by Lois Beckett, Pro Publica

If you feel unsafe at a public pool in Charleston, WV, you may soon have the right to lie there on a towel with a handgun at your side.

For 20 years, Charleston has been an island of modest gun restrictions in a very pro-gun-rights state. But its gun laws — including a ban on guns in city parks, pools and recreation centers — are now likely to be rolled back, the latest victory in a long-standing push to deny cities the power to regulate guns

by Lois Beckett,ProPublica

The Republicans have admitted it: They need to get serious about collecting and analyzing voter data.

Well, you can’t get much more serious than talking to Teradata, the “data warehousing” company that helps Walmart, Apple and eBay store massive amounts of information about the behavior of their customers.

Teradata is just one of the major data outfits with which leading Republican strategists are talking in their declared effort to match Barack Obama’s big data campaign tactics, according to one person with knowledge of the strategy discussions.

The Republican National Committee would neither confirm nor deny talking with Teradata, but was emphatic that no deal is in place. Teradata also declined to comment. There’s unlikely to be any final deals until the RNC appoints a chief technology officer, which it has pledged to do by May 1.

But if Republican strategists are still shopping for formal partners, their goal is clear: a new, more open database that will make it easier for Republican candidates to share what they’re learning about voters — and for the party to share voter information with technology developers in order to build apps for use in coming campaigns.

“At lots of levels, for lots of reasons, there’s a lot of people that we’re talking to,” Mike Shields, the RNC’s new chief of staff, told ProPublica.

Both Republicans and Democrats already have databases of basic information about every voter in the United States. But Obama’s campaign made big strides in connecting data from different sources, like campaign donation records, consumer data and volunteer lists, in order to produce more detailed profiles of individual voters.

The Democratic National Committee has also streamlined the way information flows between local volunteers and the national party, so that data about voters collected by many different campaigns — such as a Minnesota voter’s stance on gay marriage or who a Virginia voter supported in a state senate race — all ends up in the same database in DC.

Republicans want to match these innovations — especially the flashy ones, like the Obama campaign’s ability to link people’s Facebook profiles to their official voting records. They also want to use data to make predictions about individual voters, not only about how to influence their vote, but about how to maximize their potential political donations.

This is where Teradata could certainly be useful. The company is not a data broker, an outfit that strictly sells information about consumers. (So, for instance, the GOP wouldn’t be getting any of Apple or Walmart’s data.) Instead, Teradata helps companies organize their own data, so that they can pick out unexpected trends — for instance, that Walmart shoppers stocking up for a hurricane often buy strawberry Pop-Tarts.

When working with Isle of Capri Casinos, Teradata built a system to combine information about customer gambling habits with data from the company’s hotels. The new system sends an automatic alert to casino hosts whenever a “high-value guest” arrives at a hotel. It also tracks how different customers respond to coupons, emails, and special offers.

This kind of detailed tracking has become ever more central to data-driven political campaigns. Almost every day, Obama’s re-election campaign tested 12 to 18 different email variations, before sending out the best-performing fundraising email to its entire list — a testing strategy that sometimes earned the campaign an extra million dollars, or more.

The campaign also tracked individual responses to email blasts — storing information on whether someone had, for instance, signed a card wishing Michelle Obama a Happy Mother’s Day, and using that information when asking the same people to sign a birthday card for Barack.

Obama’s data team also generated individualized predictions about voters. The team calculated, among other things, which people were most likely to be persuaded to support Obama based on a conversation about a certain policy issue — information that then allowed field organizers to be more strategic about the houses they visited and the phone calls they made.

Working with a company like Teradata would only be a first step toward this kind of sophisticated data program. Obama’s 2012 campaign considered using Teradata, but ended up going with Vertica, a Teradata competitor, paired with open-source software Hadoop, to organize and search through their huge quantities of data. But, as former Obama staffers point out, having masses of information doesn’t do anything on its own: You have to use the data to ask the right questions.

Walmart famously used its database to ask what products customers tended to buy before hurricanes. The Obama campaign used its data to ask whether the voters it wanted to reach were watching the evening news — or other kinds of television shows altogether. The campaign used the television-watching data it acquired to figure out exactly what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching, all of which made for more cost-effective ad placements.

