"The Groundwork," secretive tech firm backed by Google's Eric Schmidt, has been paid $504,160 by the Hillary campaign, per FEC records.

Lee Fang has done some kickass investigative reporting for the 2016 presidential primaries. Here he puts two and two together to come up with a reason Google might be manipulating the primaries. You guessed it...it's all about the money.

The Quartz

An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley and Democratic politics.

The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt—the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet—to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs.

But campaigns—lacking stock options and long-term job security—find it hard to attract the elite engineering talent that Facebook, Google, and countless startups rely on. That’s also part of the problem that Schmidt and the Groundwork are helping Clinton’s team to solve.

Big Brother is as close as your keyboard.

Share
up
0 users have voted.

Comments

How else did you think they knew exactly which voters were Bernie supporters so they could "lose" their voter registration and suppress the vote? I mean, simply suppressing the vote blindly across the board wouldn't change the %'s enough. Targeted voter suppression, using all the data Google collects on people, though, that would be crucial to stealing an election.

up
0 users have voted.
edg's picture

except that it's entirely possible with the data Google has available. Although I'm just EdG on here, Google knows my IP address and can match it with geographic lookup to find out where I'm located and match that against other items of information about me like my Linkedin profile to get my full name, property records to get my address, phone database to get my phone number, email lookup to get that, pro-Bernie comments I've made as EdG, etc.

The difficult part would be hacking the county's voter registration system. However, in my county, if you have access to somebody's driver's license #, you can change party and cancel registration online, so it's technically feasible that using a bot drawing on the right database sources, a bad actor could disenfranchise large numbers of targeted voters.

up
0 users have voted.
Mosquito Pilot's picture

Have lots of great uses. If you sign up to a site anonymously and always access it via VPN, it's pretty hard to figure out who you are.
Google only serves me generic ads because they don't know my search or browsing history.
I can also appear to be in my choice of about 25 countries. It's fascinating how differently the news is presented to you depending on where you're from

up
0 users have voted.

Dig within. There lies the wellspring of all good. Ever dig and it will ever flow
Marcus Aurelius

they stink up everything.

up
0 users have voted.

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Deja's picture

This shouldn't surprise me. I'm actually surprised that I'm still surprised by the things I am learning about that despicable woman.

up
0 users have voted.

HRC was criminally negligent and careless with nt sec data when she was SoS. but when it comes to her campaign, she's got all the i's dotted and the t's crossed. I hope I'm still alive when she gets yanked off the national stage. It cannot happen soon enough.

up
0 users have voted.

Yahoo

travelerxxx's picture

These people have been working for Clinton for some time. Here's an article from October of last year ... and they had been working for Clinton well before that:

https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/10/13/meet-groundwork-google-chairman...

Further, it appears that there are other Google "start-ups" that are working for Clinton. I've known for some time that Google is Evil, but it's even worse than I thought.

up
0 users have voted.
Citizen Of Earth's picture

Thanks for that link.


What is so concerning about the company [“Groundwork] is that it appears to be little more than a clever way to get around the already extraordinarily loose campaign finance rules.

For instance, we all know about the rise of Super PACs and how they essentially allow unlimited funding to political candidates. The one limitation on their power is they are not allowed to directly coordinate with the political campaigns themselves. Enter “Groundwork,” which has seemingly found an exploitable loophole to this meager restriction. As such, the Quartz writers insightfully ask: “Are startups the new Super PACs?” It appears so.

Hellery. Our Historic First Crooked Woman President.

up
0 users have voted.

Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

OLinda's picture

is quickly becoming my favorite Intercept journalist. They are all good, so I should just say a shining star among many stars. He was the first to ask Hillary if she would release the transcripts for her Goldman Sachs speeches, and got that subject into the conversation.

Also this:

Thank you for the post, vl. Always so good to see you.

up
0 users have voted.
stevej's picture

has really come into his own since he left Think Progress. The Intercept is obviously a good fit.

up
0 users have voted.

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” -Voltaire

up
0 users have voted.
angel d's picture

What's buzzin? Miss your sin twister?

up
0 users have voted.

up
0 users have voted.
ChemBob's picture

is impossible to entirely avoid, but I won't use Chrome or their Android operating system to keep my exposure as low as possible to their direct info lifting.

up
0 users have voted.

up
0 users have voted.

Noted at the reddit Kossacks_for_Sanders:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kossacks_for_Sanders/comments/4nj3w8/the_hillbots/
They all tweeted the same thing at the same time.
I liked the comment made there about no friends, so she has to hire them. Ain't it the truth.

up
0 users have voted.
detroitmechworks's picture

Is to ask how much of the million dollars they're getting paid.

They usually get huffy and either stop posting, or immediately claim the report is biased, and nobody's getting paid, before ending the conversation.

up
0 users have voted.

I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

Fake likes, fake friends and the candidate reveals nothing. She's like a pixel pic.. perhaps we'll find that she really is a non human figment used to control us. The revenge of the 1%.

up
0 users have voted.

A Holo(ary)gram.

up
0 users have voted.
Hawkfish's picture

Bruce Stirling ("Neuromancer") wrote a novel a few years back in which the first artificial person was a Japanese pop star. Politician isn't much different.

up
0 users have voted.

We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

It's a search engine that doesn't track it's users. At least that's what they're committing to. It works as well as the others, and personally I'm for sticking my fingers in the eyes of the spies.

up
0 users have voted.
GreatLakeSailor's picture

up
0 users have voted.

Compensated Spokes Model for Big Poor.

Been using it for a couple of years. Easy peasy. Also Weblock, for cheap adblocker I bought On iTunes. Amazing how many Chinese, Russian, Israeli, and Korean, and now Hillary hackers out there.

up
0 users have voted.
elenacarlena's picture

I'll try again later.

up
0 users have voted.

Please check out Pet Vet Help, consider joining us to help pets, and follow me @ElenaCarlena on Twitter! Thank you.

Steven D's picture

What an effing ongoing criminal enterprise the HRC campaign is.

up
0 users have voted.

"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

Socialprogressive's picture

at just their campaign?

up
0 users have voted.

I'm great at multi-tasking. I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at the same time.

Alex Ocana's picture

Weirdly enough, this morning I posted an essay concerning humanizing Palestine here and linked it frm Face Book. This afternoon I get 7 friend requests on FB from violent types. I sent them all to the spam folder.

up
0 users have voted.

From the Light House.

sojourns's picture

Firefox with the Blur no track add on, AddBlockPlus or Super Adblock and BetterPrivacy which deletes LSO super cookies.
Avoid Chrome which is spyware (and Chromium for Linux).

I also recommend weaning yourself off of any Windows product. go Linux!

up
0 users have voted.

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

Mosquito Pilot's picture

... Is another tool to consider adding. It's from the folks at EFF

up
0 users have voted.

Dig within. There lies the wellspring of all good. Ever dig and it will ever flow
Marcus Aurelius

where was such savviness about tech issues when she was setting up her private server?

DAE wonder if part of the return on those paid speeches was an inept private server with with flat-out negligent security? If I was a CEO, I'd pay well to have the same real-time info as the US SOS.

up
0 users have voted.
expatjourno's picture

More likely, some folks from the deep state made the arrangements for her.

up
0 users have voted.

Hillary: Making sure women get a bigger piece of the middle-class pie that her neoliberal, DLC, pro-Wall Street, pro-Pentagon, pro-TPP, Republican-lite economic policies are designed to shrink.