Inside the Obama Campaign's All-Knowing Hard Drive

[xchrom]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/harper-reed-obama-campaign-microtargeting


Harper Reed went from selling arty T-shirts to hunting for Obama voters. Photograph by Jacob Dehart

DURING THE 736 DAYS BEGINNING May 9, 2010, Harper Reed walked an average of 8,513 steps, reaching a high mark of 26,141 on September 13, 2010, and a low of 110 on April 21 of this year. (His excuse: broken pedometer.) On that day, Reed, age 34.33 as of this writing, sent one tweet, 55 below his average. Reed was traveling from Chicago to Colorado, where he grew up, where he has spent 39.5 percent of his time away from home since 2002, and where, in 1990, he attended his first concert (David Bowie, McNichols Arena, row HH, seat 8). He has read 558 books in three years—roughly 1,350 pages per week at a cost of 4 cents per page. On May 11, 2011, he slept 14.8 hours before waking up at precisely 2:47 p.m. It was a personal best.

On his site, where he describes himself as "pretty awesome," Reed painstakingly tabulates everything from his weight to his exact location. A certifiable hipster with gauged earlobes and an occasionally waxed handlebar mustache that complements his roosterlike crest of red hair, Reed is a veteran of the professional yo-yo circuit, a devotee of death metal, and a cofounder of Jugglers Against Homophobia. As chief technology officer for President Obama's reelection effort—responsible for building the apps and databases that will power the campaign's outreach—he and his team of geeks could provide the edge in a race that's expected to be decided by the narrowest of margins.

Over the last year and a half at the campaign's Chicago headquarters, a team of almost 100 data scientists, developers, engineers, analysts, and old-school hackers have been transforming the way politicians acquire data—and what they do with it. They're building a new kind of Chicago machine, one aimed at processing unprecedented amounts of information and leveraging it to generate money, volunteers, and, ultimately, votes.

Reed describes his campaign role as making sure technology is a "force multiplier." And that's about as much as he'll say on the matter. The campaign declined to make Reed available for an interview, or to offer anyone who could so much as comment on the complexity of Reed's mustache. "Unfortunately, we do not discuss anything that has to do with our digital strategy," says spokeswoman Katie Hogan. Much of Reed's work now is so under wraps that it's literally code word classified—Obama for America (OFA) uses terms like "Narwhal" and "Dreamcatcher" to describe its high-tech ops. So in the spirit of the sweeping data-mining operation he helped build, I set out to learn as much as I could from Reed's online footprint.

[bigtree]

1. damn well I appreciate him and his partners

. . . it's been a revolution in info sharing from the Obama camp and allies. What a ride!

[Waiting For Everyman]

2. Good. Then he's the one I have to pick a bone with.

Google Play won't let me download the OFA Android app to a Motorola Triumph smart phone -- says it's "incompatible with my device". WTH? I am not impressed with that. It's either a failing of OFA or low-level harassment from Google, but either way, it's this guy's "area of expertise" and shouldn't be happening.

[tk2kewl]

3. Narwhal!

[Scurrilous]

4. K & R