The result? The Obama campaign bought more targeted ads, while spending less per television spot than the Romney campaign, according to data collected by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

The campaign also constantly adjusted its predictions — and checked on the big picture of the campaign — by connecting voter information with detailed polling data.

Shields, the RNC’s new chief of staff, called the data developments “a space race” between the RNC and the Democratic National Committee.

“They put up Sputnik, but there’s no reason that we can’t put a man on the moon, and leave them behind,” he said.

As well as hiring in-house data analysts, the RNC plans to make it easy for outside software developers to access the party’s national database. The goal, Shields said, is to create a “vibrant marketplace” of digital tools and applications that developers can sell to Republican candidates — all based on the party’s own voter data. Think about the apps that connect to your Facebook profile — but for politics.

If the plan takes off, some of the GOP’s closely-guarded voter data will soon be available in new ways. Obama’s 2012 canvassing app, which anyone could download, included a map of the user’s current location that displayed the first names, addresses, ages and genders of nearby Democrats.

The RNC will still get to control which developers are allowed to access its data. But its plans for a more open data platform will require that the Republican establishment confront technical, legal and cultural hurdles.

“[The RNC] is an organization that is trying to figure out where they sit with technology in general. They’re going to have to make an investment in a big way, if they’re going to go on with open development,” Harper Reed, the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, told ProPublica.

The hard part about opening up your data is trusting the users, Reed said — including the users you don’t like. What happens if some Republican developers want to use Republican data to build a pro-choice app?

“This would be a challenge for any organization, not just a political one,” he said. “It sounds interesting. It sounds innovative. It’s a challenge.”

AP Photo/CBS News, Chris Usher

by Lois Beckett,ProPublica.

For years, state Democratic parties have been gathering information about individual voters’ political leanings. They have noted down the opinions voters shared with canvassers — which candidates they said they supported or their positions on policy issues.

Now, the record of what people told Democratic volunteers may go up for sale — and not just to political groups. Democrats are looking into whether credit card companies, retailers like Target or other commercial interests may want to buy the information.

State Democratic party leaders formed the National Voter File Co-op in 2011 to sell their voter data to approved groups like the NAACP. The goal was to recoup some of the money local Democratic parties spent collecting and updating their local voter lists, which include voters of all parties.

Much of the data the co-op sells comes from the government and is already part of the public record — information such as voters’ names, addresses and party affiliation.

But local Democratic parties also have information about voters’ views and preferences collected over many campaign cycles. (We wrote about Minnesota’s data-collecting “Grandma Brigade” last month.) Some states have used this raw data to create sophisticated estimates of how likely any voter is to vote for a Democrat, support Barack Obama or have certain opinions, say, on abortion or gun control.

As the co-op moves into its second year of selling data in an already crowded marketplace, it’s looking for new potential clients — and companies who may use the data for commercial purposes, as opposed to political ones, are on the list.

“That’s one of our growth areas,” said Drew Brighton of TargetSmart Communications, which helps administer and market the co-op’s data. “Over the next six months, we are going to go ahead and make the rounds with some corporate prospects.”

Brighton said retailers, for example, might be interested in figuring out if their customers are primarily Democrats or Republicans. “People want to know who shops in their stores,” he said.

Democrats involved with the co-op do not know what companies might be most interested in buying their voter data.

“What the co-op is doing is saying, ‘Look, there’s a wealth of information here, that could potentially benefit your corporation or your business interests,'” said Ken Martin, a member of the co-op’s board, and the chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

“Everything is on the table, nothing’s off the table. It’s up to us to figure out what [data] there’s a market for, and whether there’s a comfort level among state parties for selling that information,” he said.

Each state Democratic Party will have the final say over whether to sell their voter information for commercial purposes. If state party leaders aren’t comfortable with selling proprietary data to a certain client, they can opt out.

Individual states have different laws about how their public voting records can be used. Many states mandate that public voter rolls can only be used for “political purposes,” and some states explicitly ban using voting records for “commercial purposes.” The co-op and its clients must abide by these rules.

But state political data laws do not apply to the information about voters that the party itself has gathered.

“Generally, information freely provided to the party by the voter, or data about who participated in a primary [that the party collects] is not subject to any prohibition on it being sold,” said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Elections Commission and an attorney for the co-op.

This means Democrats are free to sell the opinions voters give to campaign canvassers to credit card companies or marketing firms.

