Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 30, 2016 9:19 am
by seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 30, 2016 9:36 am
The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that’s working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt speaks about the connected world, at the Hay Festival, in Hay-on-Wye, central Wales May 25, 2013.
Nothing to say. (Reuters/Rebecca Naden)
WRITTEN BY
Adam Pasick
Tim Fernholz
October 09, 2015
An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley and Democratic politics.
The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt—the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet—to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs.
But campaigns—lacking stock options and long-term job security—find it hard to attract the elite engineering talent that Facebook, Google, and countless startups rely on. That’s also part of the problem that Schmidt and the Groundwork are helping Clinton’s team to solve.
The Groundwork is one of the Clinton campaign’s biggest vendors, billing it for more than $177,000 in the second quarter of 2015, according to federal filings. Yet many political operatives know little about it. Its website consists entirely of a grey-on-black triangle logo that suggests “the digital roots of change” while also looking vaguely like the Illuminati symbol:
1
“We’re not trying to obfuscate anything, we’re just trying to keep our heads down and do stuff,” says Michael Slaby, who runs the Groundwork. He was the chief technology officer for president Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, a top digital executive for Obama 2012, and the former chief technology strategist for TomorrowVentures, Schmidt’s angel investment fund.
He explained that the Groundwork and its parent company, Chicago-based Timshel—which according to its website is named for a Hebrew word meaning “you may” and is devoted to “helping humanity solve our most difficult social, civic, and humanitarian challenges”—are “all one project, with the same backers,” whom he declined to name.
1
“There are a lot of people who can write big checks. Eric recognizes how the technology he’s been building his whole career can be applied to different spaces.”
Schmidt did not respond to several requests for comment. But several Democratic political operatives and technologists, who would only speak anonymously to avoid offending Schmidt and the Clinton campaign, confirmed that the Groundwork is funded at least in part by the Alphabet chairman.
The Groundwork was initially based in an office in downtown Brooklyn just blocks from the headquarters of its biggest client: the Clinton campaign. There, a staff made up mostly of senior software engineers began building the tools and infrastructure that could give her a decisive advantage.
Slaby has a reputation for being able to bridge the cultural divide between politicos and techies. And sources say the Groundwork was created to minimize the technological gap that occurs between presidential campaign cycles while pushing forward the Big Data infrastructure that lies at the heart of modern presidential politics.
There is also another gap in play: The shrinking distance between Google and the Democratic Party. Former Google executive Stephanie Hannon is the Clinton campaign’s chief technology officer, and a host of ex-Googlers are currently employed as high-ranking technical staff at the Obama White House. Schmidt, for his part, is one of the most powerful donors in the Democratic Party—and his influence does not stem only from his wealth, estimated by Forbes at more than $10 billion.
At a time when private-sector money is flowing largely unchecked into US politics, Schmidt’s funding of the Groundwork suggests that 2016’s most valuable resource may not be donors capable of making eight-figure donations to Super PACs, but rather supporters who know how to convince talented engineers to forsake (at least for awhile) the riches of Silicon Valley for the rough-and-tumble pressure cooker of a presidential campaign.
“There are a lot of people who can write big checks,” Slaby says. “Eric recognizes how the technology he’s been building his whole career can be applied to different spaces. The idea of tech as a force multiplier is something he deeply understands.”
The technology that helped re-elect Obama
Although Obama’s technology staff downplays credit for his election victories, there’s no doubt they played a crucial role. One former Obama staffer, Elan Kriegel, who now leads analytics for the Clinton campaign, suggested the technology accounted for perhaps two percentage points of the campaign’s four percent margin of victory in 2012.
The 2012 campaign’s analytics team constructed a complex model of the electorate to identify 15 million undecided voters that could be swayed to Obama’s side. They drew on databases which compiled a comprehensive record of voters’ interactions with the campaign—Facebook pages liked, volunteer contacts, events attended, money donated—and assigned them a score based on how strongly they supported Obama.
Those carefully constructed models and databases paid dividends for everything from advertising and campaign fundraising emails—which were rigorously A/B tested to determine the optimum wording and design (subject lines that said “Hey!” were found to be annoying but effective)—to voter polling and get-out-the-vote efforts on election day.
Members of the Obama tech team, including Michael Slaby and Harper Reed, with Eric Schmidt in 2012.(Harper Reed)
Perhaps the standout innovation from the Obama campaign was known as “Optimizer,” a tool that allowed the campaign to deploy carefully targeted television ads. Rather than rely on broad demographic data about programs and time slots, the Obama tech team accessed detailed information from TV set-top boxes to identify the most cost-efficient ways to reach hard-to-reach voters. The campaign’s top media consultant, Jim Margolis—now Clinton’s top media consultant—estimates Optimizer saved the campaign perhaps $40 million.
