Change.gov Misuses Domain Intended for Government Bodies Only for Partisan Political Purposes

Blaster writes:

So the change.gov website is hosted by bluestatedigital.

From their website:

"We Are Your Online Partner. We'll help you use the BSD Online Tools to rally support for your cause, build a constituency, raise money online, or get your candidate elected."

This is a .gov website.

The Obama pre-administration is using this site to gather information for donors. These are the same guyswho would have turned off the credit card validation rules.

All a bunch of Howard Dean campaign alumni.

I asked Blaster if .gov can only be used by government entities, or if there are exceptions. He writes back:

GSA is the registrar for ,gov - here is the elgibility criteria:

"To preserve the integrity of the .gov name space, .gov domains are limited to United States government organizations at the federal, Native Sovereign Nation, state, and local level, and U.S. territories."

So, if change.gov is an offical government organization, we the taxpayers are paying Blue State Digital (which is explicitly partisan, and designed to raise funds and run campaigns) to run this site for us - was it sole sourced or competitlvely bid? I want to know, they are my tax dollars.

Alternatively, the campaign is paying for the site (this seems more likely to me) and thus they are misusing the .gov domain (of course, someone in government approved this), and they are using BSD to collect info - look all around the site, there are lots of "signup" forms all around. Lots of places where they are collecting addresses and demographic info - because that is what BSD is for.

As Instapundit might say, They told me if George Bush were elected the government would be turned into an expressly partisan campaigning organization to promote one party rule, and they were right!

posted by Ace at 07:59 PM

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