Whether they will choose to do this isn’t certain. Martin, the Minnesota Democratic chairman, said that party leaders will have to weigh the risks of any potential deal.

“Obviously, we know we could make money off our file, but it always comes back to the question of, at what cost?” Martin said.

He said he would evaluate commercial deals on a case-by-case basis.

“I’m not opposed to selling the data if it’s a corporation who shares our values and is going to do some good work with that data.”

Walmart, for instance, would not make the cut, he said.

Whether corporations are interested in buying the co-op’s data remains to be seen. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment about whether it would be interested in buying information about its customers’ political beliefs.

Consumer data companies like Experian already peddle information about individuals’ political beliefs and donation histories — and also link this information to their consumer habits. This November, Experian Simmons released a study breaking down the political leanings of shoppers at J. Crew, Lady Footlocker, and more than 100 other major retailers.

But the fact that selling voters’ opinions to companies is even an option for Democrats is another example of how rapidly the data industry is evolving — and how little information individuals have about how their data is being shared.

In his “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights,” released last year, President Barack Obama argued that when companies collect personal data from consumers, they should only share it in ways consumers expect.

If a company decides it wants to share personal information in a new way, Obama suggested, it should notify the consumers who are affected and provide them with choices about how their data is used.

Although Obama pledged to work with Congress to make the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights a law, that hasn’t happened yet.

Joseph Turow, a privacy expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, said the possibility that Democrats might repurpose voters’ opinions for commercial marketing is problematic — particularly because they had collected that information through “a relationship of trust” with voters.

Both Democrats and Republicans have long traded information about voters’ opinions with outside political groups. Long-time Republican activists have created a new group, the Data Trust, to manage the Republican National Committee’s data and coordinate data exchanges between the RNC and conservative and issue advocacy groups.

Asked if the Republican Party sells the party’s proprietary data to retailers or credit card companies, RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowsi wrote, “Absolutely not — hasn’t happened in past and won’t in [the] future.”

The Obama campaign’s own closely guarded trove of voter information will be used to mobilize support for the president’s agenda through a new nonprofit advocacy group, Organizing for Action, led by top Obama aides.

It’s not clear what other groups may be given access to Obama’s voter data. Organizing for Action did not respond to a request for comment. Staffers have said that passing on the campaign’s voter information to an Obama-focused nonprofit reflects the wishes of the president’s supporters, although supporters were not asked directly about how the campaign should treat their data.

Sandstrom, the lawyer for the state Democratic parties’ National Voter File Co-op, said he doubted the co-op would actually end up selling voters’ opinions for commercial uses, calling it an “abstract concern.”

Democratic Party chairs were not eager to weigh in on the issue.

Last week, ProPublica contacted 11 Democratic state party chairs — some of them newly elected to their positions — about the National Voter File Co-op. Party chairs in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Nevada, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin declined or did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

New Hampshire Democratic chair Ray Buckley, who leads the Association of State Democratic Chairs, also declined to comment.

Photo by StormKatt/Flickr

by Lois Beckett, ProPublica.

In Minnesota, Democratic volunteers scour their local newspapers each morning for letters to the editor with a political slant. They pay attention to the names of callers on radio shows. They drive through their neighborhoods and jot down the addresses of campaign lawn signs.

Then they feed the information into a state Democratic Party database that includes nearly every voter in Minnesota.

Some of the states’ few dozen data volunteers are so devoted that they log in to the party database daily from their home computers. Deb Pitzrick, 61, of Eden Prairie, convinced a group of her friends to form the “Grandma Brigade.” These women, in their 50s, 60s and 70s, no longer want to knock on doors for the Democrats. Instead, they support the party by gathering public information about other voters.

Much of the data the Grandma Brigade collects is prosaic: records of campaign donations or voters who have recently died. But a few volunteers see free information everywhere. They browse the listings of names on Tea Party websites. They might add a record of what was said around the family Thanksgiving table — Uncle Mitch voted for Bachmann, cousin Alice supports gay marriage.

One data volunteer even joked about holding “rat out your neighbor parties,” where friends would be encouraged to add notes about the political views of other people on their block.

Once information about individual people is entered into the state party’s database, it doesn’t stay in Minnesota. Almost all the information collected by local volunteers like the Grandma Brigade also ends up in the party’s central database in Washington.

