Disgraced political firm used gun owners' private data to target millions of voters

Arthur Douglas has been passionate about guns his entire life. He spent his childhood hunting, then amassed a treasured collection of firearms, including antique rifles he considers priceless. For years, he’s worked as a firearms instructor for the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Concealed Carry Association.

But the 61-year-old building contractor was incensed to learn from ProPublica that his name, age, New Hampshire address, phone number and registered voting status were in a database compiled by the gun industry’s chief lobbying group to help friendly politicians win elections.

Douglas said he never gave anyone permission to use his personal information for political purposes. He considers his privacy rights sacrosanct, like those bestowed by the Second Amendment. “I like the idea that they’re pro-gun advocates,” he said of the gun industry. “I don’t like the idea that they’re getting information, possibly illegally, to forward their agenda.”

Douglas is one of millions of people whose sensitive personal information was compiled over two decades by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, working with some of America’s most iconic gun-makers and retailers. As ProPublica previously reported, the industry group assembled data on this collection of gun owners and others without their knowledge or consent to persuade them to vote in the industry’s interests. The NSSF credited the campaign with landmark victories that vanquished gun control efforts.

What happened to Douglas’ data in the past decade has never before been revealed. It involves a transatlantic transfer to a now-disgraced political firm, questions of illegality and concerns from insiders about the repercussions should authorities discover the secret data sharing. This story, built on interviews and a new cache of internal documents obtained by ProPublica, details for the first time the sophisticated and invasive nature of the gun industry’s electioneering.

The NSSF, based in Shelton, Connecticut, represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors and retailers, along with publishers and shooting ranges. While not as well known as the NRA, the trade group is considered the voice of the industry and is a power broker in business and politics.

In 2016, as part of a push to get Donald Trump elected president for the first time and to help Republicans keep the Senate, the NSSF worked with the consultancy Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge the information it had on potential voters. The U.S. subsidiary of a London-based firm, which would later go out of business amid a global scandal over its handling of confidential consumer data, Cambridge matched up the people in the database with 5,000 additional facts about them that it drew from other sources.

The details were far-ranging and intimate. Along with the potential voters’ income, debts and religious affiliation, analysts learned whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.

Cambridge analysts ran the enhanced data through an algorithm to create psychological profiles that allowed for more incisive targeting. Potential voters were assigned one of five personality groups: risk-takers, carers, go-getters, individualists and supporters. Each got a tailored message. Risk-takers were viewed as highly neurotic and susceptible to ads that pricked their fears, Cambridge records show. Go-getters, on the other hand, would respond better to messages of optimism and the promise of a better future.

Privacy experts told ProPublica that companies that shared information with the NSSF may have violated federal and state prohibitions against deceptive and unfair business practices. Under federal law, companies must comply with their own privacy policies and be clear about how they will use consumers’ information, privacy experts said. A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from those gun-makers found that none of them informed buyers that their details would be used for political purposes.

“There’s a pretty clear argument that in some of these cases, there is deception and practices that go against the language in the privacy policy,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy specialist at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

As it did after the presidential election of George W. Bush, the NSSF credited itself with helping Trump win in 2016, paving the way for a radically different American and global era.

The NSSF declined to comment for this story. It previously defended its data collection, saying its “activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”

ProPublica obtained a portion of the NSSF database that contains the names, addresses and other information of thousands of people. The list was created by Cambridge for a voter survey. ProPublica is not making the record public but reached out to 6,000 people on the list.

Almost all of the 38 people who responded expressed outrage, surprise or disappointment over learning they were in the database.

Alvin Ingram, a retired chemist in Virginia who worked in the aerospace industry and is an avid hunter, described himself as a stickler for “accuracy and precision,” especially in legal matters. Ingram was dismayed to learn he was in the NSSF data given to Cambridge. “I think it’s horrible that there is such a thing,” he said.

Joseph LeForge, a self-described “privacy nut,” struggled to understand how it could’ve happened. The 74-year-old contractor has no Facebook account or email address and spoke to ProPublica on a flip phone. He wondered if he tripped a wire when he bought shotgun shells over a decade ago. “I don’t recall having to give them a driver’s license or anything,” he said, “but I might have.”