After the campaign, Optimizer became the cornerstone of a new startup called Civis Analytics that spun out of the Obama campaign—and it had its genesis in an election day visit by Schmidt to Chicago.
From election day to startup
As the internal polling numbers rolled in, the boiler room full of campaign staff and White House aides also included a tech executive: Schmidt, whose financial support and advice to the campaign made him an unofficial fixture. With the campaign drawing to its victorious conclusion, Schmidt was shifting into another mode: Talent-hunter and startup funder.
Schmidt and Obama at a White House meeting in 2009.
Schmidt and Obama at a White House meeting in 2009.(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
When the campaign’s analytics team declared victory at 2pm—hours before voting ended—by comparing early results to their model, its chief Dan Wagner recalls that Schmidt walked up to him and asked two questions: “Who are you? And what algorithms are you using?”
Wagner helped develop the Obama team’s ground-breaking approach to analytics in 2008, and made further refinements in 2012. But he says it was Schmidt who saw the commercial potential for the project—not just for political campaigns, but as a way to help private-sector companies decide how to effectively allocate their marketing budgets.
“I didn’t have any commercial intentions for anything, I was just trying to survive and elect Barack Obama,” Wagner says.
Nevertheless, immediately after the election, Schmidt backed Wagner and other members of his campaign team by becoming the sole investor in Civis Analytics, their data startup. Schmidt also invested in cir.cl, a social shopping startup run by Obama 2012 alumnus Carol Davidsen, who played a key role in the creation of Optimizer. (If you’re keeping score, that makes three Schmidt-funded startups run by ex-Obama staffers: Civis Analytics, cir.cl, and the Groundwork.)
What Wagner’s team built during the campaign, despite its innovativeness, was fairly clunky. “The thing that we built was pretty much a piece of junk, made of plywood in our garage,” Wagner says.
That’s because analyzing giant troves of data, knitting together disparate databases, and making it all work seamlessly is a tricky business, especially under the low-resource, high-pressure conditions of a presidential campaign. Building that tech infrastructure requires the most expensive kind of engineering talent, working under punishing time constraints. For Obama’s 2012 team, Slaby hired a developer named Harper Reed to serve as the campaign’s chief technology officer and build the campaign’s tech underpinnings.
Now Clinton’s campaign needs to build that infrastructure for themselves—or, even better, have a company like the Groundwork help build it for them. This time around, Schmidt backed the startup before the campaign even started.
Like Salesforce.com, for politics
So what does the Groundwork do? The company and Clinton’s campaign are understandably leery of disclosing details.
According to campaign finance disclosures, Clinton’s campaign is the Groundwork’s only political client. Its employees are mostly back-end software developers with experience at blue-chip tech firms like Netflix, Dreamhost, and Google.
Clinton and Schmidt at a 2014 Google event just days after the Groundwork was incorporated.Clinton and Schmidt at a 2014 Google event, just days after the Groundwork was incorporated.(Google)
The firm was formed in June 2014, shortly after Clinton released a memoir about her time as US secretary of state and began a media blitz that signaled her intent to run for president—including an appearance with Schmidt at Google headquarters—though she did not officially announce her run until the spring of 2015.
Democratic political operatives and technologists said that the Groundwork’s focus is on building a platform that can perform the critical functions of modern campaigning.
These sources tell Quartz that the Groundwork has been tasked with building the technological infrastructure to ingest massive amounts of information about voters, and develop tools that will help the campaign target them for fundraising, advertising, outreach, and get-out-the-vote efforts—essentially to create a political version of a customer relationship management (CRM) system, like the one that Salesforce.com runs for commerce, but for prospective voters.
“They are a technology platform company, not all that dissimilar from a Blue State Digital,” a Clinton campaign staffer told Quartz. Blue State grew out of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run and has become a cornerstone technology contractor for the Democratic Party and allied groups. “They provide a suite of services, donation, forum builders, things like that.”
The range of tasks anticipated for this platform—including volunteer coordination, fundraising, social-media marketing and events—makes it seem like the spiritual heir of the platform that Reed’s team built to integrate the Obama campaign’s various vendors, tools and data sources, which was called Narwhal.
That kind of database integration and number crunching may not sound terribly exciting. But building a list is the foundation of any campaign, and doing so digitally, with analytics and communications tools scaling across a nationwide campaign—with hundreds of paid staff and tens of thousands of volunteers—is no easy job, even for experienced engineers.