Few places have data volunteers as dedicated as the ones in Minnesota, which has been held up as a model for other state Democratic parties. Both Democrats and Republicans have centralized databases that, among other things, track opinions you share with local campaign volunteers.

Each piece of information the parties have stored about you might not be too interesting on its own. But taken together, they’re incredibly powerful. Political campaigns are using this voter data to predict voters’ behavior in increasingly sophisticated ways.

“People say that campaigns are more art than science. They’re wrong,” said Ken Martin, the chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

“We’re pretty sure, when we pull you up on a file, which way you’re going to vote,” he said. “It’s a little scary. A little Big Brother.”

Voters themselves have no way to know what data politicians have collected about them, or how campaigns are using or sharing that information. Indeed, the same politicians who are pushing for more transparency about the workings of the commercial data industry — including President Barack Obama — have said nothing about the information that political campaigns collect.

Both political parties treat their data operations as closely guarded secrets and will not even reveal exactly what kinds of information about voters are stored in their databases.

At times, politicians are assembling data that has no obvious application. With technology evolving, this information could be valuable in the future.

“A lot of it you just have to collect in good faith that later there will be some place it will apply,” said Sarah Black, the Minnesota DFL voter file manager.

The Grandma Brigade’s Pitzrick said she doesn’t think the publicly available data that she and other volunteers are collecting raises privacy concerns.

“Is it any different than having Best Buy have it for you?” she asked. “It’s out there.”

Political parties can use the data they collect to look at how individual voters’ opinions and loyalties change over time.

In Virginia, a typical profile in the Democratic Party’s database includes notes from the dozens of times campaigns have contacted a given voter since 2001, including which candidates the voter has supported over the years, and whether they were Democrats or Republicans, according to Brenner Tobe, the party’s director of information and technology.

By the 2016 presidential race, Virginia Democrats will have recorded 15 years’ worth of interactions with some voters.

Minnesota’s data goes back even further, thanks to an early investment in a computerized data system in the 1980s.

“The pool of people we don’t know something about gets smaller and smaller,” Black, the voter file manager, said.

During this past election cycle, Democratic volunteers in Minnesota had one million new conversations with voters, which translated into at least one million new pieces of information about individual voters, Black said.

Democrats in Virginia and Minnesota collect a lot of data out of necessity, since voters in those states do not publicly register with a political party. There’s no easy way to tell Democratic voters from Republican voters unless the party saves information about them.

A Democratic data firm showed last summer that the party was able to clearly distinguish supporters from opponents despite having no information about voters’ party registration.

The amount of information politicians have about individual voters varies state-by-state. Each state party makes its own data rules, and some local candidates are more willing to share their information than others. Swing states — which see a regular influx of national money and volunteers — tend to have more information than safe states.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have pushed hard over the last decade to train volunteers to use their party’s databases. A decade ago, the Republican National Committee was sending staffers with crates of laptops to Republican events across the country, with the goal of training local activists to use the party’s “Voter Vault” database, according to interviews with former RNC staffers. Volunteers were encouraged to bring in their address books, look up their friends in the database, and update their contact information, said Serenety Hanley, who worked on the project.

Much of the coverage of President Obama’s big data effort focused on the high-level analysts and number crunchers working out of the campaign’s offices in Chicago — and the Republicans advocating for their party to adopt similar data-focused strategies.

But Democratic insiders say that their party’s data advantage comes from their strong network of on-the-ground volunteers — something that may be harder to replicate than hiring an office of data scientists.

Pitzrick, the founder of Minnesota’s Grandma Brigade, came to political activism in 2003 from a background in marketing, and was shocked at the poor quality of the Democratic Party’s information. One local volunteer she knew went to interview a voter on her list, only to find his family holding a wake.

So, Pitzrick started flipping to the newspaper obituary page over her morning cup of coffee, and updating the voter database in her local state senate district. These days, she said, she finds it more efficient to open up local entries on Legacy.com.

One of Pitzrick’s friends, 76-year-old Fran Merriman, a former high school American history and government teacher, tracks the public records of voters moving in and out of the area — something that’s a lot of fun, she quips, for a “nosy old lady.”

“Every time we send out mailers and it comes back, we’ve wasted 44 cents,” Merriman said. Updating the database, she said, is “like contributing money” to the party.

