News that some Ron Paul supporters have committed computer fraud to further his run for President will not shock many Flopping Aces readers:
If Texas congressman Ron Paul is elected president in 2008, he may
be the first leader of the free world put into power with the help of a
global network of hacked PCs spewing spam, according to
computer-security researchers who’ve analyzed a recent flurry of e-mail
supporting the long-shot Republican candidate.“This is clearly a criminal act in support of a campaign, which has
been committed with or without their knowledge,” says Gary Warner, the
University of Alabama at Birmingham’s director of research in computer
forensics. “The question is, will we see more and more of this, or will
this bring shame to the campaigns and will they make clear that this is
not a form of acceptable behavior by their supporters?” Warner pointed
to provisions of the federal Can-Spam Act.~~~The finding is significant, because Paul’s online support
— as gauged by blog mentions, friends on social-networking sites such
as MySpace and popularity in online polls — has garnered him wide
mainstream print and television coverage, despite his relatively poor
performance in offline polling.The spamming allegations are based on a slew of e-mails captured by contributors to the university’s Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications
project, a research venture that receives 2.5 million spam messages a
day, and selects about 100,000 a week for analysis. The project
receives its spam from other researchers with ties to ISPs, and in some
cases from “trap” addresses that have never been used for any other
purpose.They were received by the lab following the latest televised Republican
debate Sunday afternoon, and had 16 different subject lines, including
“Ron Paul Wins GOP Debate! HMzjoqO” and “Ron Paul Exposes Federal
Reserve! SBHBcSO.” The random string of characters at the end is a
common spammer’s technique to circumvent bulk e-mail filtering.The spam went to “several hundred” e-mail addresses harvested for the university project, says Warner.
The e-mails had phony names attached to real-looking e-mail addresses.
When lab researchers examined the IP addresses of the computers from
which the messages had been sent, it turned out that they were
sprinkled around the globe in countries as far away from each other as
South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Brazil.“The interesting thing was that we had the same subject line from the
same IP address, and it claimed to be from different users from within
the United States,” Warner says.
Sure, he doesn’t go out and recruit the kooks to do the spam but the views he has attract them like flies to a fluorescent lamp of death. Views like this vast government conspiracy: (h/t Right Wing Nut House)
A lot of times they think subsidies and welfare goes to poor people.
Now there’s some welfare that goes to poor people, but sometimes I
think they’re crumbs. The real big welfare in the system that we have
goes to the military-industrial complex and the big banks, that’s where
it goes. [applause]
attract the nuts, the twoofers, and those who believe that spamming a online pool actually accomplishes something:
After the debate 34% of Fox News viewers said that Ron Paul won the
debate with 27% saying that Mike Huckabee won the debate. That was in
stark contrast to the Fox News focus group who when asked if Ron Paul
won nobody raised their hands.
So now we can add hacking personal computers to spam people about the great “conservative” Ron Paul
How do they do it? A post to a Ron Paul forum provides a glimpse:
It is easy.. our meetup has some tools that are pretty cheap. We use
ipipi, you can send several thousand messages for about $100 and the
best part is because it doesn’t use phone numbers, it bypasses poll
secuirty.
The reasons they do it?
This is a rEVOLution, not a business as usual campaign. What they call
‘dirty tricks’ we call fighting the system. We hvae to do everything we
can to overcome the media blackout of our candidate and fight the
establishment media!
And the result? Incidents like this one where CNBC had to pull their online poll due to the hacking:
So there was our after-debate poll. The numbers grew … 7,000-plus votes after a couple of hours … and Ron Paul was at 75%.
Now Paul is a fine gentleman with some substantial backing and, by the way, was a dynamic presence throughout the debate , but I haven’t seen him pull those kind of numbers in any “legit” poll. Our poll was either hacked or the target of a campaign. So we took the poll down.
The next day, our email basket was flooded with Ron Paul support messages. And the computer logs showed the poll had been hit with traffic from Ron Paul chat sites. I learned other Internet polls that night had been hit in similar fashion. Congratulations. You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can’t help but admire that.
But you also ruined the purpose of the poll. It was no longer an honest “show of hands” — it suddenly was a platform for beating the Ron Paul drum. That certainly wasn’t our intention and certainly doesn’t serve our readers … at least those who aren’t already in the Ron Paul camp.
Some of you Ron Paul fans take issue with my decision to take the poll down. Fine. When a well-organized and committed “few” can throw the results of a system meant to reflect the sentiments of “the many,” I get a little worried. I’d take it down again.
But rest assured dear readers, the Ron Paul supporters will quickly counter this with more conspiracies:
I find it far more likely that this botnet spam attack is not the
design of the Paul campaign or any of its supporters. It is far more
likely that this is the release of a first round of direct cyber attack
against the Ron Paul campaign.~~~
This is nefarious and demonstrates the kind of tactics that the
establishment could use to serve their interest in stopping the advance
of Ron Paul and the Revolution for freedom that he is leading as well
as his Presidential bid.
Sigh….
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