The current mayor of Washington DC is under fire because during his 2010 campaign he, or his staff, used a database of 6,000 public housing recipients so as to contact them for whatever electoral purpose his campaign wanted.
Let's think about this for a few seconds, shall we?
First, let's recall that in the US of A the phone book is open to all parties and there is no wonder why so manya people chose to pay extra so as not to be published. The only thing illegal that Mayor Gray's staff may have done, is to create a specific subset of what is after all a legal data base. In other words, what Gray's campaign is really accused of doing is a breach of ethics, using a population that has a certain political vulnerability due to its circumstances requiring they to live in subsidized housing. Also, we are talking here maybe 18,000 voters out of a potential electoral base of 350,000. 5%....
In Venezuela in 2003 appeared the Tascon list, still applicable today (I got an example from a neighbor LAST week....). That list made 3 million Venezuelan citizens second class citizens, 20%. These people, and quite often their relatives even if they did not appear in that list, have been denied all sorts of services and state jobs unless they did the Stalinist recantation. Or paid a substantial bribe somewhere.
These people were made pariah because they signed a petition to do a recall election on Chavez in 2004.
I still have the ringing of these chavista fascists that used to haunt comment sections of opposition blogs until moderation appeared. They used such arguments as "public phone lists", and the like. I still remember how many people were only too willing to minimize the Tascon list (named for the representative, Luis Tascon, who published it in his web site then, for public "escarmiento").
In short, I have in mind a certain left wing intelligentsia that was not too outraged at such behavior from Chavez.... Let's see if in future installments of the Gray story some one at the WaPo remembers Tascon.... in what is arguably one of the most left wing district of the US of A....
End of rant.