“I’m sure some place across the country there are a lot of other seniors citizens who could do this kind of work,” she said.

The Federal Trade Commission recently asked nine large data companies to clarify what commercial data companies do with individuals’ information — and whether consumers have the right to opt out. Earlier this year, several members of Congress asked data companies similar questions.

President Barack Obama himself released a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, focused on online data collection last February, which suggested that consumers “have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it.” The president said he would push for legislation to back up consumers’ privacy rights.

But the administration has been silent on what, if any, rights voters should have regarding the data gathered about them.

Asked about this issue last year, a White House spokesperson would only say that the Privacy Bill of Rights “applies to how businesses handle consumers’ personal data online, and will impact all organizations using personal information collected through commercial means,” including campaigns.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

by Lois Beckett, ProPublica.

Curious how many Democrats live on your block? Just download the Obama campaign’s new mobile app.

The app, released last week, includes a Google map for canvassers that recognizes your current location and marks nearby Democratic households with small blue flags.

For each targeted address, the app displays the first name, age and gender of the voter or voters who live there: “Lori C., 58 F, Democrat.”

All this is public information, which campaigns have long given to volunteers. But you no longer have to schedule a visit to a field office and wait for a staffer to hand you a clipboard and a printed-out list of addresses.

With the Obama app, getting a glimpse of your neighbor’s political affiliation can take seconds.

While The New York Times dubbed the app “the science-fiction dream of political operatives,” some of the voters who appear in the app are less enthusiastic about it.

“I do think it’s something useful for them, but it’s also creepy,” said Lori Carena, 58, a long-time Brooklyn resident, when she was shown the app. “My neighbors across the street can know that I’m a Democrat. I’m not sure I like that.”

It’s unclear if the app displays all registered Democrats who live in a certain area, or only a subset of voters President Obama’s campaign is trying to reach.

Asked about the privacy aspects of the new app, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign wrote that “anyone familiar with the political process in America knows this information about registered voters is available and easily accessible to the public.”

The information included in the app has “traditionally been available to anyone who walks into a campaign field office,” said the spokesperson, who declined to be named.

While the app makes voter information instantly available, it displays only a small cluster of addresses at a time. It has built-in mechanisms to detect when people are misusing the data, “such as people submitting way too many voter contacts in a short period of time,” the spokesman said.

“The campaign is strongly committed to ensuring the safety and privacy of the public and follows up with appropriate action, including alerting appropriate authorities if necessary, in any case of abuse or inappropriate behavior,” said the spokesperson. “Any voter who requests not to be contacted again is immediately removed from any provided to volunteers.”

This isn’t the first time campaigns have released digital tools that make voter information freely available.

Both the Obama and Romney campaigns currently have online calling tools that give anyone who registers for their websites the names and phone numbers of voters to contact.

In 2008, the Obama campaign’s “Neighbor to Neighbor” program allowed volunteers to use their home computers to print out lists of names and addresses to contact.

Two years later, the Democratic group Organizing for America, formed to keep mobilizing the president’s supporters after Obama was elected, released a mobile app that was in some ways a prototype of Obama’s new app. Volunteers in the 2010 midterm elections could use their mobile phones to map voters in their immediate vicinity and then send in responses from the voters they had contacted, which eliminated the need for clipboards and printed lists.

Natalie Foster, who was the new media director of Organizing for America, said the tools used in 2010 had built-in privacy limits, “where you are only given a certain number of voters that you could conceivably canvass. If somebody goes above that limit, or is just obviously clicking a button over or over, we’ll just shut it down.”

Privacy “was definitely a consideration and something that was focused on, to make sure people aren’t just going in and downloading a lot of data,” said Joshua Hendler, the former director of technology for Organizing for America.

Foster, who is now the CEO of the economic advocacy group Rebuild the Dream, and Hendler, who now works for PR firm Hill and Knowlton Strategies, said that making voter information more open makes the political process more democratic, because it lowers the barrier for people to get involved in political campaigns.

Shaun Dakin, a voter privacy advocate and longtime critic of political robocalling, flagged the Obama app last week as a “total privacy fail.”

Dakin, who criticized the Obama campaign’s 2008 Neighbor to Neighbor program on similar grounds, said voters should have the right to opt out of being contacted by political campaigns.

He also questioned why the Obama app included the ages of nearby voters, another piece of information that people might not want to have made public.

