In their study on campaign contributions for the 2012 elections, political scientist Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues found telecommunications and information technology contributed significantly to President Obama’s election campaign.
The scholars based their analyses on a new and more comprehensive dataset that captures political contributions from businesses and investors to a wider extent than previous studies did.
Accordingly, the President’s support from telecoms, software, web manufacturing, electronics, computers, as well as from the defense industry was higher than average levels of support. It equaled or even exceeded the backing of these firms for Romney.
On AlterNet, the researchers stated last week what they believed to be the most significant finding of all:
Firms in many of the industries directly involved in the surveillance programs were relative bastions of support for the President.
The lobbying of these firms, often referred to as the cybersecurity-industrial, or the cyber military-industrial complex, blurs the lines between the interests of the public and private sector. This complicates the identification and addressing of governments and the private sector as multiple stakeholders in the recently heated-up debate on Internet governance.
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