Kathy Gavin, who briefly owned guns in the late 1980s, remembered that a dealer at the time had filled out and mailed a warranty card on her behalf. She shopped at Cabela’s, first in person and later online, for equipment for her father, an avid fisherman. ProPublica previously found that the sporting goods store was among those that shared information for the database.

For years, Gavin received loads of mail during election season, urging her to vote for pro-gun politicians. She threw it away without much thought. But now that she knows about the database, she wants answers from the NSSF: “Why is my information in there? Why did you need it or want it? Yes, you could use it to pummel me with postcards, but what else are you doing with it?”

A High-Stakes Election

The 2016 election was a critical crossroads for the gun industry.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, the industry fought repeated attempts to enact gun control legislation after a series of horrific killings.

In November 2009, a psychiatrist committed the deadliest mass shooting ever at an American military base, killing 13 people and injuring more than 30 others at Fort Hood in Texas. An attempted assassination of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 left six dead and more than a dozen wounded, including the Arizona Democrat.

The next year, during a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” a young man killed 12 and wounded 70 at a theatre in Aurora, Colorado. And five months later, less than three miles from the NSSF’s Connecticut headquarters at the time, another young man, armed with an assault rifle, slaughtered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, including 20 children.

The Sandy Hook massacre prompted Obama to make gun control a priority. He announced 23 executive actions, but his most ambitious proposals, including an assault weapons ban and universal background checks, failed to win enough support in Congress amid fierce opposition from the NRA and the NSSF.

For the gun industry, a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Hillary Clinton presidency would have meant more legislative battles and a possible return to gun restrictions and loss of profits. Patrick O’Malley, the man who had been running the NSSF’s largely successful electioneering effort for more than a decade, realized it needed to modernize, according to Cambridge emails.

So in April 2016, O’Malley, an NSSF contractor and political consultant, hired Cambridge Analytica. The written agreement called for Cambridge to mobilize supporters of the Second Amendment in the battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

The aim, according to staffers on the project, was to help the GOP win the presidency and retain control of the Senate.

Since 2002, the NSSF had paid O’Malley millions to help oversee its voter outreach campaign, called GunVote, internal records show.

For the effort, the trade group had created a huge database of potential supporters. From the late 1990s on, at least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Olin Winchester and Mossberg, had handed over names, addresses and other private data on their customers, NSSF records show. (Most of the companies named in the NSSF documents declined to comment or did not respond to ProPublica. One denied sharing customer data, and the new parent company of another said it had no evidence of data sharing with the NSSF under prior ownership.)

By 2002, the database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people.

In an interview with ProPublica, Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, downplayed the significance of the database and said the trade group’s 2016 campaign involved only commercially available data, not information from gun-makers’ warranty cards.

But an internal Cambridge email from before the work began said O’Malley had been “leveraging a database of firearms manufacturing warranty cards” over the years for the NSSF and that Cambridge would receive the trade group’s data. O’Malley signed the contract and Cambridge received the data in April 2016, records show.

A report by Cambridge said the files included 20 years of information about gun buyers harvested from manufacturer warranty cards along with a database of customers from Cabela’s, the outdoor and sporting goods store.

Questions of Privacy

For the 2016 campaign, records show, the NSSF attempted to acquire even more personal details about gun owners beyond the warranty card information obtained from gun-makers.

Keane and O’Malley launched talks with Gunbroker.com, the largest online firearms auction site in the U.S., and Bass Pro Shops, one of the nation’s largest sporting goods retailers.

During a June 13 conference call, O’Malley, Keane and Steve Urvan, Gunbroker.com’s founder and then-CEO, hashed out the details of a possible data transfer.

“At a minimum,” O’Malley wrote in an email to Urvan later that day, “we’re keenly interested in the buy/sell records of your users, specifically rifle, shotgun or handgun and sale/purchase frequency.”

The next day, Urvan said he could provide data on about 1.1 million registered users of the website in the states Cambridge planned to target.