Lori Carena, the Brooklyn voter, said she doesn’t object to having canvassers knock on her door. In fact, she said she wishes it happened more often in New York, a state that’s such a Democratic stronghold she feels the campaign isn’t interested in hearing her concerns.

Asked what she feels is the difference between the traditional way of canvassing — with voter names and addresses on a printed-out list — and the new mobile app, she said, “Well, I just don’t get all this new stuff with computers and apps. That’s probably more creepy to me.”

Even low-tech tools used to distribute voter data can upset some voters. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this June that a liberal group in Wisconsin was sending fliers to voters which included a list of their neighbors and whether they had voted in 2008 and 2010.

The fliers encouraged recipients to help get out the vote for the recall election of Gov. Scott Walker. Some voters were angry that their names and addresses were being distributed publicly.

“I think this is invasion of my privacy and every other woman’s privacy. It’s like — ‘Here, this is where all the women are,'” one woman told the Journal Sentinel.

Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and the co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said the Obama app represented a significant shift. While voter data has been “technically public,” it is usually accessed only by political campaigns and companies that sell consumer data.

He said it was “heartening” that the app makes data available to citizens who want to talk to their neighbors about their political choices.

“The purpose of this app may be Democrats visiting Democrats. I can see apps where you ask Republicans to visit Democrats and Democrats to visit Republicans.”

“If we’re comfortable enough to have [this information] go into the maw of big data processors, both political and otherwise, it seems consistent for neighbors to talk to neighbors over it,” he said.

“Much of our feelings around privacy are driven by what you might call status-quo-ism,” he said, so many people may feel that the app is creepy simply because it represents something new.

Interested to learn more about how political groups are using your personal information? See our reporting on tailored campaign emails and the new wave of targeted online ads.

by Lois Beckett, ProPublica

Lauren Berns was browsing Talking Points Memo when he saw an ad with President Obama’s face. “Stop the Reckless Spending,” the ad read, and in smaller print, “Paid for by Crossroads GPS.” Berns was surprised. Why was Crossroads GPS, a group that powerful Republican strategist Karl Rove helped found, advertising on a liberal-leaning political website?

Looking closely at the ad, Berns saw a small blue triangle in the upper-left hand corner. He knew what that meant: this ad wasn’t being shown to every person who read that page. It was being targeted to him in particular. Tax-exempt groups like Crossroads GPS have become among the biggest players in this year’s election.  They’re often called “dark money” groups, because they can raise accept unlimited amounts of money and never have to disclose their donors.

These groups are spending massively on television spots attacking different candidates. These ads are often highly publicized and get plenty of media attention.

But these same dark money groups are also quietly expanding their online advertising efforts, using sophisticated targeting tactics to send their ads to specific kinds of people.

Who they’re targeting, and what data they’re using, is secret.

Online advertising companies have amassed vast quantities of information on what individual people read, watch, and do on the Internet. They collect this data using small files called cookies, which allows them to track Internet users as they move from site to site.

These anonymous profiles of information are used to customize advertisements — like sending casino ads to someone who just bought a plane ticket to Vegas.

But these profiles are also increasingly used by political groups, which can decide which people to target with a message — and which people to avoid — based on the kinds of articles they read and the kinds of sites they visit.

Many Internet users who see these ads may not be aware they’re being targeted.

As we’ve detailed, both the Romney and Obama campaigns are using advanced tracking and targeting tactics. Working with our readers, we found two examples of dark money groups using this kind of targeting, as well: one ad from Crossroads GPS and one ad from Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit linked to the politically influential Koch brothers.

How many of these ads are dark money groups sending out? It’s hard to say, because it’s not easy to track exactly how much Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity, and similar groups are spending on different kinds of advertising.

But these politically influential organizations are moving more of their efforts online.

While Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio said he couldn’t get into the specifics of their budget, “Crossroads will certainly spend more in the online space in 2012 than it did in 2010,” he said.

Americans for Prosperity did not return multiple requests for comment.

Even when Internet users are sophisticated enough to spot a targeted ad, as Lauren Berns did, it is almost impossible for them to find out why a certain organization is targeting them — or what data about them is being used.

