In late 2024, privacy advocates shared an unnerving discovery. A little-known firm by the name of Babel Street had been marketing “Locate X,” a new kind of surveillance tool — one that can show its customers the movements, moment by moment, of virtually every American. And this firm’s chief clientele? Law enforcement. Activists showed the media how the tool could easily be used to track a citizen in Alabama as they crossed the border into Florida and visited an abortion clinic.
Locate X combines the most invasive features of both the advertising tech and surveillance industries. It starts with your phone’s “advertising ID,” an ID present on both iOS and Android devices. Capitalism incentivizes app developers to sell user information to data brokers like Babel Street as another revenue stream. App developers frequently include user location data because this is crucial for targeted ad campaigns. However, Babel Street saw an even more insidious use. Armed with a user’s past whereabouts, an ID that can easily deanonymize them, and deep-pocketed customers who need a legal workaround for pesky warrants, the firm saw a lucrative opportunity, privacy and ethics be damned.
Locate X is one of a growing number of cautionary tales about the potential dangers and pitfalls of Big Tech run amok. It’s also a reminder that transparency and accountability are vital to democracy. We count on legislation like the Freedom of Information Act and the tireless work of whistleblowers to shed light on those in power. Likewise, open-source software (and the tireless work of whistleblowing code auditors) gives us the opportunity to see everything our apps do. There is no sign of an American version of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation on the horizon, but we can still protect ourselves by trying to use open-source software whenever it’s feasible. There’s a resolution coming to the National Convention this year that can start us on this path — “R9: A Path to Exit from Capitalist and Democratic Party Tech.”
R9 confronts an intriguing, but mostly invisible problem in DSA. From 2016 to today, we had to scale up fast in every way imaginable. In cities like New York, the path to electoral victory often goes through a Democratic Party primary — and all the political machinery and infrastructure behind it. To win our races in NYC, we had to build an “anti-machine,” with our own canvassing operations, field plans, comms, research teams, and ultimately our own tech stack.
To rapidly meet this challenge, we needed ready-made, intuitive tools that any new canvasser off the street already had experience using or could quickly learn. This meant a lot of reliance on both Big Tech collaborative tools like AirTable or Google Docs and “Dem Tech” apps like MiniVAN and ActionKit. This approach has worked wonders over the years, allowing DSA to win a growing number of local and state races.
In this political moment, we need something else. Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic Party nomination for mayor in New York, both shocking the establishment and making in-roads in communities establishment Democrats have been losing. This means more national attention is on DSA than ever before. Our ties to capitalist tech, once a pragmatic way to scale, will soon become a liability. How long will Big Tech oligarchs tolerate a movement actively and openly hostile to its own interests using their own software?
A Vanguard Party, or a Party Guarding The VAN?
The need to move away from Big Tech tools built and managed by the capitalist class is clear. But if you’re relying on an inside-outside strategy to win power, why not just lean on the Democratic Party tech you find “inside”? It’s tempting to think that working with vendors who primarily service nonprofits and political organizations might remove the profit motivation, rendering Dem Tech software more trustworthy. But the case of NGP VAN should make us think twice.
NGP VAN is a private tech firm that has enjoyed deep connections to the Democratic Party since its inception. One of its founders, Nathaniel Pearlman, was the Chief Technology Officer of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. If you’ve ever canvassed for a candidate, you’ve likely used their smartphone app, MiniVAN. This summer, thousands of New Yorkers became acquainted with it for the first time as they came out to canvass for Zohran. When you use MiniVAN on a canvassing shift, it will transmit the data you post to VAN. Short for “Voter Action Network,” VAN is a powerful database of voter data designed to supercharge political campaigns. It is a true gamechanger for managing field operations and leveraging a firehose of voter data when you can get access to it or any of NGP VAN’s other software.
While there have been plenty of primaries in which NGP VAN authorized anti-establishment insurgents on the Left to use its tools, that’s starting to change. In 2018, NGP VAN rejected Justice Democrat Sarah Smith’s request to use their “VoteBuilder” software for the nonpartisan primary in Washington state’s 9th House District. NGP VAN explained that Smith did not get the necessary number of endorsements or approval from the Democratic Party’s state chair. In Illinois in 2020, the firm similarly denied VoteBuilder access to fellow Justice Democrat Rachel Ventura in the Democratic primary for the state’s 11th House District. According to Ventura, NGP VAN claimed they don’t even issue subscriptions to candidates challenging an incumbent.
But it’s not just NGP VAN’s loyalty to the Democratic Party’s establishment figures that should give us pause. NGP VAN’s new owners seem less interested in “voting blue no matter who” and more into “getting green wherever it’s seen.” In 2021, Apax Partners, a private equity firm based in London, acquired the VAN developer. Just two years later, in typical private equity fashion, Apax laid off 10% of the firm.
A Path to Exit from Capitalist and Democratic Party Tech
These examples should make one thing clear: there is too much at stake to trust the wavering dual-loyalties of tech firms connected to the Democratic Party and Big Tech. R9 helps by putting DSA on the path to acquiring and/or building our own tech infrastructure — just as we did with our own organizing infrastructure. The resolution tasks the National Tech Committee (NTC) with the following:
- An annual audit assessing the feasibility of replacing current software
- A detailed plan for software procurement, acquisition, and provisioning due at the end of 2025
- A comprehensive plan for software replacement/approval, subject to NPC approval
What’s important to note is what this resolution isn’t. It is not intended as a way to force DSA to ditch helpful (albeit flawed) tools in favor of less functional replacements. Feasibility comes up a lot in this resolution for this reason. We cannot let the important task of technological independence slow us down as we’re starting to achieve political independence. This resolution outlines a plan through which we can start migrating to new solutions where it makes sense and where it won’t be a disruption to our activities.
The first part, the annual software audit, assesses how good of a fit our current software is for DSA national bodies. What are the contract terms like? How much does current use cost? What impact does this software have on our work? Is it compatible with other tools we use? If the given tool at hand isn’t the most favorable out there or if open-source alternatives are available, the audit gives the NTC the opportunity to recommend those.
This leads to the second task: what should the process be if we want to switch to an alternative? Due by the end of the year, this task requires the NTC to produce a process for things like acquiring new software, asset management, establishing a rubric for when the NTC’s input might be needed. For example, what if the software is funded by venture capital or if we find an alternative that’s open-source or built by union labor?
The final task requires two reports. The first report is on how feasible it will be to replace software purchased through “movement organizations,” consultants aligned with the Democratic Party, or labor-unfriendly tech firms. The second report is a migration plan and timeline for those tools from the first report selected for replacement.
As socialists, we’ve accomplished so much in the past few years. In many cities, we’ve built a movement that can effectively fight both the far right and the Democratic Party establishment — and come out on top. We’re poised to win the mayor’s race in America’s biggest city. As many of us pack our bags, catch our flights, and start to make our journey to this year’s National Convention, I encourage you to see this exciting moment as an opportunity to examine how we can start off this next chapter of our movement right. The eyes of the world may be on us now, but if you vote for R9, at least the eyes of Big Tech will have to look elsewhere.
