Plausible.

And much worse than Watergate.

Campaigns from both parties have been mining commercial databases about people's prefences for different types of cars, to the magazines they read for ways to get through to you.  You know then emails you read from campaign committees, they most likely have a unique indentifier thrown in somewhere in the html code so that the campaign can know when you look at a message, how long you looked at the message, and how many times you looked at the message.  And the can isolate this info to the individual email account it was sent to.

So they can know that Joe Blow looked at the message sent to him at 1:31 AM, 4:55 PM, and spent 10 minutes each with that window open.  Imagine what happens if you hand the Republican party the kind of info that the NSA would be able to gather.

Using phone taps, they could isolate certain phrases down to the sending and receiving phone line, and target the appropriate message to you.  So say you're an indpenedent and spend half an hour bitching to your sister in Iowa about the economy, and then you get a mailer from the Republican party about the economy.  There has to be an economy of scale to the message, but the level of surveillance involved is creepy, and clearly illegal, this is the sort of thing that brought Nixon down.  It was the polticial abuse of power, not the simple abuse of power that led to him resigning before being impeached.

The questions raised in this diary need to be asked.

We need a real jouralist to ask these questions to the right people.  Olbermann needs to be sent the link to this diary hundreds of times....