Berns, for instance, is a registered independent from St. Petersburg, Florida — exactly the kind of voter whose opinion campaigns and political groups are trying to sway before November.  He’s a self-described “news junkie,” who reads both liberal and conservative news sites and posts articles to Facebook two to ten times a day. But it wasn’t clear what part of his Internet behavior ad triggered the Crossroads ad — or whether information about his offline life was part of the targeting formula. Had he been shown the Crossroads ad because he had visited Mitt Romney’s site? Because he regularly reads the conservative sites of The Daily Caller and The Weekly Standard? Because he lives in a swing state? Did Berns fit the profile of a potential Crossroads supporter because he’s a 44-year-old who travels regularly? Or because he shares things with his friends, thus making him a potential “social influencer?”

A popup message accompanying the ad offered information about the targeting. But it only explained, “We select ads we believe might be more relevant to your interests.”

When we sent Crossroad’s Collegio a copy of the ad, he said he could not explain exactly how the ad had been targeted, saying, “it’s a matter of strategy that we would hold close to our chests.”

But he did offer one potential targeting factor. “We are looking for viewers who are more likely to engage their lawmakers in an issue advocacy campaign, and those are generally viewers who visit news and current affairs websites,” Collegio said. If Crossroads GPS was looking to target news junkies, then Berns was the kind of person they were trying to reach — although, of course, that didn’t necessarily mean he was sympathetic to the ad’s message. Berns regularly reads conservative sites and says he is skeptical of both parties, but on policy issues, he says, he lines up more closely with the Democrats.

Because Crossroads wouldn’t disclose their targeting strategy, we can’t know how many other factors may have been involved. Collegio would not say whether the online ad was only sent to viewers in certain states.

Television ads from dark money groups often get significant media scrutiny.  When Crossroads GPS launched a television ad in early June attacking President Obama’s “reckless spending,” the group’s $7 million ad buy made headlines in papers across the country. The Washington Postfact-checked the ad’s claims, and concluded that the ad contained both exaggerations and omissions.

What didn’t get mentioned, by newspapers or by Crossroads’ own press release, was that an online version of the same ad — the ad Berns saw — would appear on the computer screens of select individuals, based on their Internet habits. Collegio said it was “likely an oversight” that the Crossroads press release didn’t include a description of the online part of the ad campaign.   But, he noted, “When we announce online buys, the media rarely report on it.”

By their nature, targeted online ads are harder for news organizations to track, since they are only shown to some users, and will never appear to others.

This makes targeted ads much less transparent than TV ads, and makes it harder to tell if politicians or political groups are using targeting to pander to certain groups of voters, or whether they’re sending out ads that are misleading, hypocritical, or just plain false.

As part of our campaign coverage, we’ve been asking readers to send in screenshots of any targeted political ads they see. Berns was one of the first to send in screenshots of a targeted ad.

Another targeted dark money ad came from a woman in Wisconsin, who asked that her name not be used. She sent screenshots of a targeted ad from the Koch-linked Americans for Prosperity attacking Wisconsin Democratic congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, who is now running for Senate.

The ad, which reads, “Tell Tammy Baldwin: Wisconsin can’t afford Washington’s wasteful spending!” asks viewers to “Click here to sign the petition.” The ad appeared on multiple sites the woman visited, including in a prominent place on the home page of the Washington Post. While Americans for Prosperity did not return requests for comment, a Washington Post spokeswoman said a broader Americans for Prosperity ad campaign had been taken down because it had not been approved by the Post’s advertising team. While many critics of targeting have been concerned that political groups might use targeting to send out controversial ads without attracting attention, that wasn’t the case with the two ads our readers spotted. The targeted ads from both groups sent the same message as their spots shown on TV.

Recent surveys suggest many American aren’t enthusiastic about political targeting online.

A survey of 1,503 adult Internet users released this week by the Annenberg School for Communications found that 86 percent of the respondents did not want “web sites to show you political ads tailored to your interests.” Most respondents also said they want to know what the campaigns know about them.

In general, Berns said, “I’m fine with targeted advertising. If I’m going to see ads on the Internet, I’d rather they be something I’m interested in.” But, he said, he draws the line at politics.

“I’d much prefer a world where candidates tried to equally hard to reach everyone, present their policies rationally, and let the chips fall where they may,” he wrote in an e-mail.

“Targeting by political viewpoint is ‘creepy,'” he wrote. “A little too close to propaganda techniques for my comfort.”