Zogby poll asking about Tea Party affiliation

I just completed a Zogby poll that asked a strangely out-of-place, and very detailed question about my relationship with the "Tea Party." The poll itself was roughly 40% questions about my opinons of Obama and his policies, and 40% questions about my cosmetics usage.

Like most polls, it asked the usual number of questions with disappointingly limited selection of answers. Questions like "how important is topic X to you?" with choices of "very important" "kind of important" "kind of unimportant" "not important at all" and "not sure" yet never ask what your opinion on the topic is.

And yet this question contains perhaps the most detailed and specific variety of answers I've ever seen in a multiple choice survey question:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/ca15c986120abc3e.gif[/atsimg]

Anyone who has taken a number of Zogby polls has seen that there are a number of standard questions that are always asked regardless of the survey content. They ask for your age, race, gender, income, interest in NASCAR, political affiliation, etc. Sure, it seems out of place to ask about NASCAR on a poll primarily about cosmetics, but they ask on every poll. So presumably NASCAR has paid them to ask on all of their polls. This question about the Tea Party was buried in the middle of that section of standard questions. But this is the first time I've seen it.

My question is why has it been added?

My theory: Zogby is being paid by US intelligence services to ask this question, just like NASCAR is probably paying them. People who answer that they are involved with the Tea Parties get a note in their dossier.

Zogby gets paid by political campaigns to provide relevant information on public opinion.

I'm surprised they haven't been asking this question sooner.

hmmm..... i had not seen this one yet... borrowed your link and sent it to a freind that is very involved with the Idaho tera party movement and the 9/12 ers....

I will take the poll and let you know what i thought of it...

reply to post by LordBucket


So, some national intelligence agency is just outright asking people if they're dissidents? That seems like a rather overt method of gathering 'intelligence'.
Plus, it's just damn strange.

reply to post by Matthew Dark

So, some national intelligence agency is just outright asking people
if they're dissidents? That seems like a rather overt method of gathering 'intelligence'.

Sometimes simple strategies can be extremely effective. No need to be all cloak and dagger about it if people will come right out and tell you.

I don't buy mnemeth1's explanation that it's the parties who are funding the question. Doesn't make sense to me. And it's missing the point:

Quote by mnemeth1:
paid by political campaigns to provide
relevant information on public opinion.

"Public opinion" is a little different from explicitly wanting to know whether or not you're a card carrying member and whether you've ever personally attended an event.

The only people I would expect to be interested in whether you've personally attended a rally would be law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

Reminds me of accounts I've read of people attending protests winding up on the terrorist watch list.

The Tea party movement is a populist movement...and could be considered a threat. Corporations/politicians have done a wonderful job of diluting and fragmenting the entire movement though.

reply to post by lilwolf

borrowed your link and sent it to a freind that is very
involved with the Idaho tera party movement

Let us know what he has to say.

Md. Police Put Activists' Names On Terror Lists
Animal Rights Activist Named Alongside Bin Laden on FBI’s Terrorist List
No-fly blacklist snares political activists

It seems it's not uncommon for political activists of all flavors to be placed on the terrorist and no-fly lists. It would come as no surprise if Tea Party people were being targetted as well.

reply to post by LordBucket

FYI, the Dept of Computer Science, University of Mass has done an unclassified research project funded by DARPA on face recognition. Their sample group is a tea party crowd (no lie) and they show photos of several faces (permission given?, doubt it) as examples to make the points of their findings. In the paper summary, they actually use the word "exciting" to sum up their research.
The title is "On Multi-scale differential features for face recognition". I don't know how to cut and paste a PDF, but maybe you do.

From the Intro:
"Face recognition technologies can significantly impact
authentication, monitoring and image indexing applications.
This paper presents an algorithm to compute similarity
of faces as a whole. The task is to query a database
using the image of a face and then have the system either
ascertain its identity, or retrieve the top  similar
matches. As such, the technique is general and has hitherto
been used successfully in image retrieval tasks such
as finding similar scenes, trademarks, binary shapes and
textures [23, 24, 25]. The approach is based on the two hypotheses;
first that visual appearance of a face plays an important
role in judging similarity and second, multi-scale
differential features of the image brightness surface form
effective appearance features."

reply to post by pumpkinorange

Here's an article updating and summarizing some of the government's handiwork on facial recognition, dove-tailing with DMV photos. Hope OP doesn't find these two posts unrelated to his topic. If so, I apologize.

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