 |
|
|
| |
Campaign 2004 - Digital Snooping on L.A.'s Big Donors
|
3962 Reads
|
|
|
|
| |
Proof now that the federal government does *not* have your best interests at heart when it comes to preserving your privacy:
You can look up how much L.A.'s most influential and powerful are contributing to the 2004 presidential campaigns - and where many of them live. The Fundrace.org engine lets you suck information out of federal databases revealing political allegiances, strange affiliations, even the home addresses of politicians, producers, agents, actors - and you and your humble neighbors.
I could tell you in just a few clicks whose campaigns got fat checks from each of my neighbors - or that Carl Reiner and son Rob each gave $2000 to Howard Dean and Richard Riordan gave 2 grand to George W. Bush. But these aren't the surprising ones.
Drunk with power, I have now been looking up campaign contributions by L.A. residents - and my neighbors - for about three nights straight. Here are some of the more interesting nuggets:
|
|
CAA Partner Lee Gabler gave $1,250 to Dick Gephardt.
Yahoo Chairman and CEO Terry Semel is a backer of George W. Bush, with the spending-cap limit of a $2,000 donation .
Haim Saban, the Westwood-based entertainment mogul gave big to everyone: 2 grand each to Bush, Gephardt, Wesley Clark and John Edwards and $1,000 each to Dean, Kerry and Lieberman. Saban's title is listed variously as CEO, Chairman, President, Owner and Executive of Saban Capital, Saban Capitol Group/Saban Entertainment, (it seems to change from one donation to the next). Perhaps he's hedging his bets on the fronts of politics and identity.
His wife, Fox Family writer/producer Cheryl Saban, did almost the same thing, but left out Dean and gave only $1,000 to Edwards. Her occupation - at the same address as Haim's - also appears in multiple incarnations, as (variously) philanthropist, writer/producer and writer.
The site - now a white-hot buzz on the lips of several colleagues of mine as an amazingly intoxicating form of digital voyeurism - is a product of Eyebeam.org, a New York art/programming/social studies collective that, according to its Mission statement,
engages cultural dialogue at the intersection of the arts and sciences. Its goal is to forge an understanding of the relatedness of these practices, which are becoming increasingly significant engines of cultural production. Eyebeam amplifies the flux and hybridity of the art/science intersection by openly fostering the parallel strands of EDUCATION, RESEARCH, PRODUCTION, EXHIBITION with its public and peers. It implements this mission by:- Providing educational programming and access to cultural resources to the community.
- Facilitating research and development of innovation in cultural production and technology.
- Enabling artistic creation by providing access to technological and cultural resources.
- Expanding and informing the critical perception of art, culture and media through exhibitions and public programs.
By yoking mapping tools and a simple search engine to spreadsheets kept by the Federal Election Commission, Eyebeam has done a very simple thing - allowed web users to dig a bit more deeply for personal information (address, political affiliations) than some private citizens (and perhaps the movers and shakers of Los Angeles and beyond) might find comfortable.
Sure, it's all public record, and information far more damaging can be found online by serious hackers. But the frisson of figuring out your neighbors' political affiliations blended with the Star Maps-like thrill of snagging celebs' home addresses prove that the U.S. government has not quite figured out yet how to segregate its hoary old database systems to strike a reasonable balance between privacy and public information.
In fact, you can find out what the mysterious neighbors around the corner are spending money on - and what their names are - just by inputting their street address.
One of Fundrace's more elegant features is the donation distribution map, which reveals Los Angeles to be a) a hotbed for political campaign donations and b)
a town full of hardcore liberal spenders.
If you dig around you can find interesting little tidbits on Los Angeles politicians: Sheila Kuehl gave 0 to Howard Dean, while Zev Yaroslavsky gave ,000 to Joe Lieberman. Oh, well, on both counts.
And ff you click on addresses - many of them apparently corporate headquarters for studios or recording conglomerates - you learn some fascinating things. At 21650 Oxnard Street in Woodland Hills you can see what Irving Azoff, Don Henley and Barry Manilow did with their spending limits (Manilow, for one, gave <a href="http://www.fundrace.org/neighbors.php?type=name&lname=Manilow&fname=barry&search=Search+by+Name>,000 to Dick Gephardt. )
And Barbara Streisand (of, apparently, the innocuous Woodland Hills address instead of her Malibu enclave) gave $1,000 each to John Edwards, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Al Sharpton, Bob Graham and Wesley Clark. She's obviously been a longtime friend of the Democrats, but it's hard to pin down her specific allegiances with this limited method.
Among powerful producers, Sherry Lansing gave John Kerry $2,000, Mo Ostin gave Gephardt a thou and Sean "Puff Daddy / P. Diddy" Combs (who gives his address as 1440 Broadway, NYC) gave $2,000 to Al Sharpton.
Kris Kristofferson gave ,000 to Wesley Clark( again, oh well) Bonnie Raitt gave $2,000 to Dennis Kucinich and $500 to Howard Dean ...
You really could do this virtually all night. Have fun.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| Posted by: mack_reed on Monday, March 22, 2004 - 11:14 PM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
