopped the deadly shooting at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, says President Obama broke the promise he made to her that the victims would be well taken care of:

"Betrayed is a good word. Not to the least little bit have the victims been taken care of. In fact they've been neglected."

During the shooting that many consider a terrorist attack, Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist and a practicing Muslim of Palestinian descent, shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire and mercilessly shot 44 soldiers preparing to deploy to Iraq and one civilian killing 13. Munley was shot three times in her confrontation with Hasan.

You can watch video of the shootings aftermath below:

Initially, Obama tried to capitalize on the heroic actions of Munley and her partner Sergeant Mark Todd. They were included as guests in the First Lady's box for the 2010 State of the Union address. A few months later they were again honored by Obama at the 2010 National Association of Police Organizations TOP COPS award winners ceremony in the Rose Garden.

Despite the fact that there is extensive evidence that Hasan was in communication with al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki prior to the attack, the victims were denied  Purple Hearts and the government shooting has been treating the incident as "workplace violence" instead of "combat related" or terrorism. You can read a redacted report on the FBI's investigation of Hasan's ties to al-Awlaki here. Al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone attack in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011.

To add insult to her injuries Munley was laid off from her job with the base's civilian police force last year.

Last November, Munley and 147 other plaintiffs sued the U.S. government, Hassan and the estate of Anwar al-Awlaki seeking damages and a ruling that the shooting was a terrorist attack. Such a finding would clear the way for them to receive benefits available to those who injuries are classified as "combat related," which aren't available as the result of workplace violence. You can read the lawsuit here.

According to ABC News, former Sgt. Munley now believes Obama used her for political advantage in arranging for her to sit next to Michelle Obama during the President's State of the Union address in 2010. Munley says she  wants to help the others who were shot that day and continue to suffer.

"We got tired of being neglected. So this was our last resort and I'm not ashamed of it a bit."

Something to think about as you watch tonight's State of the Union political theater with its shooting victim props.

A day with the Hoover Institution

The Hoover Tower at Stanford University. Image Credit: The Hoover Institution

Monday I was privileged to participate in the Hoover Institution's Media Colloquium at Stanford University.

Perhaps you, like me, are aware of but unfamiliar with the Hoover Institution. The Institution is considered a Conservative think tank, and according to Wikipedia is "influential in the American conservative and libertarian movements." It supports individual, economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and our form of representative government based upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

During the Colloquium,  along with a couple of dozen other journalists, I spent a very interesting day exploring foreign and domestic policy issues facing President Obama and the 113th Congress, with a number of accomplished academics. We discussed the economy, the national debt, the fiscal cliff, the sequester, taxes and too big to fail with Michael Boskin and Kevin Warsh; Obama's reelection and dissociation theory with Shelby Steele; the future of Conservatism, and his new book Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation, with Peter Berkoowitz; national security issues including cyber and drone warfare with Amy Zegart; and the Middle East and Iran's nuclear ambitions with Abbas Milani.

The discussions were all intellectually stimulating and very interesting. It's been some time since I have been immersed in an academic environment. The experience caused me to appreciate my education in Political Science, International Affairs, Economics, Administration and the Law, but wishing for more. It will provide me material and new sources, which I believe will improve my reporting.

I will have more about the Colloquium in the days ahead as I continue to contemplate what I learned. For example, I intend to write about Berkowitz's new book as soon as I finish reading it. You can get a peek at Berkowitz's conclusions in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Conservative Survival in a Progressive Age.

As I mentioned above, I've long-been aware of but unfamiliar with the Hoover Institution. My participation in the Colloquium not only enlightened me as to the wisdom of some of the Institution's fellows, I also got to know and respect the staff. If you are in need of information the Institution might have, I would encourage you seek assistance from the appropriate Hoover Institution contact. They are good people.

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I received an honorarium for my participation.

Will Democrats sell your political opinions to credit card companies?

by Lois Beckett, ProPublica, Feb. 5, 2013, 7 a.m.

For years, state Democratic parties have been gathering information about individual voters' political leanings. They have noted down the opinions voters shared with canvassers — which candidates they said they supported or their positions on policy issues.

Now, the record of what people told Democratic volunteers may go up for sale — and not just to political groups. Democrats are looking into whether credit card companies, retailers like Target or other commercial interests may want to buy the information.

State Democratic party leaders formed the National Voter File Co-op in 2011 to sell their voter data to approved groups like the NAACP. The goal was to recoup some of the money local Democratic parties spent collecting and updating their local voter lists, which include voters of all parties.

Much of the data the co-op sells comes from the government and is already part of the public record — information such as voters' names, addresses and party affiliation.