He also sent a link to the company’s privacy policy, which said: “We hire contractors to provide certain services on our behalf, including trend and statistical analysis, marketing campaigns, information processing and storage, and development of new products and services.”

The policy did not mention using customer information for political purposes.

“This project,” Urvan wrote, “would fall under trend and statistical analysis.”

He asked that Cambridge certify that it would destroy the records once the analysis was done.

“In an era where a large part of the population posts every tidbit of personal info about themselves online for anyone to see, the [Federal Trade Commission] has backed down from privacy substantially,” Urvan said in an email sent on June 15. “Still I don’t want the FTC or some state agency to come knocking on our door saying we violated the privacy of our users.”

Cambridge pushed back, saying destroying the records after conducting its analysis would be like “an engineer shredding his blueprints after handing over designs to the client: counterintuitive, counterproductive and detrimental to the knowledge accumulation process.”

Urvan refused to back down, and the talks fizzled.

“Much of this data is HIGHLY sensitive,” Urvan said. “If you have it, it can be leaked, subpoenaed, or misused, and under any of those cases the data would point back to our company. Those are substantial business risks we are not willing to take.”

O’Malley and Urvan did not respond to requests for comment. During an interview in September, Keane said he didn’t remember discussions with Gunbroker.com and Cambridge about turning over customer information. He said Gunbroker.com worked with the NSSF to send election-related messages to customers but that the company didn’t provide names and addresses to his organization.

Unlike in Great Britain, France, Italy and other major democracies, the U.S. has no federal or state laws that require companies to notify consumers and gain clear, specific informed consent before their data is shared, privacy experts said. And since 1995, the European Union and its member countries have allowed individuals to object to using their information for direct marketing purposes. Only a handful of states, such as California, have in recent years adopted privacy laws that give consumers the ability to opt out of their information being shared.

Despite those weaknesses in American privacy protections, several experts who reviewed the emails at ProPublica’s request concluded that if the deal had actually been done, Gunbroker.com would have broken its privacy agreement with customers and possibly violated federal and state laws. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act’s prohibition against deceptive or unfair business practices, companies must follow their privacy policies and be clear with consumers about how their information will be used. Many states have adopted similar legal requirements.

Matt Schwartz, privacy analyst at Consumer Reports, said the NSSF and Cambridge would have had to provide “trend and statistical analysis” directly to Gunbroker.com, rather than using it for their own political purposes, for the information exchange to comply with the company’s policy.

“It seems like a stretch,” Schwartz said.

Jon Leibowitz, who was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by George W. Bush and served as chair under Obama, said even if Gunbroker.com’s CEO truly believed Cambridge and the NSSF would do a trend or statistical analysis, it would not justify giving customer information to Cambridge.

“Here, consumers believed their data would be used for commercial purposes and for high level trends, not for political purposes of convincing individual voters,” Leibowitz said, adding that the deal would have involved “an element of either deception or unfairness by Gunbroker.”

Like Gunbroker.com, Bass Pro Shops demanded secrecy and the destruction of its data, but it also had other conditions.

Instead of sending its customer databases directly to Cambridge, Bass Pro wanted to direct the files to the credit reporting company Experian — and for Cambridge to work through Experian to retrieve the information about its customers, emails show.

Cambridge’s decision to do the data analysis in London also meant Bass Pro attorneys would have to “verify we have appropriate rights” from customers before the retailer could send the dataset overseas. They were concerned that they might otherwise run afoul of the United Kingdom’s tougher privacy laws.

“To avoid this, is there a U.S.-based alternative?” emailed Marsha Green, paralegal to Larry Wilcher, Bass Pro’s vice president and general counsel at the time.

The final sticking point was Bass Pro’s demand that Cambridge purchase insurance to protect the transfer, which Bass Pro insisted was standard for all its data recipients.

