The New York Times reports on digital efforts to “track and chase” voters, “an integral part of the modern ground game. Now campaigns know where you eat, what you watch, what you read, where you work, if you commute — and are tracking it in real time, delivering specifically tailored messages to individual voters and hounding them until the ballots are cast. And in an election cycle with so many close races, the outcome, with control of Congress at stake, may turn on which party does the better job of, in effect, engineering the vote.”

“The use of this technology is not without risk. Its relentless and intrusive nature can quickly turn off voters, even though campaigns and committees on both sides work to address privacy concerns by making sure that at the individual level, each targeted voter remains anonymous.”

New Yorker: “Foley’s murder evokes sad and painful memories of the videotaped murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. That execution–of an innocent man, chosen for victimhood merely because of his nationality and, perhaps, his religion (Pearl was Jewish)–set the pattern, and a new benchmark for terrorists. Since then, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people, many of them noncombatants, have been similarly murdered, their last moments videotaped, at the hands of extremists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. There is no longer any doubt that the Internet, with its power of contagion and usefulness for recruiting, has become a preferred, particular tool of terrorists.”

BuyPartisan is an iPhone app that allows you to quickly find out if the things you buy are made by companies that match your personal political beliefs.

Washington Post: “BuyPartisan would take the nation’s ideological sorting to a new level. It’s not just that Americans refuse to marry, socialize and live near people who disagree with their partisan affiliation. If the app succeeds, it would be a sign that Democrats and Republicans aren’t even willing to do business with one another any longer.”

National Journal: “Beginning this week… Data Trust–a privately operated entity backed by the Republican National Committee that maintains a master list of voter information nationwide–is rolling out a marquee technical upgrade that will allow Republican campaigns and their allies to share voter information with one another in real time. The new feature will let campaigns and approved outside groups not only access voter information anytime (with their own data software) but update it instantly, so others viewing the voter lists can see the information immediately.”

Advertising Age says that local Democratic campaigns across the country “may struggle to use something as big and complex as Obama’s data trove, which was built for a nationwide campaign. Think of taking a fire hose to your flower garden, or asking the local marina’s security guy to dock a submarine.”

“The fact is, even if the political topics had stayed the same, most state legislative or U.S. House candidates can’t possibly use all the data that’s been given to the party. And, just as important, a single candidate simply doesn’t have the resources to hire more than one internal data handler, much less replicate the 50-plus crew that steered the Obama analytics ship.”

“The Obama administration’s decision to relinquish oversight over the group that manages the Internet’s architecture has raised an early red flag with Republicans, who blast the move as a threat to free speech,” Politico reports.

Pandora Media “plans to roll out a new advertising service next week that would enable candidates and political organizations to target the majority of its 73 million active monthly Pandora listeners based on its sense of their political leanings,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“How can it do this? The company matches election results with subscribers’ musical preferences by ZIP Code. Then, it labels individual users based on their musical tastes and whether those artists are more frequently listened to in Democratic or Republican areas. Users don’t divulge their political affiliations when they sign up for Pandora.”

Wonk Wire: Are we ready for Amazon Prime Air?

You can actually already buy an aerial drone on Amazon, though it doesn’t yet deliver itself.

Wonk Wire looks at a new proposal — which would not need congressional approval — that President Obama thinks might be one of his biggest legacies.

National Journal profiles Michael Deutsch, a little-known Florida resident who “has made it something of a hobby to snatch away desirable digital destinations from unwitting politicians.”

“Deutsch isn’t in it for the money. He’s just a self-diagnosed ‘C-SPAN junkie’ who says he wants ‘a chance to look behind the curtain.’ And he learned more than a decade ago that, as a man without the wealth to buy his way into intimate fundraisers, his best shot at getting close to the political stars that so fascinate him was to buy up political domain names early and leverage them later for some face time.”

Think Progress: “Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) criticized the Obama administration in a letter Monday, accusing officials of undermining public distrust in government by using ‘secret e-mail addresses.’ But McCain himself uses a secret e-mail address — as have previous Republican administration officials since the federal government began using email.”

Australian Minister of Education Peter Collier “says he has learned a valuable lesson in social networking after he ‘liked’ a Facebook photo without realizing that it showed a teenage prankster exposing himself,” the Guardian reports.

Collier apologized and said he “had no idea that the teenager, who was otherwise fully clothed and posing alongside an older man, was playing a prank commonly known as ‘sneaky nuts.'”

“National Republicans are building a new data-sharing platform as the party moves to close a digital divide with Democrats that became glaringly apparent in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election,” Roll Call reports.

They’ve got a partnership with two third-party entities “designed to facilitate unprecedented data generation and sharing across all GOP party committees, consultants, vendors and the conservative outside groups that have become increasingly active in political campaigns. The effort, which could cost up to $20 million, stems from recommendations made by the Growth and Opportunity Project, the RNC’s internal autopsy of what went wrong last year commissioned by Chairman Reince Priebus.”

Former Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D) told the Detroit News that she’s “excited about presiding over a week’s worth of testimony about the existence of extraterrestrials.”

Kilpatrick “signed up with five other former members of Congress to listen to testimony aimed at proving alien contact with Earth and a government effort to cover it up.”

Also on the panel are former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-AK), as well as former Reps. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Darlene
Hooley (D-OR), Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Merrill Cook (R-UT).