And it is an essential one for modern-day campaigns. The Romney campaign’s attempt to build a tool to compete with Narwhal (they named it Orca, the Narwhal’s natural enemy) famously fell apart on election day.
No Drama…Clinton?
Hillary Clinton’s last presidential run, like many ultimately unsuccessful campaigns, was hobbled by infighting among her consultants and staff. Even in the “no-drama Obama” 2012 team, the team had its own conflicts, with the engineers charged with building digital tools butting heads with staff charged with the campaign’s digital strategy.
“Who’s going to say, ‘Hey, billionaire smartest tech guy on the planet, thanks but no thanks?’”
Veterans of Obama’s campaign say Clinton’s hierarchy under campaign manager Robbie Mook is better organized to avoid such conflicts this time around, with chief digital strategist Teddy Goff over-seeing both the digital director Katie Dowd and Hannon, the highly regarded former Google executive.
“Hiring Steph may have been Hillary’s sharpest move to date,” says venture capitalist and Democratic fundraiser Chris Sacca, who tells Quartz she is “one of the most gifted and diligent technologists I have ever worked with.”
One source says Hannon is trying to reduce the campaign’s reliance on the Groundwork. But Schmidt’s stature in Silicon Valley, and his status as a major Clinton backer, may complicate any efforts to constrain the Groundwork’s involvement, and distort the typical balance of power between the campaign and a key vendor.
“Imagine you’re a mid-level person inside the campaign, or even the campaign manager,” one veteran Democratic operative says. “Who’s going to say, ‘Hey, billionaire smartest tech guy on the planet, thanks but no thanks?’”
Are startups the new Super PACs?
Today, corporations and wealthy donors have many ways to seek influence with politicians. While their donations to campaigns are limited to a maximum of $5,000 or hundreds of thousands to national party committees, they can also now set up Super PACs with unlimited money for political activities, so long as they don’t coordinate with the official campaigns.
That unlimited money is all well and good for many things a campaign needs—TV advertising, for example, and even field work. But if you want to help make a campaign more tech-savvy, it gets harder: a super PAC, nominally independent under byzantine campaign finance laws, can’t pay for tech infrastructure.
“Your world class skills are worth less because you’re doing it for a good cause.”
That’s the beauty of the Groundwork: Instead of putting money behind a Super PAC that can’t coordinate with the campaign, a well-connected donor like Schmidt can fund a startup to do top-grade work for a campaign, with the financial outlay structured as an investment, not a donation.
Schmidt, a major political donor, did not give money to Clinton’s campaign in the first half of this year, though a campaign official says he has visited the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters and is supportive of her candidacy.
With tech policy an increasingly important part of the president’s job—consider merely the issues of NSA surveillance and anti-trust policy, not to mention self-driving cars and military robots—helping to elect yet another president could be incredibly valuable to Schmidt and to Google.
And Schmidt’s largesse is not something that other candidates, either rival Democrats like Bernie Sanders or the crowded field of Republicans, will be able to easily match. The billionaire Alphabet executive chairman now boasts a growing track record for funding politically-minded tech startups. The jobs these create could make it easier to attract top engineers to political work without asking them to sacrifice pay and equity for a brief campaign sabbatical.
Slaby says that Groundwork and Timshel exist in part to help talented, highly in-demand engineers work for a larger purpose without having to totally abandon their compensation expectations.
“We’ve institutionalized this idea that if people are going to work on things that are important to them, they’re going to take a big pay cut—your world class skills are worth less because you’re doing it for a good cause,” says Slaby. “At the end of the day people crave purpose. But you also want to pay your mortgage and send your kids to college. That’s an unfortunate choice we put to people a lot of the time.”
But the Groundwork’s success in 2016 will not ultimately be judged on its prospects as a startup, but whether it helps to make Clinton the 45th president of the United States of America.
“Something I always say is, ‘You get zero votes for innovation,’” Goff, Clinton’s top digital staffer, tells Quartz. “If you do something innovative that gets you votes, that’s good … If you do something innovative and it doesn’t get you votes but a VC would like it, we don’t care.”