But local Democratic parties also have information about voters' views and preferences collected over many campaign cycles. (We wrote about Minnesota's data-collecting "Grandma Brigade" last month.) Some states have used this raw data to create sophisticated estimates of how likely any voter is to vote for a Democrat, support Barack Obama or have certain opinions, say, on abortion or gun control.

As the co-op moves into its second year of selling data in an already crowded marketplace, it's looking for new potential clients — and companies who may use the data for commercial purposes, as opposed to political ones, are on the list.

"That's one of our growth areas," said Drew Brighton of TargetSmart Communications, which helps administer and market the Co-op's data. "Over the next six months, we are going to go ahead and make the rounds with some corporate prospects."

Brighton said retailers, for example, might be interested in figuring out if their customers are primarily Democrats or Republicans. "People want to know who shops in their stores," he said.

Democrats involved with the co-op do not know what companies might be most interested in buying their voter data.

"What the co-op is doing is saying, 'Look, there's a wealth of information here, that could potentially benefit your corporation or your business interests,'" said Ken Martin, a member of the co-op's board, and the chairman of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

"Everything is on the table, nothing's off the table. It's up to us to figure out what [data] there's a market for, and whether there's a comfort level among state parties for selling that information," he said.

Each state Democratic Party will have the final say over whether to sell their voter information for commercial purposes. If state party leaders aren't comfortable with selling proprietary data to a certain client, they can opt out.

Individual states have different laws about how their public voting records can be used. Many states mandate that public voter rolls can only be used for "political purposes," and some states explicitly ban using voting records for "commercial purposes." The co-op and its clients must abide by these rules.

But state political data laws do not apply to the information about voters that the party itself has gathered.

"Generally, information freely provided to the party by the voter, or data about who participated in a primary [that the party collects] is not subject to any prohibition on it being sold," said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Elections Commission and an attorney for the co-op.

This means Democrats are free to sell the opinions voters give to campaign canvassers to credit card companies or marketing firms.

Whether they will choose to do this isn't certain. Martin, the Minnesota Democratic chairman, said that party leaders will have to weigh the risks of any potential deal.

"Obviously, we know we could make money off our file, but it always comes back to the question of, at what cost?" Martin said.

He said he would evaluate commercial deals on a case-by-case basis.

"I'm not opposed to selling the data if it's a corporation who shares our values and is going to do some good work with that data."

Wal-Mart, for instance, would not make the cut, he said.

Whether corporations are interested in buying the co-op's data remains to be seen. Wal-Mart did not respond to a request for comment about whether it would be interested in buying information about its customers' political beliefs.

Consumer data companies like Experian already peddle information about individuals' political beliefs and donation histories — and also link this information to their consumer habits. This November, Experian Simmons released a study breaking down the political leanings of shoppers at J. Crew, Lady Footlocker, and more than 100 other major retailers.

But the fact that selling voters' opinions to companies is even an option for Democrats is another example of how rapidly the data industry is evolving — and how little information individuals have about how their data is being shared.

In his "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," released last year, President Barack Obama argued that when companies collect personal data from consumers, they should only share it in ways consumers expect.

If a company decides it wants to share personal information in a new way, Obama suggested, it should notify the consumers who are affected and provide them with choices about how their data is used.

Although Obama pledged to work with Congress to make the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights into law, that hasn't happened yet.

Joseph Turow, a privacy expert at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, said the possibility that Democrats might repurpose voters' opinions for commercial marketing is problematic — particularly because they had collected that information through "a relationship of trust" with voters.

Both Democrats and Republicans have long traded information about voters' opinions with outside political groups. Long-time Republican activists have created a new group, the Data Trust, to manage the Republican National Committee's data and coordinate data exchanges between the RNC and conservative and issue advocacy groups.

Asked if the Republican Party sells the party's proprietary data to retailers or credit card companies, RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowsi wrote, "Absolutely not — hasn't happened in past and won't in [the] future."

The Obama campaign's own closely guarded trove of voter information will be used to mobilize support for the president's agenda through a new nonprofit advocacy group, Organizing for Action, led by top Obama aides.

It's not clear what other groups may be given access to Obama's voter data. Organizing for Action did not respond to a request for comment. Staffers have said that passing on the campaign's voter information to an Obama-focused nonprofit reflects the wishes of the president's supporters, although supporters were not asked directly about how the campaign should treat their data.

Sandstrom, the lawyer for the state Democratic parties' National Voter File Co-op, said he doubted the co-op would actually end up selling voters' opinions for commercial uses, calling it an "abstract concern."

Democratic Party chairs were not eager to weigh in on the issue.

Last week, ProPublica contacted 11 Democratic state party chairs — some of them newly elected to their positions — about the National Voter File Co-op. Party chairs in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Nevada, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin declined or did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

New Hampshire Democratic chair Ray Buckley, who leads the Association of State Democratic Chairs, also declined to comment.