PCWorld.com – GOP Voter Vault Shipped Overseas This is what I do not want. All my contribution and other data in India.

When the Republican Party clinched close gubernatorial races in Mississippi and Kentucky in 2003, it relied heavily on its Voter Vault database to get people to the voting booths. Though party officials are tight-lipped about what’s inside the Vault, they’ve acknowledged it contains records on an estimated 168 million voters.

Besides the political hot button of using offshore developers in the middle of a recession, some experts question the security of shipping possibly sensitive data around.

“Shipping data anywhere is risky,” says Richard Purcell, CEO of Corporate Privacy Group in Seattle and former chief privacy officer for Microsoft. “But it may be just as risky to ship the data to Illinois or New Mexico as it is to India or Pakistan. There are no more legal protections in the US than there are in India. Outsourcing data is like outsourcing parenting, which we call ‘babysitting.’ Think about the care you exercise in selecting a babysitter. The question is whether companies exercise the same care and diligence when [choosing a company to handle] customer information.”

This story may be a little sensationalized. Of more interest to me is the Rob Sanchez editorial in his latest Job Destruction Newsletter.

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JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
November 01, 2004. No. 1119
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Imagine you are in an airplane – and then somebody takes a gun to your head. He gives you a choice of jumping out of the plane without a parachute, or you can jump with a parachute that has a big hole in the middle. I don’t know about you, but I would choose to jump with the parachute even though it would probably do nothing to slow my plunge to the ground. A small glimmer of hope is always a better alternative than no hope at all. I feel that voting for Kerry is probably the way to go in the same way as jumping with the defective parachute is the logical choice. Unfortunately both options lead to the same result – disaster for the American middle class.

There are many reasons to choose Bush or Kerry for president, but unfortunately saving high-paying jobs for American citizens might be one of the least important reasons to vote for one of the other. Kerry talks a big game about stopping outsourcing but the shills don’t take him seriously. Of course Bush says outsourcing is good for America so choosing him for president is a vote in favor or turning this nation into a 3rd-world sweatshop.

The pro-outsourcing crowd won’t give us a clue as to who is better because they don’t think there is a dime’s worth of difference between the two.