The only organization to gain access to the server was Crowdstrike, no one else. Why is this the case? It is an extremely important question to think about.

Ahead of this announcement, the DNC told Buzzfeed on Wednesday that neither the FBI nor any other intelligence agency ever did an independent assessment of the organization’s breached servers. Instead, they alleged, the FBI relied exclusively on information from private digital forensics company Crowdstrike. https://www.wired.com/2017/01/fbi-says-democratic-party-wouldnt-let-agents-see-hacked-email-servers/

Crowd strike is heavily invested in by Alphabet, and is run by a Russian expat.

Google Capital, the two-year-old growth equity arm of search giant Google (GOOG, +0.39%), announced its first security investment on Monday morning. The fund has pumped $100 million into cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. http://fortune.com/2015/07/13/google-100-million-series-c-crowdstrike/

It is possible that Eric Schmidt (google), the HRC campaign and the DNC created tools that violated privacy rights (see the wikileaks email below). Thus, they couldn't allow law enforcement to examine the server; it would incriminate them for domestic spying and surveillance. Thus, they used a Alphabet owned cyber security firm.

d) Media (paid), (earned) and (social), and polling

New tools should be developed to measure reach and impact of paid, earned and social media. The impact of press coverage should be measurable in reach and impact, and TV effectiveness measured by attention and other surveys.

Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme. Connect polling into this in some way.

Find a way to do polling online and not on phones.

e) Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools

For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote. Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference.

It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes.

The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors.

f) Core engineering, voter database and contact with voters online

The database of voters (NGP Van) is a fine starting point for voter records and is maintained by the vendor (and needs to be converted to the cloud). The code developed for 2012 (Narwahl etc.) is unlikely to be used, and replaced by a model where the vendor data is kept in the Van database and intermediate databases are arranged with additional information for a voter.

Quite a bit of software is to be developed to match digital identities with the actual voter file with high confidence. The key unit of the campaign is a “voter”, and each and every record is viewable and updatable by volunteers in search of more accurate information.

In the case where we can’t identify the specific human, we can still have a partial digital voter id, for a person or “probable-person” with attributes that we can identify and use to target. As they respond we can eventually match to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key is eventually matched to a real person.

The Rules

Its important that all the player in the campaign work at cost and there be no special interests in the financing structure. This means that all vendors work at cost and there is a separate auditing function to ensure no one is profiting unfairly from the campaign. All investments and conflicts of interest would have to be publicly disclosed. The rules of the audit should include caps on individual salaries and no investor profits from the campaign function. (For example, this rule would apply to me.)

The KEY things

a) early build of an integrated development team and recognition that this is an entire system that has to be managed as such b) decisions to exclusively use cloud solutions for scalability, and choice of vendors and any software from 2012 that will be reused. c) the role of the smart phone in the hands of a volunteer. The smart phone manages the process, updates the database, informs the citizen, and allows fundraising and recruitment of volunteers (on android and iphone). d) early and continued focus of qualifying fundraising dollars to build the field, and build all the tools. Outside money will be plentiful and perfect for TV use. A smart media mix tool tells all we need to know about media placement, TV versus other media and digital media. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/48822

So what we have here is Alphabet Inc, talking about merging databases of voters with databases from an ISP (comcast) and other companies to generate models of voter habits. However, did voters consent fro their data from a company like Comcast be given to a political party?

They say this:

In the case where we can’t identify the specific human, we can still have a partial digital voter id, for a person or “probable-person” with attributes that we can identify and use to target. As they respond we can eventually match to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key is eventually matched to a real person.

It is clear that they want to associate real identities with voter habits. They want to know who John Smith will vote for, but if they are using data from multiple companies was this data obtained legally and with the consent of our hypothetical John Smith? Depending on how this data is obtained or generated, there could be illegal activity. They could have also violated privacy policies of various companies. I hardly see Comcast caring about it's users. This could be one of the reasons why the FBI was not allowed to look at the servers. The DNC and HRC campaign could be exposed for violating privacy laws. Remember the DNC also was involved in strange issues with voter databases with the Sander's campaign. Probably because they were stealing data from Sanders: http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/29/politics/bernie-sanders-dnc-lawsuit-voter-database/