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Apr 30, 2016 1:06 pm
by lyrimal » Sat Apr 30, 2016 3:11 pm
The Google Transparency Project has so far identified 258 instances of “revolving door” activity (involving 251 individuals) between Google or related firms, and the federal government, national political campaigns and Congress during President Obama’s time in office.
by coffin_dodger » Sat Apr 30, 2016 3:18 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Mon Jan 20, 2020 6:09 pm
Robert Epstein (born June 19, 1953) is an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University in 1981, was editor in chief of Psychology Today, a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, and the founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Concord, MA.[1]
Epstein has been a commentator for National Public Radio's Marketplace, the Voice of America, and Disney Online. His popular writings have appeared in Reader's Digest, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times (London), Good Housekeeping, Parenting, and other magazines and newspapers. An autobiographical essay documenting his long involvement with the media was published in 2006 in the academic journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.[2]
...Epstein, a psychology professor at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, concluded that Google's search methods 'gave' millions of votes to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.
In July, Epstein outlined his claims under questioning by Sen Ted Cruz of Texas, who had at one time been President Donald Trump's chief primary challenger.
'I know the number of votes that shifted because I have conducted dozens of controlled experiments in the US and other countries that measure precisely how opinions and votes shift when search results favor one candidate, cause, or company,' Epstein testified.
Epstein testified that Google's search techniques 'shifted at least 2.6 millions votes to Clinton.
He said he analyzed 13,000 election-related searches from the campaign and that they were 'significantly biased in favor of Secretary Clinton'.
Epstein said he 'conducted dozens of controlled experiments that measure how opinions shift when search results are biased.
'I call this shift "SEME" – the Search Engine Manipulation Effect,' he said.
Epstein (pictured with Clinton), a psychology professor at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, concluded that Google's search methods 'gave' millions of votes to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election
Wife of Google Whistleblower Killed In I-15 Crash
A North County woman identified as the wife of the Google whistleblower died following a car crash on the State Route 78 onramp to Interstate 15.
Published December 30, 2019 • Updated at 6:10 am on December 31, 2019
A North County woman, the wife of the Google whistleblower, has died following a car crash on Interstate 15 on Dec. 23.
Misti Vaughn, 29, was identified by the California Highway Patrol as the deceased driver in a car crash on the morning of Monday, Dec. 23.
Vaughn was driving on the transition ramp from SR 78 to I-15 in the rain when she lost control of her Ford Ranger and spun out, veering to the left and flying across I-15, CHP said. She crashed into a big rig and an SUV, whose drivers stayed at the scene and were not injured.
...
Vaughn was married to the Google whistleblower, Dr. Robert Epstein, who testified before Congress against Google in July, sharing how the company reportedly meddled in the 2016 election.
by Harvey » Mon Jan 20, 2020 6:45 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:02 pm
by JackRiddler » Wed Jan 22, 2020 12:02 am
In July, Epstein outlined his claims under questioning by Sen Ted Cruz of Texas, who had at one time been President Donald Trump's chief primary challenger.
'I know the number of votes that shifted because I have conducted dozens of controlled experiments in the US and other countries that measure precisely how opinions and votes shift when search results favor one candidate, cause, or company,' Epstein testified.
Epstein testified that Google's search techniques 'shifted at least 2.6 millions votes to Clinton.
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 22, 2020 12:12 am
by JackRiddler » Wed Jan 22, 2020 12:23 am
by Marionumber1 » Wed Jan 22, 2020 4:50 pm
by JackRiddler » Wed Jan 22, 2020 6:16 pm
compared2what? wrote:In fact, if I set out for the corner store tomorrow and ended up being bundled into a van by men in suits with earpieces who illegally renditioned me to some godforsaken rocky Mediterranean island prison complex where they chained me to a rusty ceiling pipe in an icy-cold brightly lit cell while jackbooted mercenaries held a power drill to my head while shouting at me to name a single point on which there was near-unanimous agreement among RI forum members or prepare to die horribly, I might even feel a brief, delusional moment of relief when I remembered that while it's definitely true that one poster's most profoundly held beliefs are almost inevitably the very definition of propagandistic mindfuckery to a number of others, at least we do pretty much all take the general proposition that we're being bombarded with media disinfo from just about every direction 24/7 as a fact that's far too well-established to bother trying to make disputing it on a prima facie basis any part of the vicious bickering that then ensues as usual.
Marionumber1 » Wed Jan 22, 2020 3:50 pm wrote:As Greg Palast has demonstrated in the link cited above and numerous past works, though he tends to ignore the even more pernicious role of electronic voting machines, the nationwide systemic election fraud in the United States is overall to the benefit of Republicans in general elections. And while there are no doubt some Democratic operatives working to swing things the other way, I think that at the highest levels of (para)political power, Democrats are aware of and approve of this fraud too. Through the continual elevation of extremist GOP candidates who would certainly not be winning in fair elections, they get to maintain the illusion of the US being an overall conservative nation for which they have to continually run "moderate" (i.e. right-wing) candidates and "work with" (i.e. acquiesce to) Republicans -- who of course would never make the same concessions if the situation were reversed, but also never have to due to this fraudulently engineered power dynamic. There is always an excuse for the Dems' corporate-funded spinelessness because they almost never gain enough power to the point where failure to implement prorgessive policy can't be blamed on the GOP. While Democrats want to have power in some sense, I think they generally don't care about having a majority as much as they care about simply being in the oligarchy's club, even if their designated role is the loser.
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 22, 2020 9:03 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 22, 2020 11:37 pm
JackRiddler » Wed Jan 22, 2020 5:16 pm wrote:.compared2what? wrote:In fact, if I set out for the corner store tomorrow and ended up being bundled into a van by men in suits with earpieces who illegally renditioned me to some godforsaken rocky Mediterranean island prison complex where they chained me to a rusty ceiling pipe in an icy-cold brightly lit cell while jackbooted mercenaries held a power drill to my head while shouting at me to name a single point on which there was near-unanimous agreement among RI forum members or prepare to die horribly, I might even feel a brief, delusional moment of relief when I remembered that while it's definitely true that one poster's most profoundly held beliefs are almost inevitably the very definition of propagandistic mindfuckery to a number of others, at least we do pretty much all take the general proposition that we're being bombarded with media disinfo from just about every direction 24/7 as a fact that's far too well-established to bother trying to make disputing it on a prima facie basis any part of the vicious bickering that then ensues as usual.
I believe that remains undisputed, yeah?
But when someone pretends to put a number on it, as if that number is equivalent to number of literal ballots changed in a rigged election, and when he attributes that number to a single cause... well then he's just making himself part of that disinfo, in this case to hype himself. It's no different from the #Russiagate hype about the pittance in FB/Twitter spending by IRA, or even the Cambridge Analytica hype (which, at least, was a real thing -- just as Google is a totally real thing).
So we agree, marionumber1. But I really want to praise this concise rendering of the internal dynamic of the two-party relationship, explaining why they actually have to be different, for the system to work as it does at all.Marionumber1 » Wed Jan 22, 2020 3:50 pm wrote:As Greg Palast has demonstrated in the link cited above and numerous past works, though he tends to ignore the even more pernicious role of electronic voting machines, the nationwide systemic election fraud in the United States is overall to the benefit of Republicans in general elections. And while there are no doubt some Democratic operatives working to swing things the other way, I think that at the highest levels of (para)political power, Democrats are aware of and approve of this fraud too. Through the continual elevation of extremist GOP candidates who would certainly not be winning in fair elections, they get to maintain the illusion of the US being an overall conservative nation for which they have to continually run "moderate" (i.e. right-wing) candidates and "work with" (i.e. acquiesce to) Republicans -- who of course would never make the same concessions if the situation were reversed, but also never have to due to this fraudulently engineered power dynamic. There is always an excuse for the Dems' corporate-funded spinelessness because they almost never gain enough power to the point where failure to implement prorgessive policy can't be blamed on the GOP. While Democrats want to have power in some sense, I think they generally don't care about having a majority as much as they care about simply being in the oligarchy's club, even if their designated role is the loser.
Which is no problem. It's not even about being in the club, it's about who pays the bills being the ones who own the party. They are employers and the job is really fucking good compared to most options, in any economy. To quote (or possibly to reverse?) what I heard some rapper say, "It's not about reality it's all about the salary."
That the results of either party being in regime tend to be identical, on the non-social issues (which count!), or driven by business developments, is true. Though there are larger arcs of history that find expression over longer terms.
But restricting analysis to just that observation, or pretending that the parties are simply identical, equally corrupt, equally true in their rhetoric, equally scam, is the wrong response. Especially the latter.
Because it feeds into the narrative of "all politicians are exactly the same, I hate them all, and therefore I get to withdraw from anything to do with politics and act like that makes me really fucking smart." Which, of course, is exactly what this same system desires from the majority. This is not classical fascism in a small nation, where the baddies need EVERYONE to be fully mobilized fanatics so they can win the war. This system works best when 80 percent are asleep.
This is how the GOP-Trump are trying to leverage the impeachment. They really want Biden and thus his son and thus the same campaign as they already ran against "Crooked HIllary." Won't matter if Trump looks 10 times as crooked. Trump commands a base, Biden will have the support of a thoroughly apathetic majority.
.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests
