Wired has reported on the recent investigations regarding the use of email spam to promote Ron Paul’s campaign:
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.
Ron Paul spokesman Jesse Benton says the campaign has no knowledge of the scam. Warner himself says that he has no reason to believe that the Paul campaign had anything to do with these messages.
Some participants in the online political world have long suspected Paul’s technically sophisticated fan base of manipulating online tools and polls to boost the appearance of a wide base of support. But the UAB analysis is the first to document any internet shenanigans.
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.
The report of such use of spam has received considerable coverage by bloggers undoubtedly as a consequence of our experiences with the abusive use of comment spam by Paul supporters who fail to realize how their tactics reflect poorly on their candidate.
The responses to the earlier report here, as well as on other blogs, demonstrate the mind set of Paul supporters. Even though the accusations are against abusive Paul supporters as opposed to the campaign itself, Paul supporters immediately began spamming blogs with denials. As is typical of comments from Paul supporters, their denials contain a combination of denial of the facts, incorrect information, specious arguments, and even paranoid conspiracy theories.
The conduct of Paul supporters reminds many bloggers of similar problems with some supporters of Howard Dean in 2003. While the problem from Dean supporters never reached the degree we are seeing from Paul supporters, Joe Trippi and many other Dean supporters did recognize how such conduct harms their candidate and did work to dissuade such actions. I am less hopeful of such action from either the Paul campaign or a meaningful contingent of Paul supporters. I fear that neither the Paul campaign or a significant number of his on line supporters are sensible enough to understand the problem.
Ultimately this is the result of the conduct of Paul and his supporters. If used properly and responsibly, the internet could be a valuable tool to promote a candidate. However when misused there is also potential to harm the candidate. When even libertarian-leaning blogs such as Liberal Values which initially treated Paul as a legitimate voice when the media ignored him now see both the candidate and his supporters as wackos we see how counterproductive the tactics of Paul’s supporters are.
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