Cambridge decided the cost was too onerous and quit the pursuit.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Bass Pro’s general counsel, Colby Irving, stressed that “safeguarding our customers’ privacy is something we take very seriously.” Irving provided a 2016 email from Bass Pro’s legal office that emphasized any agreement with Cambridge had to be “consistent with our privacy policy,” and he said none of the Bass Pro employees in the emails obtained by ProPublica had the authority to finalize a deal with Cambridge. Irving said Bass Pro, which acquired Cabela’s in 2017, had been unable to find evidence of Cabela’s “sharing customer information that was not compliant with their privacy policies at or prior to the time of acquisition.”

Turbocharged Targeting

The Cambridge alchemy had three phases.

First, the company compared the NSSF and Cabela’s data with information about consumer purchases, supplied by data broker companies L2 and Infogroup. That produced more than 1.3 million matches.

Included were details about whether people donated to children’s causes and international aid, had retail store cards, owned antiques or were interested in wine, smoking, audiobooks, board games, camping, scuba diving or cars and auto parts.

Next, analysts used an algorithm to score each person’s behavioral traits based on their habits and shopping history. From those scores, Cambridge placed each of the potential voters into one of the five personality groups.

The third phase involved reaching out to potential voters. Lists and maps were generated and given to NSSF contractors responsible for mailings. Cambridge also found the targeted people on Facebook.

A sample of the NSSF database, containing more than 6,300 people in the 10 battleground states, was given to the Tarrance Group, a Republican research firm, for the first of many polls, conducted over the phone.

The survey included a critical question asking if people would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported nominating a new Supreme Court justice “who would uphold our Constitutional gun rights.” An overwhelming majority, 86%, indicated they would be much more likely to vote for such a candidate.

The response drove the first set of Facebook ads aimed at voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. Each pop-up ad said it came from the NSSF’s GunVote page, but they were crafted by Cambridge. The ads used the Supreme Court to promote support for Republican Sens. Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Ron Johnson.

They were sent to potential voters in key states from June 21, 2016, through July 1, 2016, tailored to the leanings of each personality group. The ads highlighted the role that the senators played in blocking the appointment of Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

The fear-susceptible risk-takers were targeted with ads that introduced negative scenarios before providing a reassuring and authoritative tone. In Missouri, risk-takers were told, “Senator Blunt is working hard to keep Obama from turning the Supreme Court into an enemy to your gun rights.”

The forward-focused go-getters, however, were shown what appeared to be a father and his son hunting together. In North Carolina, they were told, “Join us in thanking Senator Burr for opposing Obama’s Supreme Court nominee to protect your future and your gun rights.”

Nearly 817,000 people saw the ads, according to Cambridge’s internal metric reports. For the next three months, Cambridge blasted other ads and videos across social media. All together, they garnered nearly 378 million views and drove more than 60 million visitors to the NSSF’s website.

“Make America 2nd Amendmentable Again”

The evening of Nov. 8, 2016, was triumphant for the NSSF.

Republicans maintained control of the Senate, which guaranteed continued protection from gun proposals opposed by the industry. Surveys indicate 62% of gun owners voted for Trump over Clinton.

Political observers widely credited Cambridge Analytica’s data work on behalf of the Trump campaign for the historic victory, but the firm’s work for the NSSF to reach gun owners and others sympathetic to the Second Amendment wasn’t publicly known.

In a report titled “Make America 2nd Amendmentable Again,” Cambridge concluded that its campaign for the NSSF had encouraged nearly 10,000 more voters to turn out in Missouri, 7,744 more voters in Ohio, 6,979 more in North Carolina and 4,743 more in Pennsylvania. The numbers weren’t pivotal, but they contributed to victory for the NSSF’s preferred senatorial candidates in all those states. The back page of the report featured the cartoon character Yosemite Sam holding a six-shooter in each hand.

At 9:17 the morning after the election, Keane, the NSSF vice president, fired off an email of praise to Cambridge’s project managers.

“Thank you for all your hard work on an incredibly successful #GUNVOTE campaign. NSSF and our 13,000 members are grateful to you all for your efforts,” Keane wrote.

Throughout the organization, there was a collective sense of relief.

“After a long eight years of President Obama,” an NSSF report reviewing 2016 said, “the firearms industry can finally operate without daily attacks from the Oval Office thanks to the election of Donald J. Trump.

“Furthermore, thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”