I don't know how many dKos readers have heard about the Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse scandal, or the similar but not-connected Quechup/iDate scandal, but for those who have and those who haven't, here is something interesting which may tie into Granny Doc's recent post, "Big Brother IS Watching You" and also the documented efforts by the PTB to protect their civilian corporate subcontractors of unconstitutionality.
Auren Hoffman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been playing the wide-eyed ingenue ever since his Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse project blew up in a cloud of flying spam mails, is an old Young Republican.
What is Rapleaf, and why should you worry about it? I'll tell you - it begins with an email I got last week that I first marked as "spam" and ignored, until I ran across a blog post warning against this outfit.
It told me that someone had searched my profile at Rapleaf, and I should go there and add data to it (the exact same email that blogger Carlo Zottman got and posted about here.) I would have thought it no different from the "Improve your website rankings!" spam I get about once a week, until I saw someone on my flist post about a creepy new spam phenomenon, from one of those new Facebook-type friending services called "Upscoop," which initially promised to protect privacy and not use your contact data to spam with (as documented thru googlecache), then removed this and sent out spam in users' names inviting everyone else on your address book to join Upscoop. Which is the same outfit as Rapleaf.
And once you started poking around on Rapleaf, you were caught - they'd start linking everything they could find about you, including data that you'd done your damnedest to keep separate, private emails that you kept unlisted, personal data that you didn't want associated because of all the crazies out there, and posting it publicly - so even trying to be proactive in protecting yourself could have the reverse effect. I haven't dared to search my [redacted] real name, since discovering this - it's like the risk of setting off a bomb by trying to it. People couldn't even kill their profiles, because they were required to use the email there to send in the "delete" request, and often these were old emails that didn't exist any more! This after Rapleaf first claiming that it was unpossible to to remove your data without a snail-mail request being sent in, something they stopped doing, perhaps coincidentally, after I threatened them with my public bloggy wrath as a former maillist/catalog data entry person, who knew and could prove that this was a complete and howling lie on their part.
This mess was quickly linked to a Ziff-Davis post about the third leg of their triad, TrustFuse, a direct-marketing project designed to attain the holy grail of marketers for years, the agglomeration of all of users' online details to create megaprofiles that would allow companies to magically create irresistable marketing campaigns targeted inescapably by browsers' past choices. Oh joy, it's just like 1997, as if the dotcom boom and crash had never happened.
All this was bad enough, combined with the simultaneous outbreak of Quechup spammage, which was doing the same thing sending out the invites from scooped address books, but which is a Facebook-type service run by an internet dating service, iDate Corp, and which has pretty much stonewalled where Rapleaf went into full metal grovel mode.
I wrote a long post on my own blog about the credibility of the Rapleaf "apologia", so I won't repeat it here. But in the course of writing it, I came across some fascinating data points about the guy who came up with the Rapleaf/Upscoop/TrustFuse project.
First off, he's almost as old as I am, and moreover he's been a Silicon Valley pro with multiple startups to his name (boasting of 3 before his 30th birthday), so his pretenses of being an ingenue who didn't know any better and just made a mistake are as hollow as if I were to spam a listserv and claim to be a clueless n00b when I got flamed. Dishonest right from the start.
If that's not bad enough, he's been caught using a sockpuppet to protect his Wiki page. Given this combination of Orwellizing mentality and cluelessness about being caught, it's not surprising that he has also removed his own article about "Why a Jewish New-Yorker who Graduated from Berkeley and Lives in San Francisco ended up a Republican" - but not the page linking to it full of praises from readers of the article! (Save it down in case he Minitrues that, too.) According to Valleywag, he's been trying to minimize his association with now-unpopular GOP leaders like GWB - and our own beloved Sam Brownback, all too well known to dKossacks and others in the liberal blogosphere. However, there is an article from the Independent still online that has him quoted defending Lincoln Group war propagandist Christian Bailey, and describes him as chairing a young Republican club called Lead21.
As one of my regular readers said, do they really think we can't use google?
All of this was more morbidly-funny than anything else until one of my other regulars pointed out to us how useful all this agglomerated data would be to the NSA, at which point all my mental alarms went off due to that Lincoln Group link. Damn! I thought, do we want to bet that he's not going to be one of those protected contractors helping violate our privacy for the PTB? I sure don't! And that's way more sinister, and horrible, than any personal worry about disgruntled fannish stalkers or exes showing up at my home address - this is a danger to us all from the Homegrown Homeland Zampolit, and this is exactly the model of how they'd do it, with the nasty sticky-string that tangles you into it and pretends to be from your friends, the reverse of the old "cell" resistance model, where you only deal with the people you trust, as they emulate your trusted friends and thus insinuate themselves past your defenses.
Finally, the Rapleaf website - which I refuse to link to, on principle - and DON'T go search yourself or your friends there, they WILL use that as an excuse to start collecting and posting any and all data they can find on you - has as their motto It is more profitable to be ethical. © 2007 Rapleaf.
This is the precise sort of hubris worthy of the Bill Bennett "Book of Virtue" crowd, the utter obliviousness to their own hypocrisy that I encountered as a young conservative kid, and which eventually helped drive me out of the movement.
Aux armes, citoyennes! Don't get fooled [again] by the Smiley Face they've pasted on The Boot.