Remember When Mr. Hochstein Tried To Scare Us With The Spectre Of 'The Lists'

ADataBaseIsNotADemocracy

List-O-RamaLlamaDingDongVille

Remember this?

...."We want people to be aware of the involvement of NDP and Labour, and the consequences for their personal information," Hochstein said. "People who don't want their name to end up on a door knocking list for the next election only have one way to guarantee that doesn't happen - by refusing to sign the recall petition." Hochstein said with all the political change possible due to the leadership contests in the NDP and the BC Liberals, as well as the HST referendum, the recall campaigns are an expensive and pointless exercise.....

That was Phil Hochstein, the same guy who's (notso)Super-Pac thingy is now running the Adrian Dix super-smear so that the (not)Premier doesn't have to, way back in December of 2010 doing his best to suppress....errrr.... scare.... British Columbians into NOT signing the original HST-recall petition.

At the time I thought it was pure codswallop.

But.

I'm now starting to wonder if Mr. Hochstein wasn't also perhaps projecting the potential for list and database abuse based on his own experiences interacting with his ideological bretheren, who were already well-ensconsed in British Columbia by late Dec of 2010.

A counter point to this potential projection is the story of Inky Mark, the former Conservative MP who saw his team's use of its Dbase in the Server-Sky for what it truly is and decided to opt out.

Jennifer Ditchburn of the Canadian Press has Mr. Mark's story:

OTTAWA - Inky Mark was always a bit of an outsider inside the Conservative caucus.

The former Manitoba MP, popular in his riding, wasn't interested in abiding by the party's message control and usually kept a low profile, sometimes not even attending caucus.

Mark now says he also opted out of the party's controversial voter identification system, or CIMS, out of similar concerns about the power the party wielded at the local level.

"If they get mad at you and don't want you to access your own data, you're done," Mark said.

"I figured that out right off the bat and said I don't want to be under their control, so I just quit basically."...

{snippety doo-dah}

....Mark says every time he or his staff would meet a constituent and get their phone number, they were expected to log the information and any pertinent details, including the individual's political leanings and personal interests.

He says the party had control over the entire, nationwide database. An MP and his staff were at the mercy of headquarters, Mark says, because they had the power to allocate and revoke database passwords....

****

Regardless all this stuff, I have a prediction.

And that is that the word 'password' will become a pretty big meme from Sea-To-Shining-Sea in the next week or so.

Particularly as it pertains to 'headquarters